GenomicsKate said:

It is worth asking what the claim would look like if it were false.

Coming at GenomicsKate’s question from a different direction. The distinction that resolves most of these threads is between what is true on average and what is true for one person. Both are real; they answer different questions and get quoted as if they were the same one.

One concrete data point for the thread. Give anything pharmacological four weeks before you judge it, and give anything measured weekly a four-point rolling average before you call it a trend.

Following on from GenomicsKate — and this may be the naive question:

How would you tell the difference between that and the alternative explanation?

BethLabQueen said:

Give anything pharmacological four weeks before you judge it, and give anything measured weekly a four-point rolling average before you call it a…

I am going to disagree with the direction of travel here. The thread has converged on the tidiest answer rather than the best-supported one, and those are not the same thing.

BethLabQueen said:

Give anything pharmacological four weeks before you judge it, and give anything measured weekly a four-point rolling average before you call it a…

That is right, and it stops being right at the edges. The general case is well behaved; the interesting cases in this thread are all at the boundary where the general case breaks.