From "The Phrase 'No Evidence' Is A Red Flag For Bad Science Communication" (Astral Codex Ten).
December 18, 2021
"In traditional science, you start with a 'null hypothesis' along the lines of 'this thing doesn’t happen and nothing about it is interesting.'"
"Then you do your study, and if it gets surprising results, you might end up 'rejecting the null hypothesis' and concluding that the interesting thing is true; otherwise, you have 'no evidence' for anything except the null. This is a perfectly fine statistical hack, but it doesn’t work in real life. In real life, there is no such thing as a state of 'no evidence' and it’s impossible to even give the phrase a consistent meaning. EG: Is there 'no evidence' that using a parachute helps prevent injuries when jumping out of planes? This was the conclusion of a cute paper in the BMJ, which pointed out that as far as they could tell, nobody had ever done a study proving parachutes helped. Their point was that 'evidence' isn't the same thing as 'peer-reviewed journal articles.'... [T]he folk concept of 'no evidence' doesn't match how real truth-seeking works. Real truth-seeking is Bayesian. You start with a prior for how unlikely something is. Then you update the prior as you gather evidence.... Some people thought masks helped slow the spread of COVID. You can type out 'no evidence' and hit 'send tweet.' But... it seems intuitively obvious that if something is spread by droplets shooting out of your mouth, preventing droplets from shooting out of your mouth would slow the spread...."
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There is evidence that masks help, just none that people who don't want to accept that will accept. A lot of these anti mask twitter graphs basically bulldoze the statistics required, and the effect of masks is not huge, so it is easily bulldozed. But even a small effect early on, before there were vaccines, could save a lot of lives.
At this point, I have given up the argument, because it requires a minimum amount of good-will on the part of the listener, and an openness to reason, which is not on display very much. Not to mention that Fauci's lies on the subject have pretty much discredited any arguments that he makes, even though the proper response to a liar is not to believe the opposite of what he says, but to ignore him. That's another argument that seems too subtle for people now.
At this point though, there is no hiding from the virus, if masks put off you getting the virus for a few weeks, what is to be gained by that? We are not waiting on a vaccine at this point, maybe better therapeutics. It doesn't seem worth torturing people who have phobias about the masks, and clearly the ranks of mask phobics are legion.
One thing is certainly true, early on, COVID spread on airplanes easily, as was well documented by careful studies in Singapore where incoming passengers were quarantined and tested and in-flight transmission could be teased out, and after the airlines demanded masks, these same studies showed that transmission on flights became rare. I know the CEOs of certain airlines have made statements, but I don't see where they have refuted these studies.
You’re starting to catch on, Professor.
no one is as Blind, as those who will Not See
Some things we can never know ...
He extorted $200,000 in ransom (equivalent to $1,278,000 in 2020) and parachuted to an uncertain fate over southwestern Washington.
D.B. Cooper
This sounds like the kind of crap you get when people with no understanding of either science or math (specifically statistics) decide to write an essay on something they do not understand. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence crap. Depending on how through your study is, absence of evidence can indeed be evidence of absence. Not conclusive evidence, but it is damn sure the way to bet if you have looked hard enough. And if there is a black swan, sooner or later you will find it.
Snakes don't squeak...so there's that.
I think you have to go back to the basics of journalism
Perhaps the name of the blog should be changed to Starry-eyed Codex Ten.
Science is about proving something is true. Thinking something is reasonable doesn't satisfy science without proof. Biomedical engineering tests of the kinds of masks most people wear prove the viral aerosoles people with the virus spread travel easily through the masks. Data collection of the number of people who contract covid show no reduction in the number of cases in areas with mask mandates vs. those places without. People who wear masks because they believe they work because it seems intuitively obvious are lacking enough data to make a reasoned decision. Not accepting they don't given substantial evidence they don't is the equivalent of insisting the Earth is stationary, and the sun moves because we can't feel the Earth moving, and we can see the sun move across the sky.
If masks made a difference you would see it in the data.
On a related note: Johns Hopkins, CDC and others began to pull data from their websites shortly after the public began looking for the data justifying government polices like masks and lockdowns.
I love it because it's so true. It really highlights the downside of the millennials fixation on evidence-based decision making, EG moneyball.
