Control Group Quotes

I think the biggest problem in clinical trials is that they are underpowered. And that fundamentally, the studies are just too small.

The value and utility of any experiment are determined by the fitness of the material to the purpose for which it is used, and thus in the case before us it cannot be immaterial what plants are subjected to experiment and in what manner such experiment is conducted.

Scientific method: There's a madness in the method.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

If you don't have material, you don't have an experiment.

What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.

People will often take an interesting experimental study which has been done in the world, perhaps at small scale, and then it's touted as some big solution.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

What's nice about experiments is that they are much more closely tied to what theorists think about the world than normal empirical research. You can design your experiment to exactly ask the question you want to ask. This is not true about normal empirical research.

The claim that SpongeBob makes your child dumber is a causal claim. If you do X, Y will happen. To prove that, you'd have to show that if you forced the children in the no-TV households to watch SpongeBob and changed nothing else about their lives, they would do worse in school.

When you start using test audiences, it becomes more scientific than it is about the work itself, and that's boring.

That’s the thing about a human life-there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.

I don't think that somebody who is observing or predicting behavior should also be participating in the 'experiment.'

… scientists are required to back up their claims not with private feelings but with publicly checkable evidence. Their experiments must have rigorous controls to eliminate spurious effects.

The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.

Only by observing this condition would the results of our work be regarded as fully conclusive and as having elucidated the normal course of the phenomena.