This is a continuation of a long topic, addressed by post number rather than by page. Start at post 1 · go to the accepted answer.
Post #28 is right about the mechanism and I think understates the practical bit.
The most useful reply I ever got about claim built was a request to state my units. It sounds like pedantry and it has saved me twice.
Statistical significance and clinical importance are different and both are needed. A significant difference below the minimal important difference is a real finding of no practical consequence.
What I can speak to on claim built is narrow, so I will keep it narrow rather than generalising from it. Beyond that boundary I do not know.
Reporting bias within a paper — a result in a figure that is absent from the abstract — is checkable and is worth checking when the claim matters.
Correct me on the arithmetic if it is wrong; I would rather know.
Reading back through, this was answered upthread and I missed it. My fault.
Placebo-controlled versus active-controlled changes what a result means entirely, and comparing across the two is one of the most common errors in this subcategory.
The general case is well covered; this is the awkward specific one.
On post #34 — agreed on the reasoning, with one qualification.
I would call the community position on claim built likely rather than established, and I would be comfortable defending that hedge.
Quietly grateful for the plain phrasing. Not every thread gets that.
Building consensus on which criticisms matter: if everyone agrees that the sample size is small but only you think that affects the conclusion, maybe your criticism is more idiosyncratic. That does not make it wrong but it is worth noticing.
Adding the measurement that post #43 says would settle it.
Source for the claim built figure, since it was asked for. It is in the discussion rather than the abstract, which is why the version circulating is stronger than the paper is.
Reading the surrounding paragraph is worth the two minutes. The authors are more careful than their summarisers.
Hold a trial to the standard something could actually have met. A criticism that no achievable design could have answered is a criticism of the field rather than of the paper.
That is the version I would defend. It is not the version I started with.
I disagree with the framing of claim built above, and I think it is a substantive disagreement rather than a terminological one. Setting out why, so it can be checked.
The reasoning depends on an assumption that is doing a lot of work and is never stated. If the assumption holds, the conclusion follows. I do not think it holds generally.
Reading rather than contributing, but this is the most useful thread I have found on it.
Answering the question post #48 raises rather than the one it answers.
Counterpoint on claim built, offered without confidence: the same observation is consistent with a much duller explanation, and nobody has ruled the dull one out.
On claim built I would separate what is worth knowing from what is worth acting on. The first list is long and the second is short, and conflating them is how threads get heated.
Summarising the claim built thread so far, since it is long and the answer is buried: the first reply has the method, the fourth has the correction to it, and the rest is people agreeing at length.
Everything in post #52 holds. The case it does not cover is the one I have.
Where a critique rests on a subgroup, check whether the interaction was tested. A difference between subgroups that is not statistically supported is not a difference.
The disagreement above is smaller than it looks once the terms are fixed.
Reporting rather than recommending, on claim built. What happened is above. Whether it should have is a different question and not one I am qualified to answer.
Surrogate endpoints are not automatically bad and their validity is compound-specific and population-specific. The question is whether this surrogate has been validated for this use.
I had read the opposite somewhere and cannot now find where, which tells me something.