What is that old tired nostril: absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence
"it seems intuitively obvious that if something is spread by droplets shooting out of your mouth, preventing droplets from shooting out of your mouth would slow the spread...."
Except that when virus also shoots out of your mouth in forms smaller than than the openings in any standard masks, they won't do much, and that slowing "the spread" in one setting won't do much to slow it in another--at least as long as people interact maskless sometimes somewhere.
And when we do seek evidence on what seems "intuitively obvious" here, it turns out not to be obvious. Of course, you can then question the evidence, which is fair game. But it is also seems that many "experts" have studiously avoided designing careful quasi-experimental studies, with control groups etc., to study mask benefits in different circumstances, in different populations. It's almost as if they like their intuitions better. But my intuition tells me that masks are not parachutes.
I thought covid was primarily spread by aerosols, not droplets.
Or is there no evidence of that?
Interesting. Clearly a problem.
And then you also have the social scientists who are only interested if the results support their hypothesis about how the world works. They simply won't publish if the study doesn't support their theory. So maybe they do ten separate studies to prove, e.g., that polygamy improves mental and physical well-being. The results of one of the studies supports the hypothesis, the other nine point in the other direction. No problem, just publish the one and ignore the others.
Now do this same article regarding Global Warming/Climate Change. And let's talk about actual evidence as opposed to narrative 'evidence'.
Also- evidence of the senses. That direct link to reality. What do the evidence of your own senses tell you? If we see someone sneeze while wearing a mask and we see- with our own eyes- a smattering of droplets going out via the sides, top, bottom, and through the mask, wouldn't the evidence of our senses tell us that, maybe masks don't actually work? Despite what we may be told by science communicators? What do we do with that evidence of our own senses when they collide with the 'scientific' communication? Do we not believe our own lying eyes?
To be fair, we don't know whether those headlines convey everything the scientists actually said. Science "journalism" is guilty of much of the miscommunication, often, it seems, in an attempt to sensationalize some issue to attract clicks and sell advertising.
But even where the scientist is guilty of poor communication, it seems part of another problem, conveying more certainty in their results than is justified. "No evidence" is short-hand for "we don't know", but they should know the public takes it to mean with certainty science says that something is or isn't true. This happens all the time when someone reports some extreme future due to climate change but fails to mention that the error bars for their results could actually mean the exact opposite is more likely to happen. Again, in fairness, measurements of error or probability are hard to communicate, but too many scientists don't even try, particularly when they want their results to support a cause or provoke funding.
Of course there's actually a worse situation where you hear "no evidence", a willful refusal to look at existing evidence. For example, those tornadoes in Kentucky? It's not that there's no evidence they were caused or made worse by climate change, the actual evidence strongly suggests that there's been a significant decline in number and strength of tornadoes over the past 20 years. But saying that wouldn't support the narrative.
When someone uses the phrase “there’s no evidence….”
What they really mean is we haven’t looked for, and by extension don’t intend to look for evidence.
They are literally saying our eyes are closed, and we intend to keep them shut.
And then, of course, there is the Schiff Hack, which claims that things that are demonstrably false and totally made up, are treated as true as long as they are come from the Left.
(Sorry, Ann,for the multiple posts. I keep thinking of things as soon as I hit publish. And it's still early here.)
Cloth masks and those boxes of masks sold at Walmart and convenience stores do not work. In fact, it says so right on the box of the latter. Because masks can stop "droplets" doesn't mean it stops a virus
"it seems intuitively obvious that if something is spread by droplets shooting out of your mouth, preventing droplets from shooting out of your mouth would slow the spread"
On the other hand, "common sense" is NEVER an acceptable substitute for doing the experiment. A corollary to this is that if it is not technically feasible to do the definitive experiment, you don't replace the data with what "common sense" tells you.
There is no evidence that performing CPR yields better outcomes than not performing CPR.
No one has ever performed a study where a random group of cardiac arrest patients were denied CPR and a second group was administered CPR and the outcomes for those two groups were compared. Maybe the Nazis would have done this sort of study.
You have it tagged "Bad Science" whereas the article was actually about "Bad Science Communication", which is a subset of the MSM's generally bad communication about everything; they're not trying to keep you accurately informed, they're trying to sell advertising.
