Comment

OF COURSE the plural of anecdote is evidence.  An anecdote is a story, something that happened to someone.  A lab report is a carefully annotated and documented anecdote.  If enough people see the same things and say the same things–tell the same stories–we call it evidence.

If 5,000 doctors report a particular finding, then that categorically is evidence.

But here is the relevant point, at this moment in global time: the plural of “expert opinion” categorically IS NOT evidence.  Why?  A guess about the future is not evidence and can never be evidence.  Only things which HAPPEN, which are seen and described, can EVER be evidence.  This is the case no matter how many “experts” are singing in the chorus.

This is the same scientific problem with global warming, as I’ve pointed out over and over: hypotheses are being treated as facts, as evidence.

I keep getting told what is “going to happen”.  I’ve been called a “dangerous person”–those exact words–three or four times on the internet in the past week.

But this fact is basic, vital, and irrefutable: a hypothesis–a model, to be perfectly clear–is not evidence, and if the hypothesis is not falsifiable–if nothing can happen which would cause the person proposing it to say “I was wrong”–then it is not even an hypothesis: it is a raw conjecture, which is literally a synonym for an unscientific guess.

By and large, in this COVID-19 crisis, it is my view that conjectures are being treated as established facts, and used to upend hundreds of millions of lives, largely to no purpose.  A few lives will no doubt be saved, but a larger number will be lost in the economic flood to come.  We learned recently that ventilators seem to do more harm than good, so their potential shortage can no longer be used to keep the world locked up.

This whole thing is ridiculous and getting worse by the day.  Two weeks ago everybody was scared.  Now, the scary scenario, the scary model, the scary HYPOTHESIS, has been falsifed.  Our ER’s and ICU’s are not filled, and we now know that treatment in the hallway or even in a tent somewhere will be nearly as good as in any other scenario.  It’s the drugs and the drips.  Those we are not, as far as I know, short of.

And I would hazard a guess that at this moment suicide and overdose deaths are at 2-3x their normal rates in all countries where those are a problem, and certainly in America.