The danger with surprising results is that they often use the surprise part as an excuse for small sample sizes, etc.. Another way to think about this situation

The danger with surprising results is that they often use the surprise part as an excuse for small sample sizes, etc.. Another way to think about this situation is to flip it and say that surprising (and spurious) results are more likely from exploring a small dataset. Andrew Gelman talks a lot about this issue on his blog: https://andrewgelman.com/2014/08/01/scientific-surprise-two-step/ https://andrewgelman.com/2014/08/01/scientific-surprise-two-...