And crummy MSM articles notwithstanding, "the belief that there is no life beyond this life" is not a religious belief, it's a scientific conclusion, which is why no scientists (except a couple of cranks at UVA with a grant to spend) use it to explain anything.
Cc: CNN, MSNBC, Donald Trump
Too clever by half. But OK, let’s play: my Bayesian prior is that this writer is a moron. Having read the excerpt, I can update my prior and, yes, this writer is indeed a moron.
The problem here isn’t related to science but the abandonment of journalism for propaganda.
‘We do we need to say to trick them?’ is the challenge.
One successful parachute jump fails your null hypothesis for parachutes. Conflate legal and journalistic terms with scientific method cautiously.
Generally speaking, most journalist are scientific dummies. They don't understand the weaknesses or strengths of arguments presented to them. They are also, currently, advocates for causes, and choose to ignore anything that challenges narratives that they hold. Or even worse, they ridicule or accuse scientists whom present "contra indicators" as in the pocket of Big (fill in the blank). It creates a dis-incentive, to seek out or present "contra indicators." Thus, "no evidence found." They never looked for it.
This attitude has corrupted--not that it was a great system to begin with--the "peer review" process. Peer review, by design, limits radical changes of thought. Do Einstein and Newton have peers ? Choosing whom does the reviewing, can and will, influence what gets published. The narrative must be preserved.
In addition to having reservation about, "peer reviewed," be careful of words, "always," "never," or "science is settled." The settled science can and will change--imagine Einstein not pursuing Special Relativity because the Physics world settled on Newtonian Physics.
Regarding the Null Hypothesis, the real problem with it is that, crafting a testable, hypothesis is very difficult.
There is always ,(ha!), a systematic error in any process. Anne, look at this https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspa.2015.0748, as it applies to court proceedings.
How can something that doesn’t happen be interesting 🤔
Generally speaking, most journalist are scientific dummies. They don't understand the weaknesses or strengths of arguments presented to them. They are also, currently, advocates for causes, and choose to ignore anything that challenges narratives that they hold. Or even worse, they ridicule or accuse scientists whom present "contra indicators" as in the pocket of Big (fill in the blank). It creates a dis-incentive, to seek out or present "contra indicators." Thus, "no evidence found." They never looked for it.
This attitude has corrupted--not that it was a great system to begin with--the "peer review" process. Peer review, by design, limits radical changes of thought. Do Einstein and Newton have peers ? Choosing whom does the reviewing, can and will, influence what gets published. The narrative must be preserved.
In addition to having reservation about, "peer reviewed," be careful of words, "always," "never," or "science is settled." The settled science can and will change--imagine Einstein not pursuing Special Relativity because the Physics world settled on Newtonian Physics.
Regarding the Null Hypothesis, the real problem with it is that, crafting a testable, hypothesis is very difficult.
There is always ,(ha!), a systematic error in any process. Anne, look at this https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspa.2015.0748, as it applies to court proceedings.
"no evidence" = every time the corrupt left have something to hide.
But... it seems intuitively obvious
"Intuitively obvious" is an argument, not evidence for an argument.
Much of what is intuitively obvious is later proven wrong.
It is "intuitively obvious" to some that if gun ownership is banned by law-abiding people, gun violence will go down.
Science, however, is the antithesis of "intuitively obvious".
There is evidence that masks don't work for viruses but that does not fit the narrative.
"But... it seems intuitively obvious that if something is spread by droplets shooting out of your mouth, preventing droplets from shooting out of your mouth would slow the spread...."
When did "intuition" become evidence?
If something is "obvious" shouldn't it be quite easy to provide at a minimum at least some sort of anecdotal evidence?
COVID-19 continues to spread and kill. Shouldn't masks and vaccines have provided some discernible change in the overall course of the pandemic by now?
AFAICT, Faraday just asked "What happens if I do this", tried everything, and noted the results. The null hypothesis is a statistical thing and needed when there is a random element to results. Not everything falls into that category.
Imagine the degree of difficulty in getting IRB approval for a randomized control trial of the efficacy of parachutes.
