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I usually put more trust in medical science than in social science. Like most of us, I can't make sense of full-scale science papers (I can deal with the low-end health statistics crap well enough). And I've never seen a germ under a microscope. My only evidence for the germ theory is that I've seen some of the drugs that result from it work some of the time. On the other hand, I put no faith whatsoever in mainstream psych because it's not worked for me or anyone I know.

I know a lot of the (sociological) science/tech studies stuff and a lot of the sociology of health stuff, as well as a lot of alt psych, and I feel I can make informed judgements on this stuff (and quite frankly, if you can understand racial inequality or alt education or permaculture, you can understand STS and alt psych). I take a Korzybskian position that reality is an event-level of unique objects, and perception and theorising select some of these and ignore others, also drawing particular lines between them. So I try to read evidence in a way which picks out the event-level dots behind the researcher's particular narrative of how they join up. I also keep my eyes peeled for other dots which the stuff I've already read has missed.

Social circumstances have a huge effect on health. Social struggles and resistance are absolutely crucial in relation to health outcomes. Stress and fatigue are bad for health. Packed cities are less healthy (once healthcare is factored out) than wildnerness or rural areas. There's a weird trade-off with hygiene that reduced exposure keeps pathogens out but stops you developing resistance. Psychology is complex, but I'm completely convinced the unconscious exists and we can't understand ourselves or each other without this concept. Everyone in modern society is fucked-up to varying degrees. Autonomy, affinity, and empowering action are good for wellbeing. I can cite studies on all of this, but it also feels experientially true once I think about it. I'm also a big fan of multiplying alternative theories as lenses on a problem, because often there's some truth in them all.

Often, when I read a theory or "fact", I pay attention to how it feels. Does it feel plausible, threatening, incomplete? Does it contradict something else I "know"? Sometimes the new theory or fact actually makes sense of some feelings or experiences which were previously inchoate. Sometimes it feels like a power-move, like the sort of things authoritarians say. I won't blank out a theory which might be "true", just because it feels bad at first sight or contradicts previous beliefs. But I'll really probe *why* it feels so wrong to me - is this a blockage in myself, or something in the theory that's threatening me?

IMO empirical research is a kind of guessing and testing of guesses where communities of researchers decide particular evidence decides if the guess is right. There's different levels of evidence and reliability

As a rule I trust qualitative evidence over quantitative, and within quantitative evidence I trust stuff that's been reconfirmed and is based on large numbers over stuff which isn't. However, I'll usually look into whether the test is really testing what the researcher says it is, whether the research situation has anything in common with the contexts it's applied to, and where they're getting their data from (a claim about universal human psychology drawn from a study of 200 American undergraduates can be dismissed pretty easily). With covid I largely trust the lab research and large-number aggregate studies because the methods have proved other things that seem to be true, though of course they could be faked or incomplete and they're very early-stage. I don't trust the statistical models because this is a far less reliable method. Straightaway when the Imperial College study came out I looked it up online and determined that all their base data came from Wuhan, and I know enough about Chinese information management to distrust the data. Because of looking into STS, I also know about medical evidence and the exceptionally high bar which is set by peer-blind clinical trials - so I find it quite plausible that antivirals work but haven't been fully validated yet. I'm primed for lockdown skepticism because I'm anti-lockdown, but I've come across lots of inconsistencies and U-turns which have confirmed the skepticism. I also know international politics and economics to some degree and so it makes sense to me to see this as a recomposition of capitalism and/or as related to the rise of China. I've always had the suspicion that masks work, because it stands to reason that something spread by droplets is blocked by an obstacle. And I've distrusted government denials because governments have ulterior motives in discouraging masking-up. My initial response was that handwashing is an OCD fad, but I've come round to it once people started explaining the mechanisms of how they think the virus works. I suspected very early that lockdowns would have devastating psychological effects because I've already concluded that a lot of people are struggling, I know a lot of people who are close to the edge and I just scale this up. I also read the covid crisis through the lens of 9/11 and other similar events where the state response is an overreaction and the medicine is worse than the disease. I've been noticing a fad for lockdowns and similar repressive bullshit escalating for decades and my previous models of herd psychology and state dispositions are being confirmed, and this makes it hard to believe the lockdowns are "just medical". I also use a lot of consistency-checking and if-then logic as well, and it seems suspicious to me that states are doing some drastic, extreme, exceptional things and at the same time not doing much easier, cheaper, or more basic things (like encouraging people to wear DIY masks, making sure health workers have proper protective gear, mass-producing testing kits, making sure workers are distanced and masked at workplaces, housing homeless people, making sure shanty-towns have water). To me this contradiction between things believed by medical science and things that are being done is evidence that the real reason is not medical - it's either deliberate exploitation or some kind of kneejerk default to police-state methods. So basically I try to use a mixture of finding multiple sources of empirical evidence, testing these against each other and against everyday knowledge, checking the methods and the logic, and reading evidence in relation to general trends.

I'm acutely aware that the crisis looks very differently depending if someone's *only* thinking about medical evidence or if they're also factoring in economics, geopolitics, mass psychology, and discourse analysis (e.g. securitisation).

The main limit to this is that I don't have the time, energy, or skill to read *everything* on a topic, and this leaves me vulnerable to my own or others' selection bias.