But we had just that... we had scientists and doctors telling us just last year (at the beginning of "the plague") that masks are useless for healthy people, and that they even present a higher risk to wearers, because they touch the mask and their face more.

And then, one random saturday (in my country atleast), masks became mandatory, along with gloves to enter the stores. Some media outlets have even removed the previous newsstories (not edit and say "whoops, now we know better", but remove completely), and everybody acts as if that didn't happen.

Same with trump + wuhan lab theory... at first it was a bannable offence on facebook to promote such idea... and now after trump, there are serious inquiries if that really happened, and we're allowed to discuss this again.

Basically, whoever is in charge (government, media platform, moderator,...) will moderate, censor and ban, until the preferable (for them) reality is set.

Masks reduce the spread of respiratory diseases in hospitals. People have known this for more than a century. Many tests have confirmed it for many different diseases. Masks also work outside of hospitals. Sars-cov-2 spreads like other common respiratory diseases. Therefore, masks reduce the spread of sars-cov-2.

We see this in data. Washington [0], Vermont [1], and Maine [2] all got mask mandates last summer. These states have had half the number of cases [3] as other northern-US states which waited many more months before requiring their citizens to wear masks in public indoor spaces.

[0] https://www.governor.wa.gov/news-media/inslee-announces-stat...

[1] https://vtdigger.org/2020/07/24/scott-orders-mask-mandate/

[2] https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/health/coronavi...

[3] https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areasRegional=uswa&area...

I'm not talking about what happened after.. I'm talking about WHO literally not recommending to wear masks unless you're sick or caring for someone sick.

Back then, people who were wearking masks were marked as "stupid conspiracy theorists" and fearmongerers. Then, suddenly the mask mandates came in, and people not wearing the masks were "stupid conspiracy theorists".

example still online: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-mas...

> "There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly," Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday.

> But we had just that... we had scientists and doctors telling us just last year (at the beginning of "the plague") that masks are useless for healthy people, and that they even present a higher risk to wearers, because they touch the mask and their face more. > And then, one random saturday (in my country atleast), masks became mandatory, along with gloves to enter the stores. Some media outlets have even removed the previous newsstories (not edit and say "whoops, now we know better", but remove completely), and everybody acts as if that didn't happen.

sigh

There are nuances for that. First, there weren't enough masks and other PPE for medical personnel; second, there was already hoarding going on. Making masks mandatory at the beginning would have been disastrous and likely resulted in the deaths of many medical personnel, who were among the main limits of how many cases a country can take.

Then, you're missing a big difference between the initial "don't use masks" and later "everyone should mask up" guidances. The initial one was that you shouldn't wear a mask to protect yourself because untrained people were unlikely to wear them properly and would just touch themselves too much, thus wasting the precious resource. And of course, there was little certainty about how the virus spread and when ( do you spread it only when you have symptoms? do you spread it only if you have a positive test? )

The later one was due to knowing much better how the virus propagates, we can now conclude that wearing a mask stops people from spreading it, so everybody should wear a mask to stop community spread. There's a huge difference between wearing a mask to protect yourself from getting infected, and to stop unknowing sick people from spreading the virus via the main way it spreads. And of course, when that came about, there were just about enough masks in most countries to actually be able to do that.

Yes, it should have been handled better. Is it normal for such guidance to evolve considering the many known and unknown unknowns ? Absofuckinglutely. Would you have prefered for the guidance to stay the same for fear of looking stupid and wasting countless more lives?

> Same with trump + wuhan lab theory... at first it was a bannable offence on facebook to promote such idea... and now after trump, there are serious inquiries if that really happened, and we're allowed to discuss this again.

Again, nuance! What was bannable was claiming that China developed the virus on purpose. The lighter versions, like accidental lab leak, weren't banned ( that i recall; if you have a source stating otherwise i'd gladly retract that statement). In any case, any such discussion in the beginning seemed, to me at least, as deflections and excuses. We suck at handling a pandemic compared to just about anyone, but it's not our fault, China made this! What does it matter where the virus came from when people are dying left and right from it? Now that things are calmer, we can discuss and investigate.