Two points:
First, when I think of Science (TM), I think of theoretical science. In theoretical science, you develop a hypothesis which is used to make predictions. You carefully design an experiment and test those predictions through that experiment. If what the theory predicts happens, the theory gets stronger (but never proven.) If what the theory predicts does not occur, then the theory is suspect and needs to be reconsidered-better idea, better designed experiment, etc. You occasionally here about a theory that is later validated because the technology to test that theory has caught up to it.
Scott describes empirical science-a lot of which is statistical, data mining, and looking for correlations.
That brings me to my second point: substitute "no evidence" for "lack of correlation" and you get closer to solving the problem he discusses. Of course, that lack of correlation could be because you have not looked for a correlation, looked and did not find one, or are looking for one but do not have sufficient data. Further, correlation does not mean causation. A rise in umbrella sales does not cause rain.
"No evidence" implies factual information. "No correlation" implies open ended statistical information and thus is closer to what people are trying to communicate when they say "no evidence".
Try an example Scott cites using "correlation" for "evidence":
There is "No evidence linking Covid outbreaks to gyms, indoor dining" becomes "We have not found a correlation between Covid spread and gyms, indoor dining."
As data accumulates, you adjust the statement: "There is a correlation between indoor dining and Covid spread. We do not have enough data to see if there is a correlation with gyms and Covid spread but recommend banning both because..."
The uncertainty bubble was huge at the beginning of Covid. It should shrink as more theories are developed and correlations discovered. Instead, the early certainty has sown distrust, and the uncertainty bubble around Covid grows, instead of shrinks.
When you hear "Bayesian Statistics", pat your wallet, there is a high likelihood that someone is trying to roll you. Not that Bayesian Statistics is wrong in principle, it's just really easy to spin up a vast mountain of bullshit.
The example used by the writer shows the ideological bent. After making great points about 'evidence' and the semantics involved ('peer-reviewed' studies vs. the Mark One Eyeball), the idea of masking up appears. The logic seems sound on its face regarding droplets, but we all know from two years of experience that it's not that simple.
First question: are the right droplets being prevented from shooting out of your mouth? We know the coronavirus itself is very tiny and the mask is, when dealing with micro-organisms, rather porous.
Second question: there have been many mandates of masks on the local, state, and federal levels. And yet the disease continues to spread. Either all virus spread is resulting from transmission not related to wearing masks or masks are not as effective as those who mandate them believe.
Third question: why this example in particular? Why not a different situation where the phrase 'no evidence' is used frequently, like when some citizens point to irregularities in tabulating votes in the 2020 presidential election? Is it because there is evidence gleaned by the Mark One Eyeball, but that evidence needs to be discounted?
The writer says observation is an integral part of the scientific method. I wonder if he really believes that in all cases.
And then there's this ...
Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial
Conclusions: Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention. However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps. When beliefs regarding the effectiveness of an intervention exist in the community, randomized trials might selectively enroll individuals with a lower perceived likelihood of benefit, thus diminishing the applicability of the results to clinical practice.
pubmed
“You start with a prior for how unlikely something is. Then you update the prior as you gather evidence.... Some people thought masks helped slow the spread of COVID. You can type out 'no evidence' and hit 'send tweet.' But... it seems intuitively obvious that if something is spread by droplets shooting out of your mouth, preventing droplets from shooting out of your mouth would slow the spread...."”
Maybe they should have stepped back a bit, and asked a preliminary question: how is COVID-19 spread? They assumed that it was spread by droplets. To a great extent, like with most other respiratory viruses, it is spread primarily by aerosols, that are at least an order of magnitude smaller, and are not impeded much by surgical masks, and negligibly by most homemade masks, neck gaiters, and scarves. All the latter two do is provide AntiFA protection from facial recognition software. You get droplets when someone is coughing. Those who are asymptomatic, or fairly asymptomatic, aren’t the ones coughing. Yet they are the carriers who are walking around exhaling virons.
I have lost count of the number of published peer review articles that I have read “proving” that masks are effective preventing the spread of droplets. So? My STEM PhD kid and I traded articles for a bit on masking. Theirs inevitably included that assumption. They ultimately quit sending them after they found that they couldn’t get beyond that assumption. The real science, with actual null hypotheses, and studies of people, and not lab facsimiles, seem to show that masks probably don’t do a damn bit of good slowing the spread of the virus, and may even endanger children.
