7 ms·

He who controls the definition of "disinfo" controls the world.

thoraway1010 6y ago
Yep - when I questioned my local health authorities guidance that if "healthy" I should take off my mask on crowded public transit and when working with the very elderly (adult day health) I was told to avoid "disinformation" (in writing) and to follow surgeon general and their guidance and take off my mask on public transit and while working with the elderly. A month later they flip-flopped on that ironically. I wonder if they started to believe some of the "disinformation" that wearing masks is a low cost though imperfect way to reduce spread. I've found actual scientists working with these diseases are pretty on it for logic, but folks like epidemiologists are sometimes totally horrendous. Is epidemiology less rigorous then other infectious disease educational tracks?
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  Honestly, the answer to the question "is field x less rigorous" is almost universally no. Some fields tend to attract smarter people than others, but that doesn't mean there aren't very smart people in pretty much every field who are doing good work and exploration at depth. For this question I think that beyond the politics and what was a deeply ill-advised strategy for managing a limited resource (masks), it may also have to do with the type of studies they tend to use and give authority to. The scientists you're talking about probably are looking at smaller scale things where plausible mechanisms are investigated and confirmed. Epidemiologists though have many examples in their toolkit where such common sense findings don't extrapolate to population level interventions. For whatever reason, epidemiology doesn't seem to embrace a more bayesian approach where you operate with a good guess and try to revise it as you learn more. They tend to stick to confirmed models.
- dmurray 6y ago
  Epidemiology during a pandemic is about one part science to three parts PR. Sending a consistent message to the public and getting them to change their behaviour at all is more important than getting the details right. In the case of masks, the WHO decided early on that masks for the public were of limited use in slowing coronavirus spread: they'd stop some infections but could be detrimental if misused and could threaten the supply to medical professionals. This was a reasonable conclusion at the time. To communicate that to the public, the party line was: masks no good. Many national organisations took their cue from the WHO. Now the risk/reward tradeoff has shifted: better research shows that masks, even ersatz ones, are good and the supply lines for professionals have improved. So the message has to change: masks good. The actual scientists know that it's not black and white, but pretending it is is a useful tool for health organisations. At some point I expect we'll see a flip-flop on the party line that "there is no evidence that covid-19 infection confers immunity against future infection". It's nonsense - there are hundreds of years of circumstantial evidence - but it's just about defensible in that there haven't been any sufficiently powerful blinded trials to directly demonstrate it specifically for Covid-19. Once it's deemed to be in the public good, they'll accept some study showing exposure does indeed confer immunity.
  - pyuser583 6y ago
    Is it reasonable to ask the public to believe absolute messages that contradict themselves? Maybe what the boy who cried wolf meant was “I am not sure whether a wolf is in the forest. But the potential damage from a wolf a attack, combined with the increased likelihood of a wolf presence due to the observation of fresh wolf droppings, exceeds the damage from sheltering in place.” But the like the epidemiologists, simply said “There’s a wolf in the forest! Run away!”
    - dmurray 6y ago
      That's a question for the PR experts. I expect the majority of people are swayed by the absolute advice and the flip flopping doesn't damage the message too much. After all, we have always been at war with Eastasia.
      - thoraway1010 6y ago
        The flip flopping from folks who keep on saying "believe the science" is ridiculous. How can science be trusted if it has these huge flop flops within a week with really no change in underlying research?
  - Tomte 6y ago
    It's not just that. In the beginning the assumption was that asymptomatic people aren't (very) contagious. That meant that contagious people would know about their status (from the symptoms) and mostly stay at home. When we found out that you can be contagious and not have a clue about it, the recommendation to wear simple "community masks" changed. The scarcity of "real masks" and the wish to save them for the health sector played into the public statements that authorities made (partly because it was a true concern, partly because it's an explanation that people understand easily). In hindsight, those statements were a mistake, because many people now think the authorities flip-flopped. They did, but because there was new information.
  - mercer 6y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if in various post-mortems we will conclude that advising against face masks even though they do 'work' was a mistake. It's understandable that our governments might advise against their use because of limited availability, but I think 'doing PR' on this issue hasn't really helped when it comes to our trust in said government in our information age. Perhaps it would have been better for the government to be honest from the start, explain that they believe masks are crucial for care workers and of relatively limited use to the rest of us, and either leave it at that, or actively disallow ownership and usage if necessary. Lying about the whole thing just feeds the flames of a public that already has a large amount of skeptics.
throwaway2048 6y ago
Yeah, I mean, who is to say that reptile shape shifting aliens living in the hollow earth aren't secretly controlling the world government via the Illuminati that are enslaving the population via vaccines and 5G-coronavirus from a secret muslim pizza parlor basement where they murder children. That has every bit as much claim on the truth as Einstein's Theory of Relativity, so much so that people should be in fact forced to publish favorable information about it, (people rightfully cry out every time a private party dare to censor something with equal claims on validity to The Truth) After all how can anyone ever possibly know what truth is?
- microcolonel 6y ago
  We get your point, that you expect the public to be more wrong than the authorities. Except in this case, all of the foremost authorities have been wrong repeatedly and in ways that delayed productive caution, and extended unproductive policy. More of WHO's early guidance was dangerously misleading or false than was true; they actively denied every important observation which turned out to be critical to getting a handle on the virus. Ordinary members of the public were ahead of the WHO for months in disseminating factual information and productive advice.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    Its completely possible for the authorities to be wrong, its also completely possible for charlatan opportunists and insane people to make a bad situation much worse.
    - microcolonel 6y ago
      > Its completely possible for the authorities to be wrong, its also completely possible for charlatan opportunists and insane people to make a bad situation much worse. In this case, the foremost authority was so wrong that no charlatan opportunist with reach outside the “maybe I should drink bleach” set of the public did any worse than them, and a majority of the “non-authoritative” sources I consulted this year got the important facts (evidence of human-to-human spread, a long tail of very long incubation periods, difficult-to-ascertain asymptomatic carriers, asymptomatic transmission, unlikely to have been transmitted in a purely natural setting) straight as soon as information was available, while WHO was still denying these things without evidence to back up their denials. Added to clarify: For example, if you watched Tim Pool's (political commentator, often struggles to read and understand things he's covering) podcast, he was able to tell you early this year that some reports saw the virus incubating for upward of two weeks, and transmissible during at least some of that time; and if I recall correctly, at that same moment, the WHO's official position was that there was “no evidence of human to human transmission”, a statement that would be irresponsible even if it were true at the time. While the WHO was denying early concerns that it could spread through aerosols, the same podcast was presenting the evidence for this, and cautioning people to be aware of it (but not to panic). If you ask me, this random independent podcast handled this subject so much more responsibly than the mainstream media (who were at the time saying that it was no worse than the flu, making fun of people for being concerned about it) and the WHO (who were basically advising people to ignore evidence entirely, and not take precautions, until they deemed it sufficient).

