That's amazing. Grey hat hacking for social good. Sometimes you need to exploit the inefficiencies you're bothered by to illustrate their weakness, which hopefully makes society patch it up.

None of those are inherently fatal, either alone or in combination. To illustrate, imagine I did a study where I took 20 people, subjected them to a 10 minute ice bath, followed by a chest X-ray, and then put them naked in a steel cage and lowered the cage to the bottom of a swimming pool for 20 minutes (yes, the pool is full of water). Study participants are not told beforehand that they will be going into water.

And suppose further that 9 of them are still alive when I pull them out of the water. Not only are they alive, they are conscious, alert, and show no ill effects from 20 minutes underwater.

That would be a study worth talking about despite the sample size and lack of control and short time span.

Those would not be a fatal problems because we already know a lot about what happens to humans in general who spend 20 minutes without diving equipment underwater. We have a good idea of what the probability is for a human to survive such a thing, and can estimate the probability that my sample included 9 such people. It would be close to zero. Heck, even if I had the misfortune of accidentally getting my sample at a free diving competition the chances that I'd get 9 people who could hold their breaths for 20 minutes would be very low.

> laughable time span

Maybe participants refused to stand more?

Back pain study. How is this "social sciences"?

Traditionally, claims of a specific effect are treated skeptically until adequate evidence is given, and the burden of producing that evidence falls to the people making the claim. This, of course, goes both ways when it comes to the standing desk question.