protocol
Explanation
This comic satirizes the misuse of statistics in education research. A scientist explains that he "took the worst-performing students on the last exam and repeated them a new test the following week." In the intervening days, he "smeared their foreheads with peanut butter and smooshed googly eyes into it." The result: a "statistically significant improvement in their average score."
He announces that "The Googly-Eoo Protocol is validated" and is now being trialed in thousands of public schools. The caption at the bottom delivers the actual lesson: "Science pro tip: you can prove anything you want using regression to the mean."
The joke is about a well-known statistical phenomenon called regression to the mean. When you select a group specifically because they performed poorly (an extreme result), their next performance will naturally tend to be closer to the average, regardless of any intervention. This means any absurd treatment -- like smearing peanut butter and googly eyes on foreheads -- will appear to "work" if you only test it on the worst performers and then measure their subsequent performance.
The humor works because the intervention described is so obviously ridiculous that no one should believe it caused the improvement, yet the statistical methodology described (pre-select poor performers, apply treatment, measure improvement) is exactly the flawed design used in many real educational studies and corporate training evaluations. The comic takes aim at the way poorly designed studies can make worthless interventions appear effective, a genuine and widespread problem in social science research.