This is an important point that is often ignored.
“Does blinding as it’s commonly done mean that the patients don’t know whether they are taking the placebo or not?” You likely get a lot of them falsely answering that it means that because they are ignorant of the literature that found that if you ask patients they frequently have some knowledge.”
Accurate—and obvious on reflection, particularly with the COVID vaccines. I knew multiple people in the COVID vaccine trials. Just over half confidently said they got the real vaccine, and they knew it because of side effects. The rest were in most cases less certain but suspected they got the placebo, because so many participants had the side effects and they didn’t.
Example: Moderna And Pfizer Vaccine Studies Hampered As Placebo Recipients Get R eal Shot : Shots—Health News : NPR “Mott, who lives in the Overland Park, Kan., got a strong reaction to the second shot, so she correctly surmised she had received the Moderna vaccine, not the placebo.”
Our blind and double-blind methodology is nowhere near the perfect black box we pretend.
Very much not asking that anyone write a new post on Climate Change, since I assume a good discussion on that topic exists, but … does anyone have a recommended link to a critical analysis of those questions comparable to Scott Alexander’s discussion of Ivermectin, one that neither assumes a priori that the environmental science community will always get such questions right nor that those who question the approved science are idiots?
And, yes, I have read Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change (ipcc.ch), and several previous editions, but that is not at all what I am looking for.
Note: My intended audience is the occasional college student who asks in good faith, generally almost in a whisper because of the (inappropriate) stigma of even asking.