Do these other fields also study humans in controlled experiments?
I think it has to do with the sample to staff ratio. It's not enough to observe human subjects. You have to actively prevent them from going off the rails. It doesn't scale well when you increase the sample size. I guess we could replicate a similar experiment n-times and then do a meta study, but it's not ideal either.
How would you tackle the logistics of scaling up the above experiment?
Yes, the most common example would be clinical trials for drugs and other medical treatments- often have thousands of patients (with recruitment being the limiting factor). There are tons of ways that studies can go wrong, for example when patients don't take the treatment and lie (this is common) or have other lifestyle factors that influence the results, which can't be easily smoothed out with slightly larger N.
I don't know how to fix the nutritionist studies- I'm still pretty skeptical that you could ever control enough variables to make any sort of conclusion around things with tiny effect sizes. This isn't like nutritional diseases we've seen in the past, for example if you look at a disease like pellagra (not getting enough niacin), literally tens of thousands of people died over a few years (beri beri, rickets, scurvy are three other examples; these discoveries were tightly coupled to the discovery of essential nutrients, now called vitamins).
From my reading, that's not generally true. It all depends on the methodology. Safety or feasibility studies can use very small sample sizes. I've been reading safety studies on monoclonal antibodies like Cimzia, for example:
You should try reading the FDA approval for the drug; it was already approved before these publications (which aren't so much clinical trials as just medical research). The FDA approval has a whole paragraph about how the effect size was too small to demonstrate statistical significance, and the trials had n=300.
It's also indicated for use in a disease we don't understand, for people who didn't respond to all the previously approved drugs. Not a good example at all.
I'm not comparing these to the FDA approvals process, but to your claim that trials use thousands of patients. These three studies are ascertaining the pregnancy safety of a drug, irrespective of whether we understand the disease or what the response rate is.
Cimzia has been well-studied, and we understand why it works on autoimmune diseases like inflammatory arthritis. It has 6 FDA approvals for different indications, so your description of the drug itself is incorrect.
Clunky desktop computers connected to the internet in the 90s were already an easy mode. It's a weird point in time to pull the ladder up. I wonder if the people in the 70s shared the same sentiment.
I, for one, am glad the networks became easier and more accessible. I wouldn't be here otherwise.
> But the wood chips bring another problem which is pH levels that may go too low.
Is this something you've measured? I add a lot of wood chips and conifer needles and it's not a problem; the compost ends up between 6 and 7.5 pH (neutral is 7). I also liberally spread woodchips on the paths between the beds and things are fine.
The effects of wood mulch on plants and composts are well understood:
Shade shouldn't be a problem. In fact, a cover is good because it helps you control the sunlight and rain.
If the pile isn't heating up it's usually either bone dry or there's not enough volume. Aim for at least one cubic meter (or 3x3x3 feet).
If you have fresh grass clippings, add them - they will help a lot. A heap of grass clippings with nothing else will heat up on its own (but don't do it because it will smell).
Your cold compost is going to be fine, it will just take longer and won't cook the weed seeds. If you have more questions there's a composting subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/composting/
