[dbroockman]

This paper is intended as a sarcastic critique of the push towards conducting randomized trials in academia/medicine, but it’s an obvious straw man. You could write this sarcastic article for any research method - “see, why do research using method X when we already know the answer from other methods?”

The problem is that there are plenty of research questions where RCTs show us that previous non-RCTs were wrong.

[ironmagma]

Is that a problem? It can be true in isolation of the fact that sometimes, what's going to happen without a RCT is just obvious, because an experiment is not needed to answer every conceivable question.

[raverbashing]

"obvious straw man" researchers should be worrying about the non-obvious strawmen. Because these extreme conditions help up check the boundaries of what is possible to verify or not.

> The problem is that there are plenty of research questions where RCTs show us that previous non-RCTs were wrong.

And that is fine. When you are able to use an RCT.