Forest plots: trying to see the wood and the trees

Esthetics may be in the eye of the beholder. But I wonder if others
who have gazed upon forest plots have shared my aversion to the sizing of
symbols for point estimates in proportion to their meta-analytic weight.
The expressed motivation for this special effect is to counteract a
presumably irresistible urge for the proverbial clinician's eye to be
drawn to the widest confidence intervals and thus to the least precise
estimates. To my admittedly jaded meta-analytic eye, however, the
distended blobs representing the low-variance estimates in these displays
connote not precision but its opposite.

I formulated a hypothesis, which I tested by showing a forest plot
with point estimate symbols of uniform size to my 38-year old sister, who
has trisomy 21. In response to my request to "find the shortest line,"
she instantly and unerringly homed in on the most precise estimate.

I offer this result as potentially generalizable to the proverbial
clinician.