Don’t Trust Polls?

Posted on October 24, 2020 by Michael Froomkin

Polls vs the Street

XKCD © Randall Munroe 2020, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License

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8 Responses to Don’t Trust Polls?

  1. Eric says:
    October 25, 2020 at 10:01 am

    At this point, I don’t trust anyone cheering for the continued lockdown of American liberties. They are beyond evil and an enemy of the state. For shame.

  2. Eric says:
    October 25, 2020 at 3:01 pm

    Your statement is a total canard, couched in a radically false frame of reference that lacks proportionality and bidirectionality.

    What a horrifyingly myopic and dysfunctional view on quality of life.

    • Michael Froomkin says:
      October 25, 2020 at 3:25 pm

      It’s unclear to me what you are talking about. My best guess is that you are trying to suggest somewhat incoherently that mask rules, school closures, and other more extreme measures including ‘shelter in place’ rules to prevent COVID spread are mistaken as they are too costly to the “quality of life” of those effected, especially those whose statistical likelihood of death from COVID is lower than average.

      Of course, that viewpoint must gloss over the fact — or, if you prefer, extreme likelihood — that failing to act will result in further spreading of the disease, leading to death — zero ‘quality of life’ — for a million or more US persons, and hard to predict but very real long-term consequences for many of those who do not die of it.

      I don’t see what is horrifying or dysfunctional in being willing to pay a significant price to avoid those consequences. Sorry if it inconveniences you. Well, not sorry actually.

  3. Eric says:
    October 25, 2020 at 3:44 pm

    You are not sorry if other people suffer to keep you safe?

    That has to be the crassest view ever expressed on this blog.

    Thank you for revealing your true nature to the rest of the world.

    • Michael Froomkin says:
      October 25, 2020 at 4:46 pm

      I am sorry for their discomfort. There’s no question that the economic effects are real and deserve collective recompense — something Mitch McConnell is blocking.

      I’m not sympathetic to their sense that this is an aggressive offense on their liberty. Mask-wearing in public, for example, is no more an attack on freedom than rules designed to prevent second-hand smoke from harming people. I have always supported mandatory vaccination rules for access to schools; I’d support it for other public activities too, with exceptions for religious objectors and verifiable health conditions.

  4. Eric says:
    October 25, 2020 at 4:47 pm

    For the same reason you don’t care about others, why should anyone care about you?

  5. Eric says:
    October 25, 2020 at 5:58 pm

    I am sorry for my previous comments – I most certainly care about you.

    The reason for my recent arrival on your blog during these last few months is quite simple: I consider your intellect to be without equal and therefore sought your guidance on this matter. I thought if anyone could change my mind, it would be you. Alternatively, if I could change your mind then what better ally to have in this fight against the lockdown policies then to have you on my side?

    From a practical standpoint, liberty directly correlates with mental health. And mental health directly correlates with physical health.

    My mother once told me that laughter is the best medicine. In turbulent times such as these, I find my mother’s words to be particularly relevant. She knew, like I know now, that psychological well-being generates positive effects on the inner workings of the immune system. By contrast, the immune system suffers and susceptibility to disease increases when people are sad. And nothing saddens me more than watching this Kafkaesque nightmare destroy the world around me at an ever-accelerating pace.

    The draconian lockdowns that have been established around the world continue to create chronic stress conditions for large segments of the population as a whole. The soul-crushing loneliness from stigmatized socialization; the desperate poverty from unnecessary unemployment; the generalized anxiety from wholesale hopelessness; the dehumanizing effects of face masks on small children attempting to bond with others. Every single day that passes in a state of masked lockdown works irrevocable corruption on the foundations of our humanity.

    When I started to review the medical literature surrounding my mother’s practical advice, I found the following conclusion in a meta-analysis on the topic: “Chronic stressors . . . have negative effects on almost all functional measures of the immune system.”

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361287/

    Looking at the sources contained within that study, I discovered the work of Dr. Sheldon Cohen and his team from Carnegie Mellon University on the relationship between stress and disease:

    “Although severe acute stressful life events (less than 1 month long) were not associated with developing colds, severe chronic stressors (1 month or longer) were associated with a substantial increase in risk of disease. This relation was attributable primarily to under- or unemployment and to enduring interpersonal difficulties with family or friends.”

    https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/specials/women/warchive/980512_940.html

    I find it rather ironic, therefore, that the measures taken to mitigate the harm from this disease only make it worse in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Such an overly broad scorched-earth policy clearly mistakes the point and begs for a narrowly tailored solution.

    What’s the point of being alive when life is no longer worth living?

    https://youtu.be/Txt2cwUFYIU

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