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That would likely be completely counterproductive. There's no such thing as a separate neutral group of practitioners. More likely what will happen is it will h

That would likely be completely counterproductive. There's no such thing as a separate neutral group of practitioners. More likely what will happen is it will have a chilling effect on what science gets done. The Kinsey studies, for example, got as far as they did largely because they were under the radar for a long time. Imagine if, instead, Kinsey sent his study design off to a "separate neutral group of practitioners". They would likely have exposed the nature of the study and Kinsey would likely have been fired.

brownbat 11y ago
> They would likely have exposed the nature of the study and Kinsey would likely have been fired. If you mean because the scientific community was reactionary and would have run him out, then that's a criticism of attitudes in the scientific community, not of the usefulness of extra layers of blind in studies. Even so though, your characterization of the scientific community is a bit hyperbolic. Note that Kinsey gave many open discussions of his research area as early as 1935, and yet somehow retained his position in "swinging" Indiana. > There's no such thing as a separate neutral group of practitioners. I doubt that's knowable. There are helpful degrees of neutrality, though, and you can eliminate certain specific sources of bias as they are identified. If there was no way to derive any objective results at all, then it wouldn't matter if we just flipped coins, because no studies would be worth anything. Self-run studies are biased because significant results further a researcher's career. If you have some other team run studies without knowing the author, that team's bias is to establish its own credibility, which is orthogonal to just 'manufacture significant results.'