The Mutally-Invisible Debating Society

     There's a pretty lively discussion in my comments section, kind of.  None of you are getting published.  As of this posting, I'm not even publishing comments I think are wonderful on those posts.

     Anecdotes are not data.

     Speculation is not fact.  (And buddy, your speculation about what Uncle Sam is up to is wildly off the mark, and insanely optimistic.)

     We're wired up to extrapolate from what we personally see, hear and feel.  We're wired up to trust members of our in-group and we're remarkably flexible creatures when it comes for forming families, trust circles and tribes.  Those are great attributes for a clever, tool-using hunter-gatherer that tends to function in small groups.

     It sucks out loud when we try to apply that set of inclinations to understanding the wider world, to deeper understanding.  It misleads when we mistake second-hand information for direct experience or infer too much from our immediate surroundings.  We can go wildly wrong; we can be right and not know it.  We have devised a great many structures and hacks and clever approaches to get around these limitations, and a lot of them work pretty well, but damn-all of them suffice if we start with an internet connection and an opinion we want to keep.

     I have a lot of opinions and I am not shy about sharing them here.  You have probably got opinions of your own, and I invite you to share them on your own blog.

     And I invite you to share links to solid statistical data and actual expert analysis, if you want to address things of greater scope than your own work, your own family, your own curtilage.  I spent the entire pandemic looking for the most impartial sources of data, looking for places that had large sample sizes or worked from mass collections.  There were lots of heart-rending stories, especially early on, but that's just a general alarm bell; the big numbers pointed to where things were worse or better and suggested trends.  The year-to-year "excess deaths" data showed how things were going compared to previous years, with a large pool of non-pandemic years as the standard of comparison.  Those large pools of data showed the vaccines working.  Regionalized graphs of vaccination rates and infection rates showed the vaccines working.  And they showed vaccine safety, too, especially as the death rates returned to within pre-pandemic levels.

     Nothing is a hundred percent.  Not a hundred percent effective, not a hundred percent safe.  But it was hugely safer to get vaccinated than to contract the illness, and you were better off even if you did have the misfortune to catch it after being vaccinated, far less likely to have a bad outcome.  These things are facts.

     You don't have to like facts.  You can have opinions about facts.  You may even disagree with facts.  But by and large, you'll be wanting your own blog for that purpose.