Comments on: Development Experiments: Ethical? Feasible? Useful?

By: Los Angeles SEO

Los Angeles SEO — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 01:45:52 +0000

Development Experiments are useful to us for new things are discovered that can help us solve a certain problem like medicine. But at all time experiments are beneficial somethings they cause also big problems.

By: Logo design

Logo design — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:46:37 +0000

Without even intentionally manipulating results, non-experimental methods can yield more misleading results than RCT. If you run a simple multiple regression with 40 independent variables, chances are that 2 of those variables will be statistically significant just by luck of the draw (5% significance level), even if, in reality, they don't have a statistically significant effect on the dependent variable if you were to draw another sample. Web development company india

By: Los Angeles Website Development

Los Angeles Website Development — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:37:57 +0000

Isn’t it unethical to do Human experiments?

By: Kosher Supplements

Kosher Supplements — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:23:40 +0000

Very informative post.

By: How To Play Guitar

How To Play Guitar — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:06:58 +0000

I would like to read more of this post. Is the experimentation on Human works? Please provide your update. I will avidly wait for it. Thanks.

By: Los Angeles SEO

Los Angeles SEO — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 17:53:19 +0000

I had a great time reading this WORTH reading post. Thank you.

By: Adam Baker

Adam Baker — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:05:50 +0000

The multiplicity of factors that might affect a developmental aid intervention seem to me to preclude the possibility of constructing convincing quantitative studies. In laboratory science we control as many variables as we can, ratchet up the number of data points to compensate for variance in the data, and cross our fingers when we run the stats. In a field situation, the number of factors that might affect the success of an intervention is huge. Accounting for the natural variance alone would require an intractable number of samples; controlling the variables in statistical analysis would as well, because of the curse of dimensionality. Quantitative methods are simply impractical for such complex, and sparsely represented, systems.

It seems more worthwhile to me to improve our qualitative research methods, and see what we can learn from those.

By: TGGP

TGGP — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 20:33:44 +0000

Given the concerns of this blog with the human dignity of the poor, the researchers should

Why should the researchers be motivated by the concerns of this blog?

Personally, I think we need a hell of a lot more experimentation. Pull out all stops and experiment away. There will be some short-term downsides, but advances in knowledge outweigh them.

By: Min

Min — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:37:41 +0000

“Denying something beneficial to some people for research purposes seems wildly unethical at first.”

Sampling techniques such as “play the winner” can minimize ethical concerns. As evidence that something is beneficial accumulates, subjects are more likely to receive it. The statistics is not as easy as a simple treatment vs. control group model, but the statistics can handle it.

“The most useful RCT results are those that confirm or reject a theory of human behavior. For example, a general finding across many RCTs in Africa is that demand for free life-saving products collapses once you charge a price for them (even a low subsidized price). This refutes the theory that fully informed people are rationally purchasing low cost medical inputs to improve their health and working capacity. This would usefully lead to further testing of whether the problem is lack of information or the assumption of perfect rationality (the latter is increasingly questioned for rich as well as poor people).”

Well, my first thought, as a layman, is that culture probably has something to do with that. Sharing is a much greater value in many African cultures than in ours. Charging money to save someone’s life may be a rather strange concept in such cultures. And the “assumption of perfect rationality” is a misuse of the term, not to mention paternalistic in this context.

By: Laura Freschi

Laura Freschi — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 08:24:50 +0000

Chris Blattman adds in his two cents on his blog: http://chrisblattman.blogspot.com/2009/07/on-development-experiments.html