You're handwaving. The xkcd point only applies if you're within ~3 sigma. This isn't a complicated statistical analysis it's just asking how far out the outlier

You're handwaving. The xkcd point only applies if you're within ~3 sigma. This isn't a complicated statistical analysis it's just asking how far out the outlier is versus the standard deviation and size of the dataset. To be clear I'm not claiming in one direction or the other. I feel that if you're going to attempt to discredit a piece of work it's on you to do such a basic check. Really the whole point of that xkcd was to viscerally illustrate the practical effect of binary misclassification, or alternatively to make the point that a p of 0.05 isn't necessarily as rigorous as you might expect. Neither of those things directly applies here.