[compiler-guy]

One classic paper for on this topic:

_Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials_

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC300808/

"Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute."

[timr]

That's not a "classic". It's just a silly, overwrought straw-man [1] that gets passed around by people who think they're being clever, and/or don't understand the topic with any degree of nuance.

Nobody reasonable suggests that RCTs must be used for every problem. When the effect size is enormous, or there's obviously no alternative (as in the parachute example), it's silly to suggest the use of an experiment.

On the other hand, if you want to compare some subtle difference between two competing parachute designs, for example, then perhaps an RCT would actually be appropriate. This is much closer to what is actually being measured in real clinical trials.

[1] To be completely fair to the authors, it was intended as a joke, not an argument. The real joke ended up being that people took it seriously.