Blinding yourself: practical methods and their limits posts 31–45

I had read the opposite somewhere and cannot now find where, which tells me something.

My experience of blinding yourself contradicts the reply above. I am posting it as a data point rather than as a refutation, because one person's experience is exactly that.

Blinding yourself is well covered in the tag pages, and the older discussions are better than the recent ones because they were argued out properly. Worth twenty minutes before adding to this one.

This follows post #33 rather than contradicting it.

Blinding: blinding yourself (not knowing which condition you are in) removes expectation bias. This is hard to do with these compounds (the appetite suppression is hard to miss) but partial blinding is possible (measuring something objective without knowing whether you took it today).

I had written a reply contradicting post #33 and deleted it. Here is what survived.

Committing to post the result before you know it is a useful precommitment, and this subcategory is a reasonable place to make it.

Confirming post #33 from a second method, which matters more than confirming it from a second person.

I would put moderate confidence on the mainstream reading of blinding yourself and no more. That is not scepticism for its own sake; it is where the sourcing actually stops.

Nobody has said the unglamorous part of blinding yourself yet, so: most of the variation is explained by things that are boring to write about and easy to check.

It does not tell you about anybody else, which is why aggregating these accounts does not produce evidence of the kind people want it to.

That holds for the case as described. Change the assumptions and it may not.

Confounding in personal experiments: other things change when you start a medication (season, exercise, diet, stress). Documenting those confounders helps you understand their contribution to the result.

I would be interested in a counterexample if anyone has one.

Understood, and I withdraw the assumption I opened with.

Post #38 answers the question as asked. The question underneath it is different.

Blinding yourself is worth one more sentence than it usually gets, and the sentence is the one about how the number was arrived at.

I read post #41 twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.

Trying to state the blinding yourself position in a way that someone who disagrees would recognise as fair, because I do not think the version in this thread passes that test.

Blinding yourself is harder than it sounds and is not impossible. Somebody else preparing labelled containers is the usual approach and it requires a second person you trust.

A rolling mean over several days is far more informative than any single reading for anything that varies day to day, which is nearly everything.