sean_dublin 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 sean_dublin’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. 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 same conditions. Nobody wants that answer and it is still the answer.

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

One thing that is still open after sean_dublin’s answer:

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

PeptideChemSF 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…

I read this differently from PeptideChemSF, on substance rather than tone. The objection nobody has made: this only works if the measurement is doing what we assume it is doing, and that assumption has not been tested here.

Reporting back.

Update — I was wrong in the opening post, specifically about the direction. Correcting it here rather than editing it away.