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Re:Study: Severe Covid-19 Cases Don't Respond to Hydroxychlo... by dang on Monday April 06, 2020 @06:27PM (#22798499)
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.

Re:Study: Severe Covid-19 Cases Don't Respond to Hydroxychlo... by klmadfejno on Tuesday April 07, 2020 @10:11AM (#22803340)
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.

Re:Study: Severe Covid-19 Cases Don't Respond to Hydroxychlo... by dang on Tuesday April 07, 2020 @02:21PM (#22805918)
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...

Re:Study: Severe Covid-19 Cases Don't Respond to Hydroxychlo... by klmadfejno on Friday April 10, 2020 @01:50PM (#22835427)
Yes
Re:Study: Severe Covid-19 Cases Don't Respond to Hydroxychlo... by dang on Monday April 13, 2020 @10:19PM (#22862168)
Appreciated! (I only just saw this.)