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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...




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.




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