[whatshisface]

AI and tech won't help, but if the threshold to try a drug were adjusted to exactly the right threshold, where enrolling in a study would be expected-value neutral (this is by marginal reasoning), taking a placebo would not be worse than not.

[hedora]

I'd think AI and tech could solve the problem pretty easily, assuming the study authors could get access to the health records of everyone that was not in the study (and could therefore generate control cohorts by looking at large samples of comparable patients outside the experimental group).

This is done for targeted advertising all the time. Frustratingly, the surveillance capitalism industry is precisely the reason the dataset you'd need probably shouldn't exist.

Maybe we'll get some decent lawmakers sometime soon, and problems like that will be fixed via legislation. They'd need to ban the root-cause of the problem. I'm guessing it's more likely the current congress will let private companies steal + sell everyone's info instead.