Some problems with sciencey stuff

When the government gives money to scientists, id guess they have some sort of conditions for which scientists get the money.

I think this makes a demand for scientists who are good at playing the government money game, and who meet the conditions, rather than scientists who are good at doing science, and then making money from the good science. This seems like a problem for good science!

I plan on making more comments in this thread about some other science stuff

When the govt pours money into science, they control what conclusions funded scientists can reach.

And they encourage a bunch of people without the scientific mindset to become “scientists”.

If it was only for-profit companies hiring scientists, they’d have incentives only to hire people who can actually produce useful stuff.

The government funds science that doesn’t lead to profit, which means it doesn’t have to work. If you’re trying to make money by using a scientific discovery, it has to actually work or you won’t make money (unless you scam people). But when you stop trying to make a profit, you lose that important way of testing whether your stuff actually works.

I have worked in academic science in the UK. One of my supervisors would advise PhD. students to overspend on some of the available pools of money because he knew nothing would be done about it.

PREFACE: I wrote this post thinking that a control group could not be a placebo group. I have since read a Wikipedia article (Treatment and control groups - Wikipedia) and I think that Wikipedia article said that a placebo group can also be the control group:

In comparative experiments, members of a control group receive a standard treatment, a placebo, or no treatment at all.

I was watching a video, it was talking about a science study, I think the study was researching muscle growth, and the effects that pain killers had on muscle growth.

The study said in the abstract that it had 3 groups: a group taking Iboprofen, a group taking acetaminophen, and a placebo group.

[Bold & italics added]

Twenty-four males (25 +/- 3 yr, 180 +/- 6 cm, 81 +/- 6 kg, and 17 +/- 8% body fat) were assigned to one of three groups that received either the maximal over-the-counter dose of ibuprofen (IBU; 1,200 mg/day), acetaminophen (ACET; 4,000 mg/day), or a placebo (PLA) […]

I think this means they didn’t have a control group. That seems bad? Is that bad?

They don’t have a control group that are doing the same exercises as the groups that are on drugs, the closest they have to a control group is a placebo group, but the placebo group thinks they are using drugs, even though they are not using drugs.

I think you need a control group to tell whether the drugs/thinking you are taking drugs are making a difference.

I don’t exactly know how to word what the problem with this is, so I’m going to try to write about the attributes that each group could have.

So if you look at a group, there are things that the group is thinking and doing. So like in the drug group, they are doing: Exercise, Drugs, and they think they are doing Drugs.

So the drug groups have these 3 attributes: Exercise, Drugs, Thinks the are doing drugs.

The placebo group has these 2 attributes: Exercise, Thinks they are doing drugs.

I think you might need to remove the Thinks they are doing drugs attribute.

It seems like you’re unclear on the purpose of a control group and how control groups work. Or else you don’t know what a placebo is and its purpose.