's one of the fun things about Dunning-Kruger is that people who are not that smart think the problem is on your end if you happen to be smarter than a husky and a dolphin.

Have you noticed this is my new pet mission I guess. It's bothering the hell out of me that I keep reading stories about people criticizing RFK Jr. for being nutty and dangerous, but they don't really give examples. And when they do, it seems to me that maybe they're leaving out some context, you know, like maybe there's an argument on his side as well that we haven't heard.

So the latest is a joke. RFK III. So another, well continuing it's not the first time. So he's a family member and he's calling RFK Jr. in a post, calling him a threat to the health and well-being of every American. Wow. What, do you have an example? That's a pretty big thing to say. He's a threat to the health and well-being of every American. And he goes on to say, "None of us will be spared the pain he is inflicting." What? The pain. All of us. Really? We're all going to be in pain. What kind of pain is he talking about? Is it the pain of loneliness? What kind of pain? And what hurts more, RFK Jr. or loneliness? I got lots of questions this morning.

Anyway, so none of us will be spared the pain he is, like, do you think he's going too far? Do you think that really none of us will escape it? You don't think there's maybe like a kid somewhere in, I don't know, Ohio or something, and he's just playing outdoors. Do you think he'll maybe escape the pain from RFK Jr. or is he going to be there just like playing with his bicycle and one day he'll be like, "Oh, oh god, what's that? Why does my back hurt?" His mother will say, "No one can escape the pain that is RFK Jr. You're all going to get it. That's your turn. That's your turn, little Bobby."

All right. But does that mean that RFK Jr. is right about everything? Well, not necessarily. Let us examine one claim in particular. So RFK Jr. said recently, just yesterday maybe, that the vaccinated, this would be during COVID, that the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated data is the biggest statistical trick of this pandemic.

So he had some criticisms about how the data was kept about who was vaccinated and the outcomes and stuff. And he points out that you're not counted as vaccinated until two weeks after your second shot. So for the first six weeks the vaccine is ineffective and infection and death rates rise. But all of those are attributed to the unvaccinated group. Even though they just got vaccinated, whatever deaths happened right after the shot would be attributed to the unvaccinated.

I don't know if that includes the fact if you thought that the shot it was the reason for kill that you died right away. It's not possible that they would call that unvaccinated, is it? Is it possible? I'm sorry. It's not funny. Is it possible that they would give you the vaccination, you drop dead, and they would say, "Huh? You're still within the two weeks. That doesn't count." Oh god. No. I don't think that's what's happening. But the world is so messed up that there's nothing you can rule out at this point. Nope. Nope. You're still within the window.

Anyway, but his most provocative claim, the one that caught my attention was that by month seven the efficacy of the COVID shot doesn't just hit zero. He says it plummets into negative territory. Meaning that if you got the shot, you're more likely to get infected. Yeah. To get infected.

Now, does that sound true to you? I realize that there might be some way that it could be true that getting the shot increased your chances of having problems with COVID. That's possible. But how often is there an approved medicine that you knew made it worse for the thing that the medicine was for? Does that happen a lot? It can happen a lot. I mean, I'm sure something like that's happened, but it doesn't seem like it would happen a lot.

So if the only thing you knew was that it was a weird claim that is not universally agreed upon, you might say to yourself, "Huh, I don't know." But there is a macro point I'm going to be making today. Yes, believe it or not, I have a macro point. Don't settle for micro points when you can get a macro point like today. And the macro point is that all data is worthless. All data is worthless.

I learned that when it was my job to pull data together for a big bank and then I confirmed it when my next job was pulling data together for a big phone company. Did it stop me that the data was all unreliable to the point of being absurd? Nope. My senior executive told me in direct words, "Doesn't matter that it's inaccurate. I'll only use it when it agrees with me anyway." Literally. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is everything you need to know about data. It's never accurate. And if it were, somebody would apply some bizarre statistical treatment to it to make sure that it came out with whatever answer they wanted. And if that wasn't enough, they could add whatever assumptions they wanted until it came out the way they wanted.

So if you think to yourself that this thing about not counting as vaccinated for two weeks, and by the way, I'm sure I got that whole story wrong, but it was funny. If you think that that's like a weird story about this one domain where data isn't, you know it's a little gray area whether you're vaccinated or not. So what do you call that? That's every data. That's every data about everything all the time. There's no data that's really reliable in healthcare, in nutrition, in finance, in climate, none of it.

Once you realize that it's all at the very least subject to interpretation, which is about as useless as being bad data. Once you realize everything all the time, then it's easier to analyze a story like this. Do you believe that RFK Jr. is right when he says we don't have enough data to feel comfortable about some of these vaccinations? If you didn't know anything else except the one thing I taught you today, which is that all data is bad. It's just always bad. If you knew that, wouldn't you say, "All right, well, I haven't looked into it very deeply." But I'll bet he's spot on about the data not being sufficient for something of this importance, meaning something you're putting into everybody's body potentially. Yes. Yeah.

I'm completely on the page of we can't even, it's impossible to try hard enough to get the best data you can on that stuff. So that part's right. But then let's take the same theory that the data is always wrong and then evaluate RFK Jr.'s claim that there's a situation in which the vaccination makes things worse. Remember, if you believe that all data is wrong all the time, why would he be right about that? And so I give him the same skepticism that he gives all the other data and we're both right. He's right that probably all the data he has is sketchy and insufficient for the importance. And I wou