COA red flag compilation — what worked for you?

claudia_zurich said:

It is worth asking what the claim would look like if it were false.

Adding the part of the answer the thread has not reached. The version of this that has an answer is narrower than the version being asked. Narrow it and it becomes tractable; leave it broad and the thread will produce nine confident and incompatible replies.

That is the short version; the long version is somebody else's post.

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.

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

Why two laboratories report different purity for the same batch, and which number to believe?

DataDave said:

Give anything pharmacological four weeks before you judge it, and give anything measured weekly a four-point rolling average before you call it a…

Pushing back on DataDave here. This treats a plausible mechanism as a demonstrated one. Plausible is where you start looking, not where you stop.

DataDave said:

Give anything pharmacological four weeks before you judge it, and give anything measured weekly a four-point rolling average before you call it a…

Agreeing with DataDave, and the qualification matters more than the agreement. Yes, and the corollary is less popular: if the reasoning holds, it also holds where it produces an answer we do not like.

I would rather be corrected than agreed with, if it comes to it.