Protocol

A man with blue hair and round white-rimmed glasses, holding a piece of chalk, explains his research. A caption reads that he took the worst-performing students on the last exam, retested them the following week, and in between smeared their foreheads with peanut butter and smooshed googly eyes into it. Asked "The result?", he says there was statistically significant improvement in their average score, declaring the "googly-goo protocol" VALIDATED and now being trialed in thousands of public schools. Beside him is a chalk sketch of a googly-eyed smiley face and a line graph of score rising over time. The bottom caption reads: "Science pro tip: you can prove anything you want using regression to the mean." The joke is that the worst scorers were always going to improve toward the average on a retest regardless of the silly intervention. Votey: a grinning man enthusiastically says, "We can create brand new medicines just by finding currently sick people and giving them whatever we like!" — applying the same flawed regression-to-the-mean logic to medicine.