This is the danger of this new fangled half baked “science”. Half the world believes that masking, with pretty much anything, prevents the spread of the virus. That is why (besides enabling masking by AntiFA) billions are wearing masks daily still, and states are reimposing masking requirements. Guy got thrown off of a flight recently for wearing a thong as his mask. Nevertheless, mask Nazi flight attendants continue to enforce masking on flights, to the extent that people have to remark between bites or sips. All because “it seems intuitively obvious that IF something is spread by droplets shooting out of your mouth, preventing droplets from shooting out of your mouth would slow the spread....". Man thought for millennia that the world was flat, that the sun orbited around the earth, etc. All that was “intuitively obvious”, but ultimately was shown to be false. The masking wasn’t scientifically driven, but was, rather, sciency religion.
The important thing is you can track CV-19 with masks and without masks and there's no top level statistical support for masks making a large difference. Of course, masks help, the question is how much. If we all stayed 30 feet away from each other instead of 6 feet, it would help but the difference would be negligable. the same is true of masks.
If all went 45 MPH instead of 65 MPH the number of traffic fatalities would decline. We know that because we had a 55 MPH speed limit and we all know speed kills. Yet, we're all willing to let 5,000 extra people die every years so we can all go faster. How many would die if we got rid of masks? Probably less then 5,000 per year.
The author is asking journalists writing about science to think clearly, write clearly, and prioritize accuracy and communication over advancing a narrative.
There's no evidence that journalists want to do those things.
The problem is that masking has been studied for 100 years, and there is no solid evidence they work in the real world. Sure, the masks can catch a lot of the droplets you expel, but then the virus and the liquid is on inside of the mask, and then on the outside of the masks a few minutes later where they then get transferred to the air, and in what are probably smaller and more easily circulated droplets. The masks that work are the ones where your expelled breath and/or inhaled air are filtered heavily through a tough, porous, and extensive solid, like a gas mask.
This has been my thesis for some time: that promiscuous use of the phrase "No evidence" is often a red flag indicating that any evidence the user disagrees with is being swept under a rug. In short, "Nothing to see here, folks. Move along."
"Unfortunately, I don’t think this is just a matter of scientists and journalists using the wrong words sometimes. I think they are fundamentally confused about this."
No. They aren't confused.
They are deliberately ignorant, and/or agenda driven.
What was the name of the Micheal Keaton movie where he went searching for patterns in the TV static?
The linked article feels like an old Eddie Murphy skit where he misuses big words unknowingly.
there is no evidence given that the article's postulate is true.
There is enough of a reproducibility crisis in academic papers already. We need to demonstrate that experimental results obtained are better than guessing. We have an excellent procedure for doing that by requiring that the data show statistical significance. Here we may say that at an odds ratio of 1.4 and a 95% confidence interval of (1.2, 1.6) we have significant evidence to reject the null hypothesis at the 95% level and we can claim a 40% improvement. This indicates how extreme our treatment worked compared to doing nothing. Bayesian statistics is fine, but if the person setting the prior is biased where does that take you? I would just prefer a meta study including the old data.
How newspaper writers communicate this result to the public is another issue, which is not to be solved by the scientific method. I would just say that an experiment was done that showed this to be true with evidence better than random chance, or not. In the book “Thinking fast and slow” it was noted that people use their biases to decide quickly when to react to avoid danger but use hard thought to solve problems when they can afford to. So If you see a bear you would run away and not try to figure out if it was tame, but you would take a long time to think about your investment choices. So the public works on fear, which journalists like to stoke.
Whatever Trump is, it is funny to see the “Trump says without evidence” meme.
A respirator, for people... persons at risk, following strict protocol, or merely viable legal indemnity.
Postoperative wound infections and surgical face masks: a controlled study
Follow the science, not the cargo cult.
"Imagine the degree of difficulty in getting IRB approval for a randomized control trial of the efficacy of parachutes."
People have actually fallen out of aircraft without parachutes. The percentage of those who did so and lived is probably significantly lower than those who wore parachutes and left the aircraft in midair.
There have been and will be people jumping out of aircraft with a parachute that experience parachute failure.
tim in vermont- the ONLY study I have found on mask use to prevent COVID spread in the community showed only that mask use gives a 16% reduction to the chance of catching the virus.
so where 100 unmasked people catch the virus, 84 masked people would catch it.
