alt Hacker NewsI think most sociological interventions don't follow the scientific method because you need a control group. You can't just use random people you haven't helped elsewhere as a control, because you need to identify all of the external variables that you can so as to properly assess the effectiveness of your method (ruling out changes external to your intervention).
There aren't too many people comfortable with intentionally letting others suffer for the sake of the scientific method, and those who do have a hard time getting past ethics review boards.
Instead we have this reality where we throw money at problems and claim credit whenever something good happens, and claim we did good work when nothign changes.
That's a good point even thought it would be so much more efficient.
> There aren't too many people comfortable with intentionally letting others suffer for the sake of the scientific method, and those who do have a hard time getting past ethics review boards.
The way I see it, it is a mindset problem rather than an ethical one. Because policies are considered de facto as "improving things", it makes sense that not applying it would be unethical. However, the article makes a good point that this assumption is clearly flawed. If the mindset would be more along the lines of "there is a bad situation, we think we know how to improve it but we are not 100% sure", then it would not sound so unethical to form control groups.
For instance, using the "laptop for every child" case the governement could have instead picked a few schools that would receive school laptops with the intention to measure the effectiveness of the policy.
If it had a positive impact, then you can proceed with it and buy a laptop for every student. It seems to me more logical and also less wasteful to proceed that way.