From the other side of the consultation, briefly. Order of operations matters more than any single choice here: establish a baseline, change one thing, wait long enough for it to express itself, then measure again under the same conditions.

GenomicsKate said:

Order of operations matters more than any single choice here: establish a baseline, change one thing, wait long enough for it to express itself, then…

This matches mine closely enough to be worth saying so out loud.

GenomicsKate said:

Order of operations matters more than any single choice here: establish a baseline, change one thing, wait long enough for it to express itself, then…

There is a second half to this that has not been said yet. The mechanism and the magnitude are separate questions. Agreeing that something happens says nothing about whether it happens enough to act on.

One concrete data point for the thread. 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.

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

What would you measure differently if you were starting again?