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With a stat like "less than 1%" the order of magnitude is at least 1/10 of 1% otherwise it's an invalid format for a statistic, it's also most likely >= 0.5 because of rounding... 0 is also less than 1 so with your logic the statistic is meaningless.

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Yes, all "X is less than Y" statistics are meaningless unless there the convention you mention is strongly held by journalists when they interpret studies - which is unlikely.

i.e. it'd be very easy for a study to say "we have shown that it's likely that the effect size is less than 1%" and then a journalist to interpret that as <1%, and then for a reader to incorrectly think "they wouldn't have said this if it were actually 0.1% or lower".

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