(research psychologist here)

While it’s good to let people know some basics about research, it would be good to differentiate between this research model as it applies to physics, vs how it applies in medicine and psychology.

There was an article in the Times the other day by a psychologist (sorry, I forget his name but the search function in the Times, if you filter it to the last 2 weeks, should get you to his article quickly) who pointed out that research in medicine and psychology is much much much less precise than the theories or abstract descriptions tell us.

The example of Candy sounds very nice, but there are so many confounding factors (that is, “variables” - events, personality effects, etc) that in real life, even those studies that appear to follow the RCT model most closely may not be as accurate as we wish. Just google “Replication crisis” and you’ll find in 2011, many of the most relied upon research studies in psychology over more than a half century were found to fail attempts to replicate them - and remember, these research studies were hailed as perfect examples of RCTs. The same is true of many attempts to replicate medical studies (we all know of the difficulties in nutrition research).

The Times author says the problem is not research but the way studies are reported - not only do we never have proof (that’s a commonly accepted fact among the lay public) even the best RCTs in the social and medical sciences are only distantly suggestive of evidence.

The deeper problem in science today is that a paradigm developed for studying measurable aspects of sense experience (the method used in physics, chemistry, and other physical sciences) is very limited if not near useless when it comes to studies of highly complex people with near infinite variability.

The most delicious irony of the replication crisis is that the questioning of research validity was sparked by successful parapsychological experiments conducted by social psychologist Daryl Bem. If you read the popular literature, you might think his experiments were disproven, but a series of replications over the next 5-10 years showed odds of more than a billion to one against the possibility that his positive results were by chance.

So in conclusion, in order to study conscious human beings with living bodies, the 19th century scientific skeptics need to let go of their fear and begin to do honest research on the basis of a radically different research paradigm.