Triple-blinding

Fred Bookstein writes:

Your blog comment about triple-blinding was a joke, but there IS a triple-blinding procedure in which the identity of the two groups is not revealed to the statistician on the project until the very end. At all times the data analyses proceed solely in reference to a comparison of some unspecified “group A” with a similarly unspecified “group B,” and the identification of who were the intervened-upon and who were not is concealed from him or her until the computations are finished. (There are some other assumptions, e.g. absence of baseline differences, required for this to make sense; it applies mainly in contexts like randomized clinical trials.) You can’t really purge the Discussion section of an article of the possibility of spin, but at least you can get the right scatters and tables into the dossier that they’re spinning. The possibility was called to my attention a while ago by Michael Myslobodsky, a wise old man from my schizophrenia research world, who did not remotely intend it as a joke.

Interesting. My only experience along these lines is when I was working with a student doing matching for a public health study: There were something like 100 treated units and 1000 potential controls, and we wanted to select 300 of these as matched controls. The researchers were careful to give us only the background information and no outcomes.