Units, standards, and other things that quietly hold the world together — setting out what I have, and where I think it stops being reliable.
I was wrong about units in a thread last spring and I would like to correct it publicly rather than quietly.
The error was in the units, which changed the conclusion by an order of magnitude. Setting out the corrected version, and the way I now check for that class of mistake.
Checked the units claim against the primary source this morning. It survives, with a narrower scope than the version quoted here. Posting the narrower scope.
Adjacent and interesting: you might post something about nutrition, bioavailability from a food perspective, or the sociology of weight. Adjacent to this community's core but not central.
I have kept the units in throughout, for the obvious reason.
Agreed, and I will stop repeating the version of this I had been repeating.
Industry and supply chain: post about manufacturing, pharmaceutical economics, or market dynamics if you have something substantive to contribute.
Second-hand, so weight it accordingly.
Units has a well-known answer and a correct answer, and the interesting work is establishing that they are the same. Nobody has done that here yet.
Adding what did not work for me on units, since the failures never get written up and they are half the useful information.
Politics and public policy: healthcare policy that affects access to these compounds is relevant here. Partisan politics is not.
The general answer and the answer for your case may diverge here.
I have three months of notes on units and the honest summary is that the trend is real and the week-to-week numbers are noise. I nearly drew the opposite conclusion from the first fortnight.
Partly history and partly that nobody had to agree. Purity, assay, content and potency are used interchangeably in commercial documents and mean four different things in an analytical one.
That is the version I would defend. It is not the version I started with.
Second-hand on units, so weight it accordingly — someone whose method I trust told me this and I have not verified it myself.
Lounge-appropriate observation. I have started reading the certificates that come with things I buy that have nothing to do with any of this, and the standard elsewhere is lower than I expected.
The rule of thumb is fine; the edge cases are where it earns its keep.
Quietly grateful for the plain phrasing. Not every thread gets that.
Posting my units numbers with the method attached so they can be discounted properly. Uncontrolled, unblinded, and collected by someone who wanted a particular answer.
Newer drugs and mechanisms: when a new drug launches or a new mechanism is discovered, the Lounge is a place to discuss the news and speculate before hard data exists.
I would keep units and the decision it usually gets used for separate in this thread. They are related and they are not the same question, and merging them is why the last one went badly.
One caution on units: everything above assumes the underlying documentation is what it claims to be. That assumption is doing real work and is rarely stated.