This paper is intended as a sarcastic critique of the push towards conducting randomized trials in academia/medicine, but it’s an obvious straw man. You could write this sarcastic article for any research method - “see, why do research using method X when we already know the answer from other methods?”
The problem is that there are plenty of research questions where RCTs show us that previous non-RCTs were wrong.
Is that a problem? It can be true in isolation of the fact that sometimes, what's going to happen without a RCT is just obvious, because an experiment is not needed to answer every conceivable question.
"obvious straw man" researchers should be worrying about the non-obvious strawmen. Because these extreme conditions help up check the boundaries of what is possible to verify or not.
> The problem is that there are plenty of research questions where RCTs show us that previous non-RCTs were wrong.
And that is fine. When you are able to use an RCT.
The problem is that there are plenty of research questions where RCTs show us that previous non-RCTs were wrong.