Comment by not2b

11 hours ago

If the result is statistically significant, it just barely makes it. 84.8% isn't that much higher than 80.8% and they had only 250 prompts, if I'm reading this right.

In a field where progress is measured in tenths of percent points, that's not true. Think of it this way: the error rate drops from 19% to 15%, or from 1 in 5 to 1 in 6.

  • Statistical significance is about whether an effect can reliably be said to have been measured at all; it's not about whether or not the effect itself would be significant in the sense of moving some other needle.

    The ~5% improvement reported here might just be an artefact of the data collection or random variation, rather than a consistent repeatable change.