The figures, for anyone assembling their own picture. 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.

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

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

DoseLogDan 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 read this differently from DoseLogDan, on substance rather than tone. 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.

DoseLogDan 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 holds where the measurement is reliable. Where it is noisy — and a lot of what gets tracked here is noisy — the same reasoning produces confident nonsense.

If somebody has the primary source to hand I would rather cite it than paraphrase it.

DoseLogDan 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…

This answered a question I did not know how to ask.