Revisiting: How this community labels and discusses unrefereed work posts 31–36

Adding the measurement that post #28 says would settle it.

The confident answers on community labels and the well-sourced answers are not the same answers, which is the most useful thing I have learned reading this category.

Post #31 describes the usual case. This is about the unusual one.

Where I have landed on community labels, having got it wrong once in public: the direction is clear, the magnitude is not, and anyone quoting a precise magnitude has borrowed it from somewhere that did not measure it.

Unrefereed work is not worthless. A great deal of it survives review substantially unchanged. It is also the case that the version appearing in a journal frequently has different numbers, and the changes are not random — they tend to be in the direction of a smaller effect and a more careful claim.

How to cite a preprint: author last name, first initial, et al. Title. Server name [preprint]. Posted date. Doi. Include the server name and note that it is a preprint.

The arithmetic in post #32 is right; the assumption feeding it is the part to check.

I keep a log for community labels specifically because my memory of it turned out to be systematically wrong in one direction. Six weeks of notes cost nothing and settled it.

Two things can be true about community labels at once: the mechanism is plausible and the evidence for the size of the effect is thin. Most of the argument here is people defending the first against attacks on the second.