So "no evidence" is bad (unless, of course, we are talking about voter fraud).
the Big Problem with this, is that There IS statistical evidence that parachutes work
100's of thousands of people (millions?) have fell from airplanes with parachutes...
a very small percentage of them died
10's of thousands of people have fell from airplanes WITHOUT parachutes
ALL but about 157 of them died
people fall from airplanes WITH parachutes, EVERY DY
people fall from airplanes WITHOUT parachutes, with surprising regularity
One action is Nearly ALWAYS fatal... The other action is nearly ALWAYS non-fatal
what more evidence do you people want?
Oh, here's another group. Which is MORE LIKELY to be FATAL?
Falling from an airplane with a functioning 'chute, or Falling with a MALFUNCTIONING one?
The reproducibility of medical journal articles has steadily fallen the last 30 years. I suspect grants are too tempting. Find the right formula, like Michael Mann did, and you are off to the races. The most amusing example I recall was when George Crile Jr published his article on the "no touch technique." This was a theory that handling a tumor while resecting it would spread cancer cells. This was a fad in surgery about 40 years ago. Crile was a well known guy, the son of a famous pioneer in surgery. We all adopted the "no touch technique" even though it took longer. We would cut all the blood vessels, especially veins, before touching the tumor.
Then, low and behold, some other surgeons published a paper recommending the opposite. They injected 5 FU, a chemotherapy drug, into the colon and cut the veins last. Their theory was that the chemo would chase the tumor cells and kill them.
When they looked at the results, it turn ed out their results were the same as Crile's. So, they looked at his paper more closely and discovered that his results had not been corrected with time-life tables. He had cheated. I was actually at a meeting where he was confronted about this. Another Cleveland Clinic surgeon was asked about the discrepancy and said, "You had better ask George about that." He would not defend "no touch technique."
I have looked at the surgical literature and no touch is still being recommended 40 years later. As, no doubt, masks will be recommended by ignoramuses 40 years from now.
"The null hypothesis is a statistical thing and needed when there is a random element to results. Not everything falls into that category.
Exactly right.
Call me a chicken, I wanted TWO parachutes when I jumped.
The issue of the droplets is the axiom planted by omission: Once the droplets are caught, they're no longer relevant. They're off to some alternate universe which you can only get to by following the expressways through Atlanta.
The droplet fetch up on your mask, are refreshed and reinforced by every exhalation, kept warm and moist and lively. So are other people's droplets. Shortly, you have a petri dish of your stuff and other people's stuff, all nice and thick and gooey.
People are forever touching their masks, adjusting them, taking them off and putting them on, pulling them loose to get some oxygen or to scratch.
The stuff cocktail is then on their hands. In public, when you put your hand on a surface, it's usually a surface designed for people's hands to use; stair rail, door handle, etc.
I feel queasy thinking about how much good masks do.
Perhaps nothing works, but given the differences in circumstances, there are, randomly, positive correlations, negative (proving the opposite) correlations, and no correlations.
But for up-and-coming Karens....
"Depending on how through your study is, absence of evidence can indeed be evidence of absence. Not conclusive evidence, but it is damn sure the way to bet if you have looked hard enough. And if there is a black swan, sooner or later you will find it."
True. Just this morning I watched a video of a mathematician who is looking for the first prime number whose digits are simply made up of the real numbers- for example, 12345678910111213......n. They have examined all such numbers up to n=1 million and not found a single prime number, which surprised him on a statistical basis. Two conclusions- such primes are rarer than all other primes, or don't exist at all.
tim in vermont: "There is evidence that masks help, just none that people who don't want to accept that will accept."
You have demonstrated conclusively you have no understanding whatsoever of multivariate statistical analysis.
I would just prefer a meta study including the old data.
My (limited) experience with meta studies is that they are dominated by a few good studies and mostly serve to point out the bad studies. The idea that they are just averaging effectively identical studies is hard to justify.
OTOH, spending a few days deriving for myself the math used was fun. IIRC, I spent a lot of time staring into space thinking about it, which made for awkward conversations.
"You’re starting to catch on, Professor."
There's no evidence of that in this post.
