If it’s hard to conduct RCTs in a domain, it’s hard to have reliable knowledge about it period. Who’s to say whether your anecdotal observations & conclusions beat mine or someone else’s? One way is to check whether someone’s job is high status enough that their writings on the topic can be considered part of “the literature”. But this is a weak heuristic IMO.
I strongly disagree. There are many domains where we have knowledge with little or no ability to conduct RCTs—geology, evolutionary theory, astronomy, etc. The models work because we have strong Bayesian evidence for them—as I understood it, this was the point of a large section of the sequences, so I’m not going to try to re-litigate that debate here.
If it’s hard to conduct RCTs in a domain, it’s hard to have reliable knowledge about it period. Who’s to say whether your anecdotal observations & conclusions beat mine or someone else’s? One way is to check whether someone’s job is high status enough that their writings on the topic can be considered part of “the literature”. But this is a weak heuristic IMO.
I strongly disagree. There are many domains where we have knowledge with little or no ability to conduct RCTs—geology, evolutionary theory, astronomy, etc. The models work because we have strong Bayesian evidence for them—as I understood it, this was the point of a large section of the sequences, so I’m not going to try to re-litigate that debate here.