PharmHunterJen said:

Order of operations matters more than any single choice here: establish a baseline, change one thing, wait long enough for it to express itself, then…

Coming at PharmHunterJen’s question from a different direction. The useful move here is to separate what is established from what is widely repeated. Those two sets overlap less than the confident tone of most write-ups suggests, and the second set is where nearly all the disagreement on this board comes from.

Happy to go further on any of that.

Adding the numbers, since they settle part of this. One habit that pays for itself: post the method alongside the number. A figure without its method cannot be checked, and an unchecked figure is how this community accumulates folklore.

A narrower follow-up, since the general answer is now clear:

What did you change at the same time, and can you separate the two now?

DanielChem_CHI said:

One habit that pays for itself: post the method alongside the number.

This is where I part company with the consensus forming above. I would resist the confidence. Half of what this board was certain about two years ago has since been quietly dropped, and nobody went back to correct the threads.

DanielChem_CHI said:

One habit that pays for itself: post the method alongside the number.

Agreed, with the usual condition: that holds for the average and this board is a collection of individuals. A population claim and a personal prediction are different things and get quoted interchangeably.

Correct me if the detail matters more than I have assumed.