It's increasingly clear that masking, as practiced in the real world, has no correlation with freedom from WuFlu- see rates in NY and CA vs TX and FL. Any violation of civil liberties such as government mandated masking should be subjected to the strictest scrutiny, and of course will fail in all cases.
It's also becoming more and more clear that vaccination is becoming less effective as a public health measure, i.e., preventing symptomatic viral spread. It still provides some personal protection, but that should be a risk benefit decision left to the individual.
No government mandates should survive given what we know today.
Richard Aubrey: re masks as petri dishes, yes, exactly so. One of the (by now, many) reasons I knew the public health authorities were lying about masks and their utility was precisely what you describe coupled with their "Silver-Blaze-dog-in-the-night" omissions. First, they never pointed out that masks are utterly useless for anyone with more facial hair than a gigolo moustache because no seal is possible with sideburns and cheek/chin hair, making them worse than useless. And then there was the issue of disposal... we were to understand from the outset that this virus was a virulent killer, wildly contagious, and if there's one thing that medical personnel have procedures for, it's reducing transmission/exposure risk for dangerous substances. Practices, approved and set in stone by public health, required protective equipment like masks, gloves and gowns when in contact with patients even potentially infected with high-risk bacteria (MRSA, e.g.) or a killer virus like Ebola, but the important thing to note is what is done with that gear once you move away from the patient -- you don't just drop it in the laundry or the trash. It ALL goes in a red bin or sealing red bag (present everywhere in hospitals, care units, ambulances, etc.) and is considered contaminated waste, hazardous material (HAZMAT) to be handled and disposed of ONLY by authorized service providers whose services don't come cheap. Biohazard waste is as risky as it gets, short of, oh, plutonium, and allowing that waste to contaminate the ordinary waste disposal stream is a serious offense due to the risks to the general population.
So, with that as a set-in-stone given for public health, what were the disposal precautions for all those masks used by the public, contaminated to the max with this Killer Virus? Um, None. Public Health could have established some minimally useful services to deal at some level with all this terrible hazmat waste, but the fact is nothing like that was forthcoming or even contemplated, first, because the public wouldn't have complied, and second, BECAUSE IT WAS SIMPLY NOT NECESSARY. All those masks marinated in all that exudate goo, went straight into the regular waste disposal stream because it WASN'T A MAJOR HEALTH HAZARD IN THE EYES OF OUR PUBLIC HEALTH AUTHORITIES. Pathological lying b-----ds that they are.
Scott Alexander is no moron, although he is self-admittedly math-disabled (but he gets help for his posts). You may find his style a bit long-winded but he's an excellent writer and does a decent job capturing the actual complexity involved in trying to 'know' something by digesting public info.
In two parts: Is absence of evidence evidence? In Silver Blaze by SiR Arthur Conan Doyle we have this:
"Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”"
There is no evidence the dog barked- and that's the evidence.
And to wander far from masks- which don't work- there's my favorite topic of conversation (really, not kidding), The Fermi Question- "Where are they?" The number of extraterrestrial civilization is almost always calculated using "The Drake Equation" AKA as "The Greenbank Equation". Look it up if you're interested. Every group that has ever attempted to estimate it has come to the conclusion that not only is there a large enough number of XT civilizations out there in our galaxy that we should be well aware of them, but ofttimes come to the conclusion that we are them.
PArt 2: Before. let's say, 1950, if a serious scientist postulated the existence of XT civilizations. he'd have been scoffed at. Now, all serious scientists assume they exist- they must. But then comes The Fermi Paradox, normally expressed as The Fermi Question- "Where are they?" The SETI Foundation, Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, was founded in 1984, 37 years ago. The first formal SETI search was Project Ozma circa 1960, started by Frank Drake- of The Drake Equation fame. In all this tine of searching for them- there is no evidence, none, that XT civilizations exist. None. The absence of evidence is being to indicate that they don't exist. Because, as said before- any group trying to estimate how many there are, comes to the same conclusion- there are many, and we must be them. There are literally hundreds of ways to detect other technological civilizations. At some point radio is going to be a primary for of communication. AM radio broadcasting started over 100 years ago. There a re roughly 130 stars visible from Earth within 50 lightyears, and over 1300 star systems total. None of them has sent a signal back. And we've detected none from them. We have instrumentation that could easily detect a 50,000 Watt clear channel station from 50 lightyears away(with the assumption they would develop in the same manner) and we've detected- nothing. The continued absence of evidence, which is mounting, seems to be evidence we're alone in this galaxy of 100,000,000 or so stars. The absence of evidence is evidence. There have been no detectable radio emissions we've caught, no light wakes from star drives, no nothing- there's nothing we can conceive of that leaves evidence of an advanced interstellar civilization that we can detect.
