[tedsanders]

My point is that you can still extract useful information when your stop is dynamic rather than static. One typical scenario is when your effect size ends up being larger than you originally guessed. There's little reason to continue if the difference becomes obvious.

In the future, I would appreciate it if you steelmanned my comments or asked for clarification instead of insulting me. It hurt my feelings. I wish I had written a better comment that hadn't incited such a reaction from you. Best wishes.

[apathy]

You are right, I shot from the hip. Sorry about that.

I also have noprocrast set in my profile so I couldn't go back and edit it (something I thought about doing). I probably would have toned it down if I hadn't requested that Hacker News kick me off after 15 minutes.

Your line of discussion is productive. It's just important that people understand the difference between degrees of belief and degrees of evidence from a specific study and never confuse the two. Trouble is, lots of folks confuse them, and lots of other folks prey on that confusion.

Anyways, sorry for being a jerk.

[tedsanders]

No worries and thanks for the apology. I apologize for my own comments in this thread, which were lower than the quality I aspire to. I had pulled an all-nighter for work and was sitting grumpily with my phone at an airport.

[ted_dunning]

Your intuition about effects bigger than you expected is just on target.

But it applies at all scales of effect. Stop when you have a big enough effect or have high confidence that you won't care.