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by bertil 1006 days ago
You are confusing:

a. the Family-Wise Error Rate (FWER what xkcd 882 is about) and the many solutions of Multiple Comparison Correction (MCC: Bonferoni, Homes-Sidak, Benjamini-Hochberg, etc.) with

b. Contamination or Interaction: your two variants are not equivalent because one has 52% of its members part of Control from another experiment, while the other variant has 48%.

FWER is a common concern among statisticians when testing, but one with simple solutions. Contamination is a frequent concern among stakeholders, but very rare to observe even with a small sample size, and that even more rarely has a meaningful impact on results. Let’s say you have a 4% overhang, and the other experiment has a remarkably large 2% impact on a key metric. The contamination is only 4% * 2% = 0.08%.

It is a common concern and, therefore, needs to be discussed, but as Lukas Vermeer explained here [0], the solutions are simple and not frequently needed.

[0] https://www.lukasvermeer.nl/publications/2023/04/04/avoiding...