It occurs to me that there's a sort of “learned helplessness” trap you can fall into from the thermodynamic base case: you can fail to separate _anything_ from placebo if your model fails to include enough of the real levers in the modelled system vs the levers it has that don't exist in that system. You can turn any signal into noise if you slice it up too much; that's basically half of the replication crisis. Studies on anti-depressants are an interesting example, for instance.
It occurs to me that there's a sort of “learned helplessness” trap you can fall into from the thermodynamic base case: you can fail to separate _anything_ from placebo if your model fails to include enough of the real levers in the modelled system vs the levers it has that don't exist in that system. You can turn any signal into noise if you slice it up too much; that's basically half of the replication crisis. Studies on anti-depressants are an interesting example, for instance.