Sublime

DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

-What if we had a “US Department of Experiments” with the power to grant temporary waivers from Federal, State, and City laws — when safe and ethical to do so — for the purposes of learning what policy interventions actually work?

No blinding. Experiments must have a test and a control arm. “Blinding” is when the researcher doesn’t know whether the subject they are analyzing (be it proteins, cells, mice, or human subjects) is the test or the control. Results are more reliable if the researcher is blinded, and this is standard part of clinical trials, but is often not practic... See more

We have not digested the fact that cures for cancer had been coming from other branches of research. You search for noncancer drugs (or noncancer nondrugs) and find something you were not looking for (and vice versa). But the interesting constant is that when a result is initially discovered by an academic researcher, he is likely to disregard the ... See more

What if we had a “US Department of Experiments” with the power to grant temporary waivers from Federal, State, and City laws — when safe and ethical to do so — for the purposes of learning what policy interventions actually work?

Publish your results. If you are interested in an experiment’s results, there’s a good chance that other people are as well. When you publish the results, those people do not have to design and run a similar experiment themselves. It’s tempting and common to avoid reporting negative results because it’s easy to perceive that the experiment "failed.... See more