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by idm 2304 days ago
In the psychological sciences, it seems like you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

When a phenomenon with a large effect size is demonstrated with tens or hundreds of participants, everybody crows about how the sample size should have been larger.

On the other hand, when a small effect size requires millions of observations to detect, now the criticism is that the effect is too small to matter.

At any rate, this effect is small - but it is reliable. The only crappy part about this study is the ethical boundaries it crossed. In most other ways, this study was kindof amazing...

2 comments

In statistics, there is an optimal sample size for avoiding type 1 and 2 errors.

https://www.stat.ubc.ca/~rollin/stats/ssize/n2.html

There was a tiny difference detected with millions of observations. But it has no scientific meaning.