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Kevin's avatar

I'm surprised, given your other writings, you can't see some obvious factors here:

1. Complete manipulation of the narrative and the "data" by those who benefit from said narrative. This includes people in media, government bureaucracies, pharma companies.

2. The difference in risk-tolerance between many kinds of people. People in white collar jobs, generally more coddled in life, are going to have a different response to risk than those who have very different lives.

3. A great many people don't agree w/ the local COVID policies, but have no power to change them until elections. This has actually happened in jurisdictions all over the US, but is largely not covered (VA elections had this as a bigger factor than was reported)

4. People, in the end, aren't as dumb as the experts want to proclaim. They can look around and see what's happened as part of their own, lived experience, and notice that the restrictions are entirely BS, have done basically nothing, COVID isn't nearly as dangerous as portrayed, and that the vaccines don't do virtually anything that was initially advertised. Being skeptical of utopian claims is actually a mark of wisdom, not something to be scorned (unless you're in the expert class trying to prove your worth to society).

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Age of Infovores's avatar

Should these facts make us more skeptical of empirical research methods predicated on assumptions that two groups are basically similar? For example, the differences-in-differences technique requires an assumption of parallel trends--the trend of the control state post treatment maps out what would have happened in the treated state, in the absence of treatment. If neighbor regions that appear to be so similar on the surface can differ so wildly in response to covid, this seems to be a stronger assumption than previously thought. Of course, this assumption may be reasonably valid in non-outlier situations, but I see a lot of papers making assumptions like this to study Covid itself which seems inappropriate given your observations here.

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