SarahChen_PharmD said:

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

Adding the part of the answer the thread has not reached. Most of what circulates confidently in this community traces back to one summary of one study, and the qualifier was dropped somewhere in the third retelling.

One concrete data point for the thread. Say what you would expect to see if you were wrong, before you look. It is a small discipline and it changes what you notice.

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

What would you measure differently if you were starting again?

BiostatsBrad said:

Say what you would expect to see if you were wrong, before you look.

Worth saying that the confident version of this is more useful to the person writing it than to the person reading it.

BiostatsBrad said:

Say what you would expect to see if you were wrong, before you look.

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.