4 ms·

How would you randomize 4 day work weeks in an unbiased way?

• FredPret 3y ago
  You can't, which makes it difficult or maybe impossible to have hard facts about it
  • black_puppydog 3y ago
    seems like a bad excuse to not even try to go beyond shrugging/handwaving
    • FredPret 3y ago
      Nope - it's a great reason to not even start spreading more bullshit into the info-sphere. (The same can be said for almost everything related to nutritional "science".) If we don't have a good mechanism for knowing something is true or not, we should acknowledge that and approach the problem philosophically / aesthetically. We need to know what we know so that we can use knowledge as our building blocks, not fake information. You can't magic science into existence and then use it to make decisions.
• bschne 3y ago
  If you run a trial like this hoping to get an idea of what effect the thing you're doing has, you have two things to worry about (using the terms common at least in econ here). The first is internal validity: Does what you're doing give you a good estimate (i.e., not biased) of the effect you're trying to estimate. The second is external validity: Does your result tell you enough about what would happen if you did the thing you did, but outside your trial context. If you do a trial of four-day workweeks, you're probably always going to have issues with the latter for any feasible setup. As you allude to, the companies that self-select into participating in such a trial are probably not a good representation of the wider economy, even if you randomize among them. Now if you randomize rollout of four-day weeks at least among those willing to participate, and you didn't lose about 50% of participants between the start of your trial and the follow-up survey, you would at least get an unbiased estimate of what the policy did for those companies. But alas, they don't even do that part.