Follow-up: Documentation that appears only after payment posts 61–88

Documentation quality as a signal: a supplier that reports method identifiers, distinguishes specification from result, and states the counter-ion form is telling you something about systems behind the document. A certificate that is a number and a signature tells you less.

Adding the caveat now so it does not have to be extracted later.

A stock listing that never changes and a lead time that never varies are both worth noticing. Real operations have variation in them.

This follows post #62 rather than contradicting it.

I would call the community position on Documentation likely rather than established, and I would be comfortable defending that hedge.

Worth separating two things that post #60 runs together.

One more thing on Documentation that took me far too long to see: the two figures people quote are not measuring the same quantity. Once you notice that, the apparent contradiction disappears.

Where somebody posts a concern, ask what would resolve it before arguing about it. Half of these threads end with a document nobody had asked for.

I am aware this is the third time this month I have made this point.

What I can speak to on Documentation is narrow, so I will keep it narrow rather than generalising from it. Beyond that boundary I do not know.

The strongest single signal available cheaply is what happens when you ask a technical question. A quantitative answer inside a working day is difficult to fake at scale.

Reading back through, this was answered upthread and I missed it. My fault.

Narrowing post #66, because the general version has more than one answer.

On Documentation I would separate what is worth knowing from what is worth acting on. The first list is long and the second is short, and conflating them is how threads get heated.

Everything in post #69 holds. The case it does not cover is the one I have.

The honest answer on Documentation is that it depends, and the useful part is the list of what it depends on. Four items, in rough order of how much they matter.

Most people get the first two right and then argue about the fourth.

Exaggerated claims without documentation: every compound has limits. No peptide is "100% pure" because purity is measured to finite precision. A supplier claiming implausible perfection without backing evidence is overreaching.

Narrowing post #71, because the general version has more than one answer.

Speaking only to Documentation as I have actually seen it, rather than as it is usually described: the effect is real, it is smaller than the thread suggests, and the variance between people is larger than the effect.

Post #71 and I disagree about the size of the effect, not about the direction.

The useful distinction on Documentation is between what was measured and what was inferred from it. Both end up in the same sentence and only one of them has error bars.

The most useful contribution to this subcategory is a resolved case written up with the resolution, because the unresolved ones are all anyone remembers.

That is the version I use. It may not be the version that is correct.