4 ms·
A study with 20 students? This is useless.
by planckscnst 12y ago
A study with 20 students? This is useless.
- pekk 12y agoIs it more useless than shooting from the hip with completely uninformed opinions?
- TeMPOraL 12y agoWith this sample size any reasonably-sounding model you invent on the spot has a good chance of giving better results.
- pekk 12y agoYou've implied that 0 data points are better than 20. With 0 data points, consider the source: I will make a "model" to exactly reflect whatever my agenda is, rather than generating one at random.
- sadfaceunread 12y agoYou could test this hypothesis on a website and get 100x the data (with more noise) pretty easily.
- gwern 12y agoI agree, formatting details seem to be very context-specific and this is a lab setup, not in the wild. I would trust much more some AB test results from the NYT or any media organization - line length is one of the most obvious things to test! I tested page-widths (which forces line length) on my own site, using n=109k visitors (so, quite a bit larger than n=20): http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#max-width-redux http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#max-width-redux A wide - but not the widest - version performed best.