There is still zero proof on the matter, and i doubt there ever will be ( as if the CCP would admit a lab leak in China caused a pandemic with such proportions and consequences).

> Wuhan Institute of Virology has collaborated with the Galveston National Laboratory in the United States, the Centre International de Recherche en Infectiologie in France, and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada.

> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.

I want to believe they had a good excuse for doing so.

I want to believe they created rigorous safety protocols that reduce the risks as much as possible.

Then they chose to do it in the most populous city in Central China (population 11 million) which is so stupid I doubt they had a good enough reason and certainly didn't bother with safety all that much.

After such stupidity one doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt.

[0] - List of laboratory biosecurity incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

No, they literally said there is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-mas...

Yes, there was a shortage, but "no evidence ... any potential benefit" means something different.

About facebook:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/facebook-...

> Facebook is keen to ensure that a change in one rule doesn’t lead to a free-for-all for Covid misinformation. On the same day that it lifted the ban on lab-leak theories, it tightened up restrictions on users who “repeatedly share misinformation on Facebook”.

Guardian says it they also banned the "lab-leak" theories... (not to mention the second part of the quote).

Those are just two examples. Vaccine passports were also a "conspiracy theory". AstraZeneca was also marked as "perfectly safe" (and not "probably safe"), until they started ditching it everywhere.

And I'm not complaining about science changing after more data is revealed/processed (that is a normal part of science), I'm complaining about people getting banned one day for saying something, and then that something being accepted as reality the next day, and companies like facebook removing the bannable offence and saying "we will ban more people" in the same sentance.

Some media outlets have even removed the [erroneous] previous newsstories (not edit and say "whoops, now we know better", but remove completely), and everybody acts as if that didn't happen.

Well, yes. We've always been at war with Eastasia.

By your tone alone and the wording, I feel like downvoting you too, despite probably agreeing to your main point.

That means, I agree we live in a time, that is pretending to be based on science - but the debates are way more about how all the people feel about certain things and words and happily ignore or fight against all the facts, if they don't fit.

Those are impossible because such questions can't be scientifically asked in the first place.

Like, what does "benefit society" even mean? By what parameter? You can definitely make a scientific conclusion of the order of "religious conservatives really hate it when women work", but... duh? I can agree with that and not care one bit.

Second one, impossible because there's no such thing as race scientifically, in the sense the common person uses that word. You could make such a conclusion about groups with particular genetics, but you can't tell those by eyesight.

> Like, what does "benefit society" even mean?

Oh, this one is easy.

Imagine we managed to create a good enough model of the society. Kinda similar to what engineers use to design bridges or combustion chambers.

Then we create a target function - minimize the number people below poverty level, minimize the weighted number of crimes, maximize productive life longevity - and so on. All good things.

We run it and the model tells us: (1) mandate every woman have three kids by age of thirty (2) promote currently elected president to the king and make it a lifetime hereditary post and (3) make sure everyone goes to the church every Sunday (4) sell Alaska to China.

We shrug, check things here and there - and no, there's no mistake, the solution is stable and whatever we thought were unresolvable problems of monarchy actually do have simple solutions which noone thought about before.

So, what's next?

Impossible, we'll never agree on the target function.

Eg, "minimize people below poverty level" -- this isn't universally wanted. Some people believe in fact that it's fundamentally impossible and that if anybody is brought up, that can only happen by bringing somebody down, and at best this is achievable by averaging everything to mediocrity, and they hate the idea of that.

Well, at the very minimum the target function can be something like "make sure everyone is not worse than right now and as many people as possible are better".

For the definition of "better off", see [1]

[EDIT]

Here's another option. Imagine, people come to you and say: hey, dale_glass, you're smart we trust you. Please pick the target function. You can put there whatever you want with whatever weight you want.

