At first I was confused about how this would work, but thinking a little about it, it should be fairly easy. Give some researchers (randomly selected!) results from studies that are not RCTs ("control") and others RCT-based results ("treatment") to replicate. See which group manages to replicate more results.
Expensive, yes. Would I like to see it? Heck yes, if nothing else as a way to trick the establishment into doing more replication studies.
If the meta-RCT shows that RCTs are efficacious, then RCT's are effective. But, if the meta-RCT shows that RCTs are not efficacious, that means the meta-RCT, which is also an RCT, cannot be trusted, which means that RCTs are still effective.
> 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?
If you have strong prior belief about outcome of your action, if it doesn't go as you planned. You have a way better signal to update your internal model.
That is kinda true, since the peers who would be rating your weekly progress update wouldn't necessarily be your target audience.
So, you'd have to optimize your products pitch to be appealing to your peers, that means spicing up your landing page, adding cool graphics etc. I even went as far as having an option of easily creating a test account to play with the product without needing to sign up and sadly no one used it. For the first 2 weeks, I was getting more downvotes than upvotes. After which, I focused more on sharing metrics (sign ups etc) rather than solely focusing on reporting the work I have done. This did have a material impact in the peer rating process. Once I made it to Top 50, my project was selected by one of their experts, quite fast.
I got into the program, like a week ago. Still learning the ropes, I'm having a great time with them so far. Their internal slack group is really fun and their team is also quite responsive when it comes to resolving your queries.
On a deeper level, I really appreciate the strategic approach they have chosen when it comes to supporting and nurturing the entrepreneurs that they have backed, where the default approach is not writing a check to make the problems go away. But, actually listening to the myriad problems that crop up over the course of your startups journey and actually making a concerted effort to solve said problems.
> the lever is demanding transparency on exactly what these companies are doing.
I think a even more powerful lever would be having laws that allow consumers easily export their data from one platform to another or make internet companies adopt a common standard for increasing interoperability of users data.
Or even not a law, but a standard / RFC and a working implementation of it by a few large companies, for others to follow suit.
If only there'd be an incentive for a few large companies to pull this off, the way they do with other standards (see HTML5 or AV1 for recent examples).
I'm sorry to tell you don't really understand how derivatives work, even price fixing for that matter.
Prices of derivatives such as forward contracts and options are freely floating and are widely traded. "price-fixing" is defined as a coordinated effort to corner the market, a good example would be when siegel tried to corner onion futures, which lead to creation of "onion futures act". Historically, only few have succeeded in cornering the market.
Bitcoin supports reversible transaction, if you don't trust the vendor, it's not that hard to use a trusted escrow service.
I agree bitcoin does have its flaws, economically bitcoin behaves like a commodity, which might hinder consumer adoption. There are ways to get around that, you could potentially issue a anonymous currency of sorts backed by bitcoin, with a fixed exchange change rate. So, the prices could remain relatively stable. May be that could drive consumer adoption.
TBH, I don't know what bitcoin is going to look like in the next 10 years. It's like the internet all over again. Just like the internet, bitcoin value doesn't necessarily come from the underlying utility as a transaction platform or in case of the internet TCP/IP, but from its distributed , permissionless and decentralized nature of governance. We know for a fact, that's what drives innovation.
>permissionless and decentralized nature of governance.
I was under the impression that more than 50% of the mining power is controlled by a very small set of Chinese miners. Could they not wreak major havoc by deciding to tweak the protocol themselves or not adopt certain features?
Similarly, what happens if the few bitcoin core developers decided to do something nefarious with the client. Surely they would be caught right away, but then how would the community decide on what software/protocol to use?
I think the reason it is working and has worked so far is aligned incentives - doing something nefarious or selfish will ultimately work against you as people abandon and avoid you.
There is no doubt though that cryptocurrencies are potentially fragile. I do think though that pandora's box has been opened. Maybe bitcoin will stand the test of time like jpeg, C, C++, http, TCP/UDP/IP, zip, bittorrent, fortran, x86, SMTP, unix, RTSP, vi, javascript, etc that have been good enough and persisted with a huge network effect. Or it could end up being a jumping off point for something that smooths out the rough edges needed for mass adoption.
