alt Hacker NewsIt's an experimental study. These designs attempt to create a treatment and control to account for this problem.
Others in the thread point out how it's not easy to implement, but there is a methodological attempt at casual inference in the design.
Replies
MarkusQ • today at 4:24 PM
It is not an experimentally study. It's observational, e.g. from the paper: "we exploit the abrupt end of United Kingdom sugar rationing in September 1953 as a natural experiment."
They didn't perform an experiment, they took someone else's observational data from a real-world event, and attempted to interpret it as if it had been an experiment.
➕ show 1 reply
It’s really not experimental though.
Assuming their math and design are good, this is pretty strong, as these things go. But there were a lot of other things that were different between the groups that could reasonably be affecting results.
The article itself is careful to deny drawing any prescriptive conclusions from this research — a tacit acknowledgement that the causal connection isn’t entirely clear.
This is interesting and fairly strong, and potentially important, but definitely needs more work before we start acting on it.