[riwsky]

We're talking past each other, here.

Your article presents a sufficient argument for dismissing the TDD example. Tossing effect size in, your argument still applies for dismissing an ideal study.

My point is not that what you said didn't suffice, it's that the philosophically heavyweight arguments weren't necessary. They were a hand-written recursive-descent parser, when the example could have been solved with a regex.

[jimmyhmiller]

Yeah, you could very well be right this is all overkill. But what I wanted to do was handle the general case rather than deal with things on a case by case basis. So to extend your analogy, I consider this blog post a parser generator. It isn't suppose to parse any particular text, but to allow you to create a parser for anything you want.

I've found that my short replies to empirical advocates seem to not connect. There seemed to be an assumption that I just wanted to hold onto my opinions and not think deeply about anything. So I wanted to do the exact opposite. Be as pedantic as I could (in the space of a shortish blogpost).