jim_asheville said:

Almost every unanswerable question in these threads is unanswerable because three things changed in the same fortnight, and no amount of subsequent…

Adding the part of the answer the thread has not reached. The honest answer is that the effect is real, the magnitude is contested, and the individual variation is larger than either. Those three things can all be true at once, and most arguments here are two people holding different parts of that.

Adding the numbers, since they settle part of this. 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.

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

Was that from a primary source or from a summary of one?

labquiet_amy said:

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

This is where I part company with the consensus forming above. 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.

OP back with an update, since a thread like this is useless without one.

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