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by necovek 1774 days ago
The understated point is "valid" in "valid statistical methods".

Frequently, social sciences (and even a lot of medicine: basically, anything involving humans where applying valid statistical methods can quickly become unethical) rely on too small a sample set to eradicate the noise.

You do not have to model all factors, because it is impossible to do so, you just need to have a large enough sample to ensure statistical significance that's not out of "statistics in a week" course.

I've seen one too many 50-subjects study, that claims to have extremely high confidence.