carl_compliance said:

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…

Adding the part of the answer the thread has not reached. Take it one variable at a time. Almost every unanswerable question in these threads is unanswerable because three things changed in the same fortnight, and no amount of subsequent argument can untangle them after the fact.

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 carl_compliance — and this may be the naive question:

What would you measure differently if you were starting again?

LabKate said:

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

I read this differently from LabKate, on substance rather than tone. I think the framing smuggles in the conclusion. Ask it the other way round and the obvious answer reverses, which usually means the question is doing the work.

LabKate said:

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

Agreed, and the size of the effect matters as much as its existence. Something real and small gets treated here as though it were real and decisive.