I was reading today about water fluoridation, and its "effects". These include reduced(or, depending on who you ask, increased) aggression.
This interested me- not because I believe it, but because this has a hypothesis(water fluoridation affects you) with a predicted outcome(reduced/increased agression).
The first commandment of science is "Thou shalt test thy beliefs by experiment", and this seems the perfect opportunity.
What you’d need to do is get, say, three groups, relatively large. They’d have to stay at some kind of facility for the test- that is to say, they would only drink water specialy provided. One group would get standard fluorine levels, one would get a high(within safety limits) dose, and one would get pure, filtered water(as a control).
Have them play some specially designed or chosen violent video game- preferably one with a range of more aggressive or less aggressive tactics. A statistical increase in aggression in the fluorine groups would be… interesting.
I imagine you’d have to take measures to prevent the placebo effect(people think the drug will make them more aggressive, so they behave more aggressively).
Also, I imagine something like this taking place over a couple of weeks, so it might be a bit expensive. I know this is a pretty common issue, though, so some kind of confederation, between people who want to prove the effects of fluoridation and people who want to prove it’s harmless, might be able to scrape the money together.
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