And as I noted in the comments there, the corruption goes all the way up.
In the days when there were no good treatments for AIDS, patients would conspire to see who had the drug and who had the placebo, so they could quit if they were getting the placebo and try to sign up for a study where they might get the drug. You may (rightly) say that’s missing the point of a RCT, but the point is that desperate people aren’t going to be in it for the science. So if you’re blaming the subjects, the problem then is how to find a population of human medical test subjects who have the proper scientific disinterest. (Let alone the researchers.)
So, LessWrong readers: what would convince you to sign up as a guinea pig?
The use of placebo controls in experiments is not required to make a valid experiment. If you tell the research subjects that there are, say, 4 treatment regimens which the doctors have roughly equal expectation to work, and they’re randomly assigned to them, then there’s a lot less interference of the sort described above, and the doctors can tell the truth, and the experiment still yields useful information.
I’d worry much more about professional clinical subjects corrupting results.
And as I noted in the comments there, the corruption goes all the way up.
In the days when there were no good treatments for AIDS, patients would conspire to see who had the drug and who had the placebo, so they could quit if they were getting the placebo and try to sign up for a study where they might get the drug. You may (rightly) say that’s missing the point of a RCT, but the point is that desperate people aren’t going to be in it for the science. So if you’re blaming the subjects, the problem then is how to find a population of human medical test subjects who have the proper scientific disinterest. (Let alone the researchers.)
So, LessWrong readers: what would convince you to sign up as a guinea pig?
The use of placebo controls in experiments is not required to make a valid experiment. If you tell the research subjects that there are, say, 4 treatment regimens which the doctors have roughly equal expectation to work, and they’re randomly assigned to them, then there’s a lot less interference of the sort described above, and the doctors can tell the truth, and the experiment still yields useful information.