Imagine new coordination technology X. We can remove any specific tech reference to remove prior biases. Say it is a neutral technology that could enable new types of positive coordination as well as negative.

3 camps exist.

A: The grifters. They see the opportunity to exploit and individually gain.

B: The haters. They see the grifters and denigrate the technology entirely. Leaving no nuance or possibility for understanding the positive potential.

C: The believers. They see the grift and the positive opportunity. They try and steer the technology towards the positive and away from the negative.

The basic formula for where the technology ends up is -2(A)-(B) +C. It's a bit of a broad strokes brush but you can probably guess where to bin our current political parties into these negative categories. We need leadership which can identify and understand the positive outcomes and push us towards those directions. I see very little strength anywhere from the tech leaders to politicians to the social media mob to get us there. For that, we all suffer.

Just grabbing one highly adjusted score and drawing conclusions solely off of that is not enough. It's really only giving you one piece of a very complex puzzle in the case of something like education scores.

Observational stats in social sciences turns out to be a lot like epidemiology and strongly held conclusions are hard won.

If you gather EHR or medical claims record data for vaccines for example, you have to take very seriously the biases and impact of missingness inherent in the data. Is that person you have no evidence of disease for truly not diseased or do they just have missing data? IS it missing because they just didnt go to the doctor because they're healthy enough to kick the disease on their own or because they're so financially unstable that they can't afford to consistently see their primary care doctor. Is the data missingness itself actually what's more correlated with the disease than the vacciation you are looking at?

Example: If your outcome is dementia then may be using cognitive tests that have a high level of variability due more to social class, education, test taking ability. Is receiving a fancy vaccine is more likely in an affluent area? Could be that correlation itself might completely explain away the positive effect that vaccine has on cognitive test scores.

In Alzheimer's you're often trying to correlate things that happen in early life with long term damage that only surfaces many many years later. Retrospective studies where you go back and ask sick or healthy people have recall bias where the sick ones remember more issues with themselves early on than healthy ones do even with the same early life issues.

Not trying to say epi is perfect or that there isn't room for improvement in tools (there absolutely is). But just like often happens when crossing over into the biological sciences there's a lot stickier problems than people outside the field realize.

Let's be honest, this is a longshot.

All my work could honestly be done instantaneously with better data harmonization & collection along with better engineering practices. Instead, it requires a lot of manual effort. I remember my professors talking about how they used to calculate linear regressions by hand back in the old days. Hopefully a lot of the data cleaning and study setup that is done now sounds similar to a set of future scientists who use AI tools to operate and check these basic programatic and statistical tasks.

We're seeing a moment now where the "pro-crypto" team is bifurcating (really this has always been true but it's more obvious now) into good crypto vs bad crypto. Or mission driven vs profit maximalising. Oversimplifications of a nuanced political, tribal landscape with many many sides but you get the idea.

Democrats being anti all crypto was clearly wrong, attacking the more legitimate parts MORE fiercely than the illegitimate parts. But the flip side is Trump's "crime season" as they call it in crypto twitter, which also sucks. Maybe some day we'll get crypto that is useful, profitable, and designed in a beneficial way. That day is not today.

#1 status quo complacency which does things like congressional insider trading, identity politics, is completely ancient, and useless and ineffectual in identifying or implementing any actual changes that would improve people's lives.

#2 is a wing of the party ready to take a wrecking ball to things (bravo), but thinks taxes are the solution to everything.

We need more wrecking ball type options than just #2. We need a diversity of wrecking ball options that are energetic, smart, able to identify the places where the system (both private industry & governmental) isn't functioning properly and have the guts to actually push change through.

A healthy respect for the difficulties of determining causality is beneficial. Irrational skepticism ignoring the evidence of strong observational research simply replaces it with... what exactly? That's how we ended up with an 71 year old anti-vaccine conspiracist as the health secretary.