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Part of the problem is that there are some Doctors and Scientists participating with agendas. Take cloth masks, there are doctors who say it helps and doctors

Part of the problem is that there are some Doctors and Scientists participating with agendas. Take cloth masks, there are doctors who say it helps and doctors who say it doesn't help much. Some the doctors who said it doesn't help were genuine. But some of the doctors were saying it doesn't help were lying because they assumed people wouldn't social distance if they wore a mask, believing the increased risk due to not wearing masks was not worth what they believed would be a big decrease in social distancing. Some of the doctors were are saying they didn't help, were lying to preserve masks for health care professionals (including lying about n95 masks). It's hard not to feel like attacking some one you believe is deliberately putting many lives at risk to forward a political or personal agenda.

benmmurphy 7y ago
I've also heard it claimed that masks not helping was pushed because there was no peer reviewed randomized trials that showed that masks helped therefore the official advice was there is no evidence that masks helped. Of course there is no randomized trial evidence on the effectiveness of social distancing on long term reduction in mortality due to corona virus but different ideas have to hurdle different levels of evidence. This idea of different levels of evidence actually makes sense because some things have potentially high payoffs and very likely low costs. For example wearing masks would appear to fall into this bucket. This comes back into reasoning under uncertainty that someone else brought up in the thread. The medical community has had problems in the past because bad medical interventions typically impose high costs on patients so if they have little positive benefit then it can easily become a net-negative situation. So then you have a culture where anything that hasn't gone through an RCT with multiple confirming studies doesn't exist as an intervention.

benmmurphy 7y ago

I've also heard it claimed that masks not helping was pushed because there was no peer reviewed randomized trials that showed that masks helped therefore the official advice was there is no evidence that masks helped. Of course there is no randomized trial evidence on the effectiveness of social distancing on long term reduction in mortality due to corona virus but different ideas have to hurdle different levels of evidence. This idea of different levels of evidence actually makes sense because some things have potentially high payoffs and very likely low costs. For example wearing masks would appear to fall into this bucket. This comes back into reasoning under uncertainty that someone else brought up in the thread. The medical community has had problems in the past because bad medical interventions typically impose high costs on patients so if they have little positive benefit then it can easily become a net-negative situation. So then you have a culture where anything that hasn't gone through an RCT with multiple confirming studies doesn't exist as an intervention.