Inter-lab variability in peptide testing — July 2024

Dr.PainCLE said:

The honest answer is that the effect is real, the magnitude is contested, and the individual variation is larger than either.

Adding the part of the answer the thread has not reached. Whatever the answer turns out to be, the method for getting there is the same: state the assumption, do the arithmetic in public, and invite the correction. That is slower than asserting, and it is the only version that survives being wrong.

One concrete data point for the thread. If you are going to change something, change one thing and give it long enough to express itself. Four weeks is the usual minimum for anything pharmacological on this board, and two weeks of data has told you almost nothing.

Following on from Dr.PainCLE — and this may be the naive question:

How would you tell the difference between that and the alternative explanation?

dan_philly said:

If you are going to change something, change one thing and give it long enough to express itself.

I am going to disagree with the direction of travel here. The thread has converged on the tidiest answer rather than the best-supported one, and those are not the same thing.

dan_philly said:

If you are going to change something, change one thing and give it long enough to express itself.

Agreed on the substance. I would put less weight on the timescale, because two months of anything is not enough to distinguish a trend from a wobble.