These kinds of well-needed comments full of doubts and questions of what all was controlled for in the research and whether confounding variables remained, the kinds that always come up on reddit and now (hooray!!) lemmy, make me wonder whether research could in some cases be dramatically improved by letting the internet loose on the research hypothesis ahead of time instead of once the paper is published.
Scientists: “In our study, we will evaluate whether a is correlated with an increase in b. We will control for w, y, x, and z.
The internet/reddit/lemmy: “You absolute imbeciles. Did it not occur to you to control for α, β, and gamma through omega?!
Scientists: well, we will certainly consider all those and do our best to do so now!