The caveat: you will have to unconditionally accept the outcome. You cannot keep tweaking and rerunning until the result matches your ideas of perfect society.

Your move?

[1] https://worldhappiness.report

> Well, at the very minimum the target function can be something like "make sure everyone is not worse than right now and as many people as possible are better".

Not everyone wants that either. Some enjoy having inferiors.

> Here's another option. Imagine, people come to you and say: hey, dale_glass, you're smart we trust you. Please pick the target function. You can put there whatever you want with whatever weight you want.

What does that have to do with science or what we were talking about? That's extremely subjective.

I think you have picked particularly bad examples for this. Both the model and the target function have real, practical considerations that make them probably impossible. If, however, you did make such a model and such a function then the running that model in every possible configuration space would be a problem of such massive scale that you couldn't ever hope to find the best configuration.

I think if you have some sort of point you are trying to make, you should confine yourself to something more practical and easier to have a definite answer. If you so I think you will find that, eventually, the invalidated belief will be dropped except by a small minority and the consensus will shift to encompass that viewpoint.

Your scenario requires a lot of people to give up their personal freedoms and happiness for the good of whichever individuals' lives would be improved by their sacrifice. Let's add in that all men not married by the age of 21 should be castrated. It's for the good of society right?

What's the point of this? If/when those things would hypothetically be found, we'd have to come to terms with it. However, we found that (1) reproductive freedom (2) constitutionalism and democracy (3) religious freedom, are all conducive to a better society. It's impossible we'll ever find otherwise.

That's completely missing the point. The point is, do you accept that unpleasant Truth, do you reject it, or do you weigh whatever other values you have against that truth and ignore it.

That's what that question is.

You can't make that question in the general sense and draw useful conclusions.

Eg, it's an "unpleasant Truth" that you're at a risk of dying in a car accident. But yeah, we just decide it's worth going out anyway, and ignore it.

But that isn't applicable to a similar "unpleasant Truth" that welding on a gas tank could get you killed. The task is different, the risks are different, the tradeoffs are different, the ways to compensate for danger are different.

All such things are very contextual. Trying to divine some sort of general rule or philosophy doesn't really work.

Honestly, both of these, the car accident and the gas tank are being treated exactly the same here. You've looked at the given "truth", evaluated it, and then come to a decision on whether it's worth it or not. It's explicitly making that decision and that trade off.

what andrepd said felt far more like a handwave

>However, we found that (1) reproductive freedom (2) constitutionalism and democracy (3) religious freedom, are all conducive to a better society. It's impossible we'll ever find otherwise.

It's a denial of a hypothetical, which is not engaging with the core point, but instead attacking the analogy instead. It's a standard (and often unintentional) logical fallacy.

This is my interpretation of the conversation. Please avoid approaching this from the "perfect hypotheticals" perspective, their perfection is besides the point.

A: We have a perfect target metric, and we've found that C, which we philosophically like, performs far worse than B, which we find abhorrent

B: There's no perfect metric, and if there were, we've already found C is better, and there's no way how C could be worse.

It's deliberately avoiding the point.

To break it down even further:

>However, we found that (1) reproductive freedom (2) constitutionalism and democracy (3) religious freedom, are all conducive to a better society.

we've already found C is better

>It's impossible we'll ever find otherwise.

there's no way how C could be worse.

No. Because your result won't simply be the truth. Especially if it unpleasant. Why would it be if it is optimal.

Optimal for pension system is to kill your grandpa. Do you accept that? I hope not.

If you didn't want downvotes you could have left out the particulars especially untimely is the inclusion of vaccines cause autism. The whole debacle was fueled originally by a lying sack of garbage who was drummed out of the medical profession for faking his results and just took off from there.

Well, I mean, he makes it clear enough that those are just examples for the sake of argument. I found the examples useful to understand the scenario he was proposing.