Yes. I'd start by expecting big differences between individuals and between settings. And good studies will measure the different sources of variation as well as any average effect.pjclinch wrote: ↑20 Jan 2022, 9:32amOne thing I'm reasonably confident about is that different people respond very differently to risk, and that what one is looking for in policy is a very broad common denominator, i.e. this intervention will do significantly more good than harm. This makes psychological effects potentially very difficult to factor in to policy decisions beyond understanding that they will make the error bars bigger. But as anyone who's done physics knows, you do have to account for the size of the error bars when stating something with confidence. It's still science if we say "we don't know enough in here, and here are the wildly varying results we got that show we don't know enough, but there are effects in there we haven't learned to measure usefully yet".
Policy should include assessment of evidence along with other factors. And often that should include stating that there are things that we don't know yet.
This discussion would be much more constructive if it separated evidence from policy, and especially from fear of possible future policy.
Jonathan