3 ms·

The way it's written in the article doesn't sound like it's a controlled study. Don't you want a double-blind study where people aren't pre-selecting themselves

The way it's written in the article doesn't sound like it's a controlled study. Don't you want a double-blind study where people aren't pre-selecting themselves? There could be all sorts of bias in that selection. Then again, it might be hard to put people in a lottery where half of them are made to feed their own poop to their kids.

AndrewDucker 6y ago
You don't make them. You let people volunteer to feed poo to their babies and then randomly select half of them to actually feed their baby a placebo.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  It's the letting them volunteer that's problematic. People who volunteer might be systematically biased toward/against whatever thing you were trying to measure. Then giving half of them a placebo would not reveal the true effect. Suppose there's a hidden gene that causes people to be able to fly like superman if they're given their mother's poop. The gene also causes people to not volunteer in poop feeding studies, because the experimenters unfortunately placed the adverts on the ground. You find volunteers, you give half of them the poop and the other half the placebo. You find that none of them can fly, so you conclude poop doesn't cause flight. If you make this probabilistic it gets less obvious to pick apart statistically, but same problem.
  - __s 6y ago
    The point of double blind isn't to get around your crazy scenario, but to be able to say you evaluated the effect of one factor on your self selected group Which generally ends up being that lots of studies are about isolating the effect of one factor on young white educated men, but you can at least say you've isolated the factor as opposed to just comparing young white educated men to the general population
  - watwut 6y ago
    The volunteer thing is pretty much standard in medical studies due to ethical considerations. You dont get to make experiments on people without proper consent etc done.
halflings 6y ago
With a sample size of 7, do you really think the issue is that it's not double-blind? This looks like the first step towards larger studies. Also remember that given this was quite experimental and could've easily had adverse health consequences, it had to be on a volunteering basis.
- pygy_ 6y ago
  Subjects could volunteer into a double blind trial. I wouldn't fear adverse consequences. Childbirth (of the vaginal kind) is naturally messy.
tweetle_beetle 6y ago
> Then again, it might be hard... You've answered your own question there. As I understand it, pregnancy and childbirth related studies often have this issue as the moral stakes are higher and there are issues around consent. Also under normal conditions neither is actually a medical condition/procedure which needs treating and the benefits are often only seen over a long timeframe, making obtaining volunteers less straightforward. As long as everyone is honest, less than perfect science is still useful.

AndrewDucker 6y ago

You don't make them. You let people volunteer to feed poo to their babies and then randomly select half of them to actually feed their baby a placebo.

lordnacho 6y ago
It's the letting them volunteer that's problematic. People who volunteer might be systematically biased toward/against whatever thing you were trying to measure. Then giving half of them a placebo would not reveal the true effect. Suppose there's a hidden gene that causes people to be able to fly like superman if they're given their mother's poop. The gene also causes people to not volunteer in poop feeding studies, because the experimenters unfortunately placed the adverts on the ground. You find volunteers, you give half of them the poop and the other half the placebo. You find that none of them can fly, so you conclude poop doesn't cause flight. If you make this probabilistic it gets less obvious to pick apart statistically, but same problem.
- __s 6y ago
  The point of double blind isn't to get around your crazy scenario, but to be able to say you evaluated the effect of one factor on your self selected group Which generally ends up being that lots of studies are about isolating the effect of one factor on young white educated men, but you can at least say you've isolated the factor as opposed to just comparing young white educated men to the general population
- watwut 6y ago
  The volunteer thing is pretty much standard in medical studies due to ethical considerations. You dont get to make experiments on people without proper consent etc done.

halflings 6y ago

With a sample size of 7, do you really think the issue is that it's not double-blind? This looks like the first step towards larger studies. Also remember that given this was quite experimental and could've easily had adverse health consequences, it had to be on a volunteering basis.

pygy_ 6y ago
Subjects could volunteer into a double blind trial. I wouldn't fear adverse consequences. Childbirth (of the vaginal kind) is naturally messy.

tweetle_beetle 6y ago

> Then again, it might be hard... You've answered your own question there. As I understand it, pregnancy and childbirth related studies often have this issue as the moral stakes are higher and there are issues around consent. Also under normal conditions neither is actually a medical condition/procedure which needs treating and the benefits are often only seen over a long timeframe, making obtaining volunteers less straightforward. As long as everyone is honest, less than perfect science is still useful.