[jrootabega]

If he said unblinded at some point, it could have been because the study author looked into the cup to determine which substance had been taken too soon. The subject should have had no knowledge of what was taken until the entire 16-month trial was over.

We should avoid extreme polarization of our judgments in general. The study deserves some amount of praise for things it did somewhat well (like the method of blinding which is clever, but not applicable to everyone), and criticism for things it did not do well, such as designing your own study methodology for your own mood. That alone will affect the results. Simply RUNNING an experiment can affect your mood because it's interesting (or even maybe frustrating). The subject probably felt pride and satisfaction whenever they used their pill selection technique, which could improve mood on its own. Neither accolades nor complete derision are appropriate, although trying to claim too strong a result from this study is kinda deserving of derision if you claim to be science-minded.

The study was well-meaning and displayed cleverness.

[robwwilliams]

And that is exactly the point made in the target post by the author. He explicitly raised that criticism himself. Double kudos for self-criticism. You will not find many conventional science publications pointing out: “Shucks, we could have done this a better”.

[jrootabega]

The ancestor post is neither a "Complete injustice" nor "derision" nor an "insult", and it doesn't warrant a hostile mocking reply. Its tone could have been gentler, but it wasn't that bad. And the study doesn't really deserve "accolades", it deserves to be recognized for whatever it does well. Such polarization of tone and vocabulary doesn't accomplish much, and I'll even propose that it actually prevents good things from happening. It is good that the author is aware of, and acknowledges, the problems in the study. What other studies and journals have done wrong doesn't make the author or study more deserving of praise.

Also, you asked why he said "unblinded", and I think you now have the answer to that.

[robwwilliams]

Yes, perhaps. But please tell me you have read the original post. It is thoughtful, self-deprecatory, careful, well analyzed, and upfront about limitations and possible improvements.

Re-reading such a negative critique of a solid home-brew experiment is unwarranted. There are several word here worth red flags.

>This is an N=1 trial. Dressing your N=1 trial up with lots of pseudo controls and pseudo blinding and data collection does not make it better. In fact: putting this much effort into any medication trial makes it much more likely that you’re going to be incentivized to find effects that don’t exist. I think it’s nice that the author admits that they found nothing, but statistically, worthless drugs show effects in much better-designed trials than this one: it’s basically a coin toss.