Can we talk about how SLOW the FDA is

dan_philly said:

The boring version of this is the one that works, and the boring version is: measure a baseline, change one variable, wait, measure again under the…

I read this differently from dan_philly, on substance rather than tone. 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.

Happy to go further on any of that.

dan_philly said:

The boring version of this is the one that works, and the boring version is: measure a baseline, change one variable, wait, measure again under the…

dan_philly has the substance of this right. The condition it depends on is worth stating. Yes, and the corollary is less popular: if the reasoning holds, it also holds where it produces an answer we do not like.

dan_philly said:

The boring version of this is the one that works, and the boring version is: measure a baseline, change one variable, wait, measure again under the…

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.

Adding the clinical framing, because it changes how the question reads. 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.

Closing the loop on my own question.

Update — my curve sits below the published mean and the explanation is that the trial arm had support I do not have. That was reassuring rather than otherwise.