The "setup this benchmark" happens in medicine all of the time, and it's super insidious and no one sees it. It's hard to tease out. For example, say you have

The "setup this benchmark" happens in medicine all of the time, and it's super insidious and no one sees it. It's hard to tease out. For example, say you have a new (patentable) drug that you're trying to get approved and replace an old (generic, cheap) drug. You need to prove that the new drug is at least as safe as the old one and/or more effective than the old one. Which sounds reasonable. Let's say that the old drug is super safe and that the new one may not be. What you can do is set up your RCT so that you surreptitiously underdose the control arm so the safe drug looks less effective. And then you can say that your new drug is more effective than the old one. Peer review doesn't notice this because you can easily hide it in the narrative of the methods section. I've seen it a couple of times. So you can easily have "gold standard RCTs" that get the result you want just by subtle changes in the study design.