There’s no evidence parachutes work.
Prework for people wanting to dispute this statement: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evidence/
Parachute use to prevent death, trauma when jumping from aircraft (2018) [pdf]
41–50 of 169 posts
Re: Parachute use to prevent death, trauma when jumping from aircraft (2018) [pdf]
#42How do we really know whether double blind randomized controlled trials actually work? Is there any RCT done on evaluating the efficacy of RCT?
Re: Parachute use to prevent death, trauma when jumping from aircraft (2018) [pdf]
#43That headline reminds me of the most recent XKCD [1] where an astronomy research group realize how they can churn out findings.
The joke is they’re ruling out the obvious. The headline makes you believe they are stating the obvious (but actually the study is a comment on randomized trials and what kind of research is possible)
Re: Parachute use to prevent death, trauma when jumping from aircraft (2018) [pdf]
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
They state the point at the end, and it's serious point: if you were inclined to use "science" to argue against a certain intervention that some group believes in, you could do a randomized trial of that intervention, but manipulate the conditions so that the intervention is unlikely to help. The study would look right and sound right to some people. It would use all the best practices. And yet it would be a bullshit…
> manipulate the conditions so that the intervention is unlikely to help > [The study] would use all the best practices You've go some major contradiction here, since when is such manipulation "the best practice"?
Well, is giving 50% of people placebo parachutes and having them jump out of a plane at altitude considered best practices?
Re: Parachute use to prevent death, trauma when jumping from aircraft (2018) [pdf]
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
This para, buried deep in the paper, is the point: A minor caveat to our findings is that the rate of the primary outcome was substantially lower in this study than was anticipated at the time of its conception and design, which potentially underpowered our ability to detect clinically meaningful differences, as well as important interactions. Although randomized participants had similar characteristics compared with…
It's right in the abstract and conclusions though, not really buried.
Yeah well the satire would have worked better if it were buried, although the real joke is 'minor caveat'.
Re: Parachute use to prevent death, trauma when jumping from aircraft (2018) [pdf]
#46I came to leave a snarky joke comment about "in mice?", and then I remembered that mice don't actually need parachutes because their terminal velocity is roughly the same as a human using a parachute [1]. If someone actually ran the study with mice, they'd find that parachutes aren't necessary! 1: https://johnmjennings.com/can-a-mouse-survive-a-fall-from-a-...
Also correlation is not causation. Just because some people jumping from planes have parachutes doesn't mean that all people jumping from planes have parachutes.
Re: Parachute use to prevent death, trauma when jumping from aircraft (2018) [pdf]
#47I came to leave a snarky joke comment about "in mice?", and then I remembered that mice don't actually need parachutes because their terminal velocity is roughly the same as a human using a parachute [1]. If someone actually ran the study with mice, they'd find that parachutes aren't necessary! 1: https://johnmjennings.com/can-a-mouse-survive-a-fall-from-a-...
The fact that mice don't appear to deliberately jump off high things as a way to get down tells me that they probably do get hurt...
Just because they don't fall super fast doesn't mean they don't get injured because they don't have as much distance to "drop and roll" like a human does.
Re: Parachute use to prevent death, trauma when jumping from aircraft (2018) [pdf]
#48How do we really know whether double blind randomized controlled trials actually work? Is there any RCT done on evaluating the efficacy of RCT?
> Is there any RCT done on evaluating the efficacy of RCT?
What is the set of possible results from the experiment you propose? What function are you going to test: randomness in general, some special RCT event, maybe some doctor who loves to break some double blind experiments?
Re: Parachute use to prevent death, trauma when jumping from aircraft (2018) [pdf]
#49[deleted]
Re: Parachute use to prevent death, trauma when jumping from aircraft (2018) [pdf]
#50I came to leave a snarky joke comment about "in mice?", and then I remembered that mice don't actually need parachutes because their terminal velocity is roughly the same as a human using a parachute [1]. If someone actually ran the study with mice, they'd find that parachutes aren't necessary! 1: https://johnmjennings.com/can-a-mouse-survive-a-fall-from-a-...
Also correlation is not causation. Just because some people jumping from planes have parachutes doesn't mean that all people jumping from planes have parachutes.
Feels more like an ecological fallacy issue than a post-hoc