This is of course true. But not unique to meta analysis, so it’s not clear why your focusing on them. A poorly run large scale double blind randomized control trial is just as worthless if it’s run poorly. A meta analysis could at least overcome a bad study with the aggregate
You could easily lose the effect entirely BECAUSE you used a meta-analysis. The point is that meta-analysis does nothing to correct for underlying biases
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If 58 witnesses related essentially the same event with varying degrees of consistency and credibility, wouldn’t the smart thing to do be to start with an average of all of the stories? Wouldn’t the truth most likely mirror the details that were repeated the most often?
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So for example if 18 said they saw a man 5’8 tall, 20 said 5’10 and 20 claimed he was 6ft tall, you’d conclude he was approx 5’10. Either way, surely it wouldn’t make much sense to conclude ‘We have no idea how tall the man was and can’t even conclude if said event took place.’
End of conversation
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That’s simply untrue. If it were true, large scale trials wouldn’t be any more valuable than small scale trials. The larger the sample, the more corrective it will be for individual bias. This is as true at the study level as it is at the participant level.
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