ГУЛаг Палестины

can even be conceived at the low end of the alcohol-consumption continuum. That is, a

subject prohibited from drinking any alcohol might argue that this for him unnatural and

unaccustomed regimen changed his personality, undermined his career, and ruined his

marriage, and with this claim in hand, could readily find a lawyer willing to help him

sue for damages.

And if such an experiment had ever been conducted, it would

be invalid

Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment would fail to meet the

double-blind requirement. And although we are certain that an experiment manipulating

alcohol consumption over an extended period has never been conducted, even if it were

conducted, it would nevertheless contain inescapable flaws which would stand in the way

of permitting cause-effect conclusions. For example, you may be aware that the best

experiments are ones that are "double-blind." A "blind" experiment is one in which the

subjects do not know what experimental condition they are in - they might not know, for

example, whether the pill they are swallowing contains a curative drug, or only a

placebo. In our alcohol experiment, they would not know whether the liquid they were

drinking was wine, or only some wine-colored and wine-flavored water that had been

sealed in wine bottles. Already, we see the impossibility of our wine experiment being

even so much as blind. Just about every subject in our wine experiment would

immediately realize what it was that he was drinking. Tinted water is clearly

distinguishable by its appearance and taste and effect from wine. A blind wine

experiment, then, is an utter impossibility. Most subjects would be able to quickly

infer approximately what experimental condition they had been placed into.

A "double-blind" experiment would be one in which neither the subject nor the

experimenter knew what experimental condition any particular subject was in. For

example, the experimenter hands the subject a capsule, but does not himself know until

the experiment is over whether that capsule contains a curative drug or only a placebo.

In our alcohol experiment, a double-blind experiment would involve the experimenter

monitoring the life and health of each subject, but only after the experiment was over

opening up the sealed envelope to find out how much alcohol that subject had been

consuming over the past 30 years. Utterly impossible as well.

The reason that the double-blind requirement is essential is that without it,

confounding factors appear that might be responsible for any observed longevity

effects. For example, subjects aware that they are in a large-alcohol-consumption group

would also tend to realize that such alcohol consumption might harm them, and so they

might attempt to compensate by taking vitamin pills, not smoking, upgrading their diets,

exercising, and so on. Or, they might start eating fats prior to drinking alcohol, in

order to coat their stomachs and slow the absorption of the alcohol. They might do a

large number of things. What is important is that the knowledge of one's experimental

treatment can lead to one or more changes in behavior, and that it is these unintended

changes, and not the wine consumption itself, that could affect longevity, either in one

direction or the other.

Or, here is a particularly plausible confounding that might appear. Imagine that the

experiment attempts to control wine drinking, and no more than that, and that subjects

do faithfully follow the wine regimen that is imposed on them. Nevertheless, the less

wine that they were allowed to drink, the more beer and hard alcohol they would probably

end up drinking, but which would make the initially equal groups unequal on beer and

hard-alcohol consumption. And so then it would be impossible to tell if differences in

longevity should be attributed to differences in wine consumption, or to differences in

beer consumption, or to differences in hard-alcohol consumption.

But while we may choose to pause and speculate as to what confounding variables may

appear, scientific method does not obligate us to do so. We know that confounding

variables are possible in non-double-blind experiments, and the number that we are able

to imagine is limited only by the time that we allocate to trying. If I cared to spend

a few hours thinking about it, I could write several pages of possibilities. If I chose

to spend a few months thinking about it, I could write a book of possibilities. I am

able to imagine confounding variables either improving health or impairing it at the low

end of the alcohol-consumption continuum, and as well either improving or impairing

health at the high end of the alcohol-consumption continuum. Scientific method does not

require us to know for certain what and how many confounding variables may appear to

destroy the validity of an experiment which is not double-blind; rather, scientific

method assures us that it is so likely that one or more confounding variables will make