3 ms·

Small sample sizes aren't necessarily damning. E.g. if you gave 5 rabies patients a treatment and they were all instantly cured, that would be extremely strong

Small sample sizes aren't necessarily damning. E.g. if you gave 5 rabies patients a treatment and they were all instantly cured, that would be extremely strong evidence it worked. Because rabies is 99.999% fatal and the chances of 5 randomly chosen people being cured by coincidence is basically 0.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago
In this case, for example: "We had four non-verbal children in the study, two 6-year-olds and two 14-year-olds. The six-year-old and the 14-year-old who received suramin said the first sentences of their lives about one week after the single suramin infusion. This did not happen in any of the children given the placebo." That seems promising and worth further study.
- xenadu02 9y ago
  Indeed, the initial results are promising and worth further study with a larger sample size. We should be careful though... many results don't replicate in larger populations.
wu-ikkyu 9y ago
Rabies is an objective pathology, so it is far more easily/accurately classified than subjective social conditions like autism.
- igravious 9y ago
  Many idiotic statements (such as yours) would be prevented if English language speakers agreed to a global moratorium on the use of the words "objective" and "subjective" until such time that it could be verified that 99.999% of the population could use them in regular discourse in non-idiotic ways.
  - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
    >"psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests". -Allen Frances, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine and DSM-IV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Frances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Frances