3 ms·

Thank you for saying this. More n is required, yes, but small n results like this are a noteworthy step in the right direction. There is often good reason why

• esyir 5y ago
  I'd also like to chime in on "effect size matters". After all, you don't need particularly large N to conclude that decapitation is going to be fatal.
  • mlyle 5y ago
    Yes--- Small n studies are often the most exciting. If you get a p<0.01 effect in 10 people vs. 10000 people... the lower bound of the effect size is similar, and so for the same prior each study should change our belief by a similar amount... but the upper bound of effect size is much larger in the large study. The only thing that messes this logic of mine up a bit is publication bias. There's a much larger chance that small studies sit on the shelf unpublished if there's no clear effect.
• jcims 5y ago
  I had an occasion to deep dive into hundreds of clinical trials about a year ago, talk to PIs and trial participants, etc. One thing I didn't even have awareness of, let alone appreciation for, was how essential it is to have a good trial design (or maybe how an insufficiently considered trial design can be vulnerable to catastrophic failure modes). It seems that running these 'small batch' studies/trials can be tremendously helpful to inform and refine the approach before executing on a larger scale. Of course if it takes 3 years to reach an endpoint it probably doesn't make sense to serialize them, but to my layman perspective there appears to be clear value (and in this case encouraging results).