Does it actually work?
The green room · 3 threads
Claims, figures and where they come from. Bring a number, expect to be asked for its source.
This is the section the site exists for. Somebody repeats a figure they have seen quoted in a newspaper, a funding bid or a conference slide, somebody else goes and finds where it came from, and quite often the number turns out to describe something other than what it is being used to prove. Nobody is trying to be discouraging. The point is that a claim you can trace is worth more than a claim you cannot.
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The house rule, and why it is worth keeping
A number gets asked for its source. It sounds unfriendly written down and in practice it is the opposite, because the alternative is a board where people talk each other into hopes that the evidence will not carry. The best thread in this section is somebody chasing a widely repeated percentage back through three reports to a small uncontrolled evaluation whose own author wrote that it did not imply causality.
If you want to do that yourself, reading arts in health research is the piece to start with. It covers the distinctions that do most of the work: a controlled trial against a before and after evaluation, an effect size against a p value, a whole sample result against a subgroup, and why a large pile of studies can still add up to low certainty.
And a caution that belongs at the end of this particular section rather than any other. 'No good evidence yet' is not the same statement as 'it does not work'. Plenty of what is described in these threads sits in the first category, including things people found genuinely valuable. The threads are here so you can tell which claim you are being offered, not so you can rule anything out.