He will randomly assign groups of children to keyboard, voice or drama classes.
"You can't take a bunch of babies and randomly assign them to grow up in comfort or poverty.
For all sorts of reasons, you can't randomly assign one group of teenagers to use cannabis, and another not to.
If you sign up, we will randomly assign you to any other meeting.
The ideal study would randomly assign women to have mammograms or not.
Yet year after year, driven by the value we randomly assign to handsome slabs of meat, the cogs are set in motion.
Then you randomly assign some of them to do one thing, and the rest to do another – and then you can see what difference it makes.
The plan was to photograph volunteers wearing skimpy bathing suits and then randomly assign them to one of three groups: cardiovascular exercise, weight lifting or control.
"It would be possible to randomly assign different teaching methods, and different approaches, and different ways of seeing the screen, and all kinds of things," he told me.
A potential flaw in the Dutch study is that the scientists did not randomly assign people to take active drugs or dummy pills for comparison purposes.
The orthodox way to find out is to randomly assign patients to have the lung scanning test, or not, and then compare outcomes.
