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Hearing how you phrased it reminds me of a study that showed how parachutes do not in fact save lives (the study was more to show the consequences of extrapolating data, so the result should not be taken seriously):

https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094



The original referenced paper is also very good: http://elucidation.free.fr/parachuteBMJ.pdf (can't find a better formatted link, sorry)

Conclusions: As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials.Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.

With the footnote: Contributors: GCSS had the original idea. JPP tried to talk him out of it. JPP did the first literature search but GCSS lost it. GCSS drafted the manuscript but JPP deleted all the best jokes. GCSS is the guarantor, and JPP says it serves him right


I liked this bit, from the footnotes: "Contributors: RWY had the original idea but was reluctant to say it out loud for years. In a moment of weakness, he shared it with MWY and BKN, both of whom immediately recognized this as the best idea RWY will ever have."


This is now my second favourite paper after the atlantic salmon in fmri


I still prefer the legal article examining the Fourth Amendment as it pertains to Jay-Z's 99 Problems.

http://pdf.textfiles.com/academics/lj56-2_mason_article.pdf


My favorite is "Possible Girls":

https://philpapers.org/archive/sinpg


I'm a big fan of Doug Zongker's excellent paper on chicken:

https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf


My gateway pub to this type of research was the Stork paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14738551/


link?



Apparently there was an article as followup:

"Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Proper Multiple Comparisons Correction" (2010, in Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results)

We had the good fortune to have discussion of the study with comments from the author a few years back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15598429




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