Comment on Words truly matter

• niktemadur@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Ah, yes! Of course, there’s that other half of the post - the “experiment” itself. What I said about words applies to the people involved, it’s not the mold in the jar who “believes” in the placebo, I completely skipped over that part.

  For a laboratory scientific experiment to prove something, anything at all, it has to pass a threshold known as sigma-5, which means that the margin or odds of error must be less than one part in around 3 million. There has to be a laboratory certainty of 99.99994%

  There are a million-plus-one ways that a supposed “controlled experiment” can go askew and wrong. In the case of the jars, my guess is that they packed the “unloved jar” more aggressively. That kitchen experiment is messier than a school lab, and a school lab doesn’t cut it even for a sigma-1 I would reckon.

  source