Re:Intestinal drug shown to boost memory and cognition
by gus_massa on Monday October 04, 2021 @09:42PM
(#28754602)
There are two problems:
1) Someone defined "statistically significant" as 5%, and sometimes it's too high and it's too easy to get an interesting result caused by a fluke, specially if there are too many groups trying different things. (As an extreme case, in particle physics they use 5 sigmas to avoid fase discoveries.)I think we agree about this.
2) In this case, reading the paper linked by criticas below in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28745673 , the error bars in Figure 1 are unbelievable small. For example the second points looks like 12.0±.2 vs 13.0±.2 (I can't find he exact data, so I'm just looking at the graphic and guessing.) And they claim p<0.01 T get this level of concentration with only 20 persons, the raw data mus be very concentrated around 12 and 13, but I expect that the number of remembered word to be very noisy and have a wide distribution.
1) Someone defined "statistically significant" as 5%, and sometimes it's too high and it's too easy to get an interesting result caused by a fluke, specially if there are too many groups trying different things. (As an extreme case, in particle physics they use 5 sigmas to avoid fase discoveries.)I think we agree about this.
2) In this case, reading the paper linked by criticas below in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28745673 , the error bars in Figure 1 are unbelievable small. For example the second points looks like 12.0±.2 vs 13.0±.2 (I can't find he exact data, so I'm just looking at the graphic and guessing.) And they claim p<0.01 T get this level of concentration with only 20 persons, the raw data mus be very concentrated around 12 and 13, but I expect that the number of remembered word to be very noisy and have a wide distribution.