So The Fermi Question, "Where are they?, has a corollary, "Why can't we find them?" There are two universal answers to this, and only two. One, the Bible thumpers are right, and God created us, and only us, to populate the Earth AND the stars. Or: Berserkers are real. I've always thought the second was more likely. But I've recently come to think there may be a third universal solution- "Civilizations and species strive towards stasis." Think about for a second. What is the goal of virtually every environmental movement? To establish an unchanging environment in which mankind coexists peacefully with all other species. Unchanging. IMHO, all utopias are dystopias, but what do people express a wish for? An unchanging world where everything is predictable and there are no surprises. That, to me, is the most frightening prospect, that all civilizations are doomed to extinction because they established an unchanging culture that never left their home planet. That's the very crux of all environmental movements, and has been since the beginning. There's an ideal Earth temperature- we must reach it and regulate activity so it doesn't change. There is an ideal population level- we must get there and regulate reproduction. Etc. and so on and so forth. We must achieve stasis. TBH, that's what most people today, and yesterday, are most comfortable with. The thought that nothing ever changes. Change is frightening.
One of the top three courses I took in college was FW 620 "Ecological Policy" at Oregon State University taught by Professor Robert Lackey. I would consider him the modern-era scholr on normative science defined by Professor Lackey as "information that is developed, presented or interpreted based on an assumed, usually unstated, preference for a particular policy choice.”
If there was ever an area of science where normative science is rampant, COVID-19 is it.
I read Scott Alexander's substack Astral Codex Ten, including this post, and it is clear that hardly any of the previous commenters have, or they would know that Scott, in this passage, is asking why people would believe that masks work? and he answers that "well, it is intuitively obvious . . ." (to them; he knows being intuitively obvious is rather poorly correlated with being true, especially in the more arcane reaches of science). He also knows that "droplets" is the wrong word; it's chosen to indicate that the people to whom he is attributing these sentiments are not well-informed.
The last part of Ann's post is excerpted from the final paragraph of his 1,310-word piece and is setting up his concluding punchline. COVID-19 and masks are not a principal focus of his post, just one of several examples of the shades of meaning of "no evidence."
He's also very self-deprecating, and goes out of his way to point out where he's been wrong. "Self-admittedly math-disabled" (as jg notes) should, I think, be understood as meaning he acknowledges that practicing statisticians know more statistics than he does. He knows more statistics than practically anyone else does, though.
Reading Scott Alexander is both a pleasure and an education.
tim in vermont said...
There is evidence that masks help, just none that people who don't want to accept that will accept
"Helps" is a meaningless word. "You are 1% less likely to get Covid if you wear a mask 24/7". That's nice. The mask has enough bad effects that wearing it isn't worth the 1% improvement.
If you look at potential benefits, while ignoring all costs, then anything "helps".
If the mask lovers were willing to engage in honest discussion, note all the tradeoffs, and not engage in tribal behavior, and not engage in sheer stupidity like forcing school kids to wear masks outside, then we could have a rational discussion on the matter.
Since that's not what's happening, the answer is "take your masks, and fuck off"
Not to mention that Fauci's lies on the subject have pretty much discredited any arguments that he makes, even though the proper response to a liar is not to believe the opposite of what he says, but to ignore him.
You're almost there. The proper response to a liar is to ignore him, and to ignore everyone who pays attention to him.
Do let us know when the public health officials start out by saying" Dr Fauci is a lair, a political hack, and we want nothing to do with him. Now,...."
But they won't do that, because they're into tribal bullshit, not science.
So we, properly, ignore them, too
Tim said...
This sounds like the kind of crap you get when people with no understanding of either science or math (specifically statistics) decide to write an essay on something they do not understand.
This is the kind of crap you get when people write about an article they don't bother to read.
You're expressing a lot of Scott's points, just less well
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