LabKate said:

The boring version of this is the one that works, and the boring version is: measure a baseline, change one variable, wait, measure again under the…

This is where I part company with the consensus forming above. Pushing back on the anecdote-stacking. Twenty people reporting the same thing is twenty samples from the same self-selected pool, not twenty independent confirmations.

LabKate said:

The boring version of this is the one that works, and the boring version is: measure a baseline, change one variable, wait, measure again under the…

No disagreement, though it depends on where somebody is starting from, and this thread has been assuming a starting point nobody stated.

LabKate said:

The boring version of this is the one that works, and the boring version is: measure a baseline, change one variable, wait, measure again under the…

That reframing is the part I needed.

Adding the clinical framing, because it changes how the question reads. If two explanations both fit, the useful question is which one predicts something the other does not. That is answerable; arguing about which sounds more plausible is not.

MASHdoc_SA said:

If two explanations both fit, the useful question is which one predicts something the other does not.

Second this.