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Re:Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19 by s5300 on Thursday October 28, 2021 @12:12AM (#29022294)
IMO, one of the largest hurdles that modern society is going to have to overcome is the average person's understanding of large (or small) numbers and basic statistics.

I think a large issue within that hurdle is that a lot of people simply won't want to learn, or apply the knowledge after learning.

Re:Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19 by SkittyDog on Thursday October 28, 2021 @12:28AM (#29022393)
And the funny thing is that the original commenter was looking at a trivial math problem. It wasn't even a question of statistical validity, it was just "What does it mean to compare percentages to each other?" That's grade-school mathematics.

I see this kind of error pretty frequently, and it's usually not a failure of mathematics... Most often, the person has some pre-existing negative emotional reaction to the stated conclusion, and their brain searches for something to criticize, in order to soothe those negative emotions.

I could only speculate as to why the original poster doesn't like hearing that an existing drug shows promise in treating COVID. Maybe they're a big Ivermectin booster, and they don't like the idea of another drug threatening their favorite?

Re:Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19 by matjet on Thursday October 28, 2021 @01:34AM (#29022730)
I think you might want to reconsider your opinion of others. I believe the OP was referring to this result being on the edge of statistical significance given: The effect size relative to the base population; The fact that many similar trials are performed and discarded with similar drugs; And as we see when looking deeper, there are other issues such as early stopping. It is not unreasonable to suspect the effect could disappear given more data.
Re:Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19 by SkittyDog on Thursday October 28, 2021 @02:36AM (#29023070)
YOU are raising some valid points... but based on the OP's other comments, they seem to have a very limited knowledge of statistics--and yet, they are pushing a very critical line on this topic.

OP is asking other posters to do quite a bit of homework for them... As in, "Is this study big enough?" <<YES>> "OK, but how big does it need to be to prove X?" ... At a certain point, it seems clear that OP is not arguing in good faith, because they feel compelled to make the critical statements, first, without understanding the topix.

I would caution you to not extend sympathy to OP's cause, simply because you happen to share a critical eye for this study. There is a HUGE difference between being right for the right reason, vs the wrong reason... and that's how we get crap like Ivermectin for COVID.