Dr.GastroMayo said:Worth answering the question that was asked rather than the one behind it.
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.
paige_pharma said:Agreed, with a caveat about community reputation: it is a lagging indicator.
Thank you — that is the clearest version of this I have read, and I have read a lot of them. Sending this to two other people who asked me the same thing last week.
Dr.GastroMayo said:Worth answering the question that was asked rather than the one behind it.
Careful with the causal language. Two things moving together in a period when five things changed is not a mechanism, and stating it as one makes the thread less useful to somebody reading it later.
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Shop Reference StandardsOne concrete data point for the thread. One practical note: write down what you did and when, before you need it. Reconstructing a timeline from memory three months later is how people end up unable to answer the one question that would have resolved it.
That is the short version; the long version is somebody else's post.
Moderator note: good thread. Keeping it here rather than moving it, because the question is general enough to be useful. Tagging this one for the weekly digest.