That's not a shallow dismissal. Fundamentally, what I read was a cohort size of 11. 1 died. No control group. No double blind (as no control group).

There's no aspect of this that would be statistically distinguishable from noise.

Then again, the original study suffered from this as well.

n=11 may be succinct, but it is not shallow. There is a world of statistical DoE, analytics, etc. behind this.

My concern is the rush to headlines about studies without any real resolving power. The bad part of this is that we don't have time to do proper studies (this takes months and many people to make work). The n=11 comment actually infers this issue.

Sort of like -1 = exp(sqrt(-1)*pi), you don't need many letters to convey a tremendous amount of meaning.

Somehow the hivemind decided a few years ago (it would be interesting to trace how and when) that every study with a small sample size is worthless and merely mentioning sample size is enough to cancel it, and whoever is first to bring this up in a thread wins. It's a gotcha response.

Obviously there are statistical concerns with small samples. Equally obviously, not every such study is worthless and the authors are not all idiots who knows less than any internet commenter. So to get substantive discussion, we need to engage with the specifics of a particular study, not post a generic dismissal. "n = 11?" looks specific but it isn't. It's a template instantiation, as stock as "Correlation is not causation".

The answer to "the rush to headlines about studies" is not the opposite reflex, it's to slow down and reflect, and then maybe post if one has something thoughtful to say. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I don't mean to pick on the GP commenter. Maybe they had something else in mind. The issue is how such a comment plugs into a known shallow-discussion dynamic. The problem is at the group level, not the individual, and we all suffer from this reflexiveness, so none of us gets to feel smug.

It is shallow because it doesn't teach anything to people that are not already familiar with this kind of work.

Something not shallow would be like "only eleven people participated in this study, this is too little to get a clear result that's not due to luck."

That would be just as shallow. The issue isn't brevity, it's genericness. Are we really making the assumption that every study with a small sample is worthless, and that our reflexes know better than the people who worked on it? Obviously we need to do better than that. Generic discussion is shallow discussion (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).

Here's a comparable comment that at least begins to engage with the specifics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22798031. I don't know if it's a good point, but it's at least actually about this particular study. We wouldn't moderate such a comment.

I'm not sure I agree with this. Would you feel the same way if the sample size was 1? 5?

11 is very small, and useful only for evaluating the presence of very very prominent effect sizes, regardless of domain. A comment saying n=11 is not a novel insight, but I believe it is useful, similar to people who add "in mice" to articles whose headlines might imply the test was on humans. I appreciate those comments.

In this case I think it is fair to conclude that the headline "Severe Covid-19 Cases Don't Respond to..." is an accurate takeaway purely because the sample size is so small. With this sample size you can, at best, conclude that these combinations of drugs don't reliably cure the disease in severe cases, which is a very different idea.

Why not? It depends on the study. I agree with you about misleading headlines and the mice thing. It's an interesting point to compare.

While I have you: could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that, and in fact this account was banned. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Yes

Appreciated! (I only just saw this.)

Succinctness does not imply shallowness

Certainly not. Mechanically repeating a stock criticism does. This one is currently the internet's cliché way to dismiss a study.

Generic discussion is shallow discussion.