3 ms·

Kind of a tangent, but I get frustrated when researchers publicly release results when one of their groups have a ridiculously small sample size. It’s irrespons

• deleted 5y ago
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• Xylakant 5y ago
  The article is “published” on a preprint server and carries a suitable warning at the top. It’s preliminary, unverified and not reviewed. The target audience is other researchers, not the general public. It’s useful to publish preliminary results based on low sample sizes, it can guide future research. Basically a “hey, we found something we consider interesting, it may be worth having a better look at this.” It’s very dangerous to read too much into this, though - hence the warning at the top.
• onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  I thought this also - but as it turns out - you can make conclusions with really small sample sizes in medicine. For example (this has nothing to do with the paper), if the average rate of some condition - some rare brain tumor - is 1 in 50M - and you take 200 COVID-19 patients and 4 of them have it - and they have several of these tumors - you can have high CI & Power with a low sample size. When you're doing conversion rate optimization - it's usually just "did this person make a purchase?" And usually, your base rate is not less than 1/1000... But in medicine, there are ways to measure the severity of the symptoms and a lot of things are quite rare.
• buildbot 5y ago
  They had over 700 people total, 50% control and 50% infected; which they break down earlier in the same paragraph. The 15 people are those who are hospitalized and the abstract literally says the results from that small group aren’t significant.