Comment by fosdad2131321

> The entire point of a control is to test for that sort of contamination

No, the point of a control is to give you a reference point that shares all the systemic biases and unknown unknowns, not to detect those biases. If you follow the same procedure on a known null and on your experiment and observe an effect, assuming you really did exactly the same thing except the studied intervention, you can subtract out the bias.

This one example of technical jargon diverging from colloquial or intuitive use, and it is the type of thing people who haven't had statistics or scientific process education often struggle with because they keep applying their colloquial intuitions.

You talk like you understand this on the rest of the comment so I'm confused by this framing, and the person you are replying to points out (in my reading ) that contamination of the control 1) does happen in practice (in the sense that there was an accidental intervention) and 2) if the gloves contaminated both the measurements and control the same way then the control is exactly serving it's purposes