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That’s a bit harsh. It’s an exploratory study testing a new paradigm.

It's only as harsh as the the headline is rose-tinted.

"Exploratory study shows promise" is better. When n=21, flipping a coin as about as accurate.

This statement belies a fundamental misunderstanding of statistics on your part.

If you're really good at statistics, you can just intuit what seems like a sufficient N. This is actually a powerful statistical method because you can vary your intuition depending on whether you want to believe the study was well-powered or not, enabling you to easily discard Bad Evidence and include Good Evidence.

Few understand this.

No, that’s utter nonsense. Statistical power is well defined and the required N to reliably detect an effect is a function of its effect size, which is the thing that wannabe statisticians don’t understand.

> you can vary your intuition depending on whether you want to believe the study

I suspect it is deliberate nonsense.

> I suspect it is deliberate nonsense.

But is that your intuition talking?

You don't intuit it, you calculate it. If you claim to be able to predict coin flips with a specific accuracy I can give you the exact number of trails N you need to be x% confident.

If you claim 90% accuracy and I want to be 95% confident with the standard alpha of 0.05 you need 38 trials.

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