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> For the study, researchers enrolled 11 adult men and women who had excess weight.

It's amazing how low our standard for news is when it comes to things like weight loss.

Depending on the size of the effect, 11 participants can be very valid in an experiment. For example, assume you have 11 participants having a hormone measured after an experiment. If normal readings are 300 with a SD of 30, and at the end of the experiment their mean is 520 with a SD of 40, then you've just shown a strong, significant effect.

Yeah, except it usually would be (in the best case scenario) more like "520 with a SD of 40" for 10 people and "1 outlier", which you wouldn't really be able to properly conceptualize let alone explain, since your "outlier" is freaking 10% of the group.

That is, ignoring the fact that experiments without a control group can be hardly considered valid at all.

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