Long-time reader: I have looked for the primary source twice and failed twice. Either it does not exist or it is somewhere I do not know to look, and I would like to know which.
Long-time reader, first-time poster — setting out what I have, and where I think it stops being reliable.
Saying hello, and stating my interest so that it is on the record rather than inferred.
I am here for the documentation and the analytical discussion. I have nothing to sell, no affiliation with any supplier, and no intention of posting about my own care.
If there is a convention I am about to break, I would rather be told now than after.
Welcome from staff. Nothing is required of you here — no posting quota, no introduction, no declaration of background. The only thing we ask is that a claim about a supplier arrives with the evidence attached.
The thing about Long-time reader that took me longest to accept is that a plausible mechanism is not evidence of an effect. It is a reason to look, not a result.
What I want from this Long-time reader thread is the list of things that would need to be true for the claim to hold. If we can write that list, we can check it.
Good to have another set of eyes on the wiki posts. Community wiki editing is open at trust level three and the queue of small corrections is permanently longer than the people fixing them.
Noted, and I have changed what I was going to do on the strength of it.
Introductions are also a reasonable place to say what you are hoping to find, because somebody will usually know whether it exists here already.
Anyone who has looked at this more carefully, please correct the record.
Where I would push back on the Long-time reader consensus is the confidence, not the direction. The direction looks right. The confidence is borrowed.
Trying to state the Long-time reader 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.
What I would tell a new member reading about Long-time reader for the first time: the confident posts are not the reliable ones, and the reliable ones are longer.
Nice to meet you. Say what you are interested in rather than what you do, if you would rather — plenty of people here are anonymous about their background and it costs them nothing.
Filing this under things that are true until someone shows me otherwise.
Distinguishing three things in the Long-time reader discussion that keep getting used interchangeably: the observation, the proposed mechanism, and the recommendation that gets attached to both.
This is the first time the answer has come with its own limits attached. Appreciated.
This is the sort of exchange that makes the archive worth searching.
An honest declaration on Long-time reader: I have a prior here and it is strong enough that you should weight what I say downward. Stating it rather than hiding it.
Long-time reader is worth one more sentence than it usually gets, and the sentence is the one about how the number was arrived at.
Welcome. The short version of the culture: be specific, date everything, and say when you are guessing. That is genuinely the whole of it.
Not the answer, but possibly the question that gets there.
Long-time reader looks different depending on whether you are reading the primary literature or the summaries of it, and the difference is not in our favour.
This settles it for me, at least until somebody posts a reason it should not.
On Long-time reader the community has more anecdote than the confidence in this thread implies, and I include my own contribution in that.
Two questions I would want answered before drawing anything from the Long-time reader data above: how were the cases selected, and what happened to the ones that dropped out.