gwern comments on Stuff That Makes Stuff Happen - Less Wrong
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It's not, if only because the people implementing it can guess it: a textbook I read on doing medical trials mentioned that this procedure was done in medical trials, and it led to tampering where doctors would send the patients they liked better or were sicker or whatever to the 'right' trial arm.
So they changed the person's name, or what?
Something like that. There are a lot of ways to tamper with this: participation is voluntary, of course, so if a patient would 'benefit' from being randomized to the 'right' arm, you'd encourage them to do it, while if they weren't, you'd encourage them to drop out (and maybe get the tested treatment themselves!). You'd filter the list in the first place, or use alternative names (My legal first name starts with one letter but I always go by a version of my middle name which starts with a different letter: which version does the doctor write down?). And so on.
One interesting example, from a retrospective:
thanks!