A small study that got enormous coverage and should not have

The registry entry is worth checking against the published paper, and on one occasion the outcomes we were reading were not the ones originally listed.

This is the post I wish had existed when I was looking for it.

My reading has got slower and better. I get through a quarter of what I used to and I understand considerably more of it.

What I have taken from this group is mostly humility about how much is genuinely settled.

I would encourage anybody nervous about joining to come and say nothing for a few sessions. That is what I did for four months.

What helped was somebody explaining confidence intervals to me properly, once, in plain terms, and I have read differently ever since.

That is a very clear way of putting something I have never been able to put clearly.

Reading and nodding. Nothing to add, and I wanted you to know somebody had read it.

I had to learn that an effect being statistically significant and it mattering to a person are two entirely separate questions.

What I would say is that an honest "we do not know yet" is worth more than a confident answer, and the papers say it more often than the coverage does.

The trial that gets quoted most in general coverage is not the one that answers most of the questions people here actually have.

One paper a fortnight, read properly, has taught me more than three years of reading summaries of papers.

The thing I look at first now is who was actually in the study, because that is usually where the answer to my question lives.

The session where we read a paper about something none of us takes was the most useful, because nobody was defending a position.

Something practical: I read the methods before the conclusions now, which somebody here suggested and which changed how much I trust what I read.