When No Control Group is Necessary

Post #605

Control groups help you to answer the counter-factual:

“But what if I wasn’t in the treatment group? What would my results have been in comparison to how they are now?”

But some accumulations of excess mortality are so high that they defy history, and so they gain an informational sufficiency merely by being unprecedented.

Analogy

If some water began to run uphill — rather than running downhill like water typically does — then a control group (a second body of water, for comparison purposes) would not be necessary in order to make certain that the findings were both substantial and significant.

Breaking with all precedent is already “enough” evidence on its own. It’s not that further investigation would not be useful (more information is almost always better than less information), but it’s just that further investigation would not be necessary.

Water running uphill is already “a story-in-itself.”