Yep - when I questioned my local health authorities guidance that if "healthy" I should take off my mask on crowded public transit and when working with the very elderly (adult day health) I was told to avoid "disinformation" (in writing) and to follow surgeon general and their guidance and take off my mask on public transit and while working with the elderly. A month later they flip-flopped on that ironically. I wonder if they started to believe some of the "disinformation" that wearing masks is a low cost though imperfect way to reduce spread. I've found actual scientists working with these diseases are pretty on it for logic, but folks like epidemiologists are sometimes totally horrendous. Is epidemiology less rigorous then other infectious disease educational tracks?

Enginerrrd 6y ago
Honestly, the answer to the question "is field x less rigorous" is almost universally no. Some fields tend to attract smarter people than others, but that doesn't mean there aren't very smart people in pretty much every field who are doing good work and exploration at depth. For this question I think that beyond the politics and what was a deeply ill-advised strategy for managing a limited resource (masks), it may also have to do with the type of studies they tend to use and give authority to. The scientists you're talking about probably are looking at smaller scale things where plausible mechanisms are investigated and confirmed. Epidemiologists though have many examples in their toolkit where such common sense findings don't extrapolate to population level interventions. For whatever reason, epidemiology doesn't seem to embrace a more bayesian approach where you operate with a good guess and try to revise it as you learn more. They tend to stick to confirmed models.
dmurray 6y ago
Epidemiology during a pandemic is about one part science to three parts PR. Sending a consistent message to the public and getting them to change their behaviour at all is more important than getting the details right. In the case of masks, the WHO decided early on that masks for the public were of limited use in slowing coronavirus spread: they'd stop some infections but could be detrimental if misused and could threaten the supply to medical professionals. This was a reasonable conclusion at the time. To communicate that to the public, the party line was: masks no good. Many national organisations took their cue from the WHO. Now the risk/reward tradeoff has shifted: better research shows that masks, even ersatz ones, are good and the supply lines for professionals have improved. So the message has to change: masks good. The actual scientists know that it's not black and white, but pretending it is is a useful tool for health organisations. At some point I expect we'll see a flip-flop on the party line that "there is no evidence that covid-19 infection confers immunity against future infection". It's nonsense - there are hundreds of years of circumstantial evidence - but it's just about defensible in that there haven't been any sufficiently powerful blinded trials to directly demonstrate it specifically for Covid-19. Once it's deemed to be in the public good, they'll accept some study showing exposure does indeed confer immunity.
- pyuser583 6y ago
  Is it reasonable to ask the public to believe absolute messages that contradict themselves? Maybe what the boy who cried wolf meant was “I am not sure whether a wolf is in the forest. But the potential damage from a wolf a attack, combined with the increased likelihood of a wolf presence due to the observation of fresh wolf droppings, exceeds the damage from sheltering in place.” But the like the epidemiologists, simply said “There’s a wolf in the forest! Run away!”
  - dmurray 6y ago
    That's a question for the PR experts. I expect the majority of people are swayed by the absolute advice and the flip flopping doesn't damage the message too much. After all, we have always been at war with Eastasia.
    - thoraway1010 6y ago
      The flip flopping from folks who keep on saying "believe the science" is ridiculous. How can science be trusted if it has these huge flop flops within a week with really no change in underlying research?
- Tomte 6y ago
  It's not just that. In the beginning the assumption was that asymptomatic people aren't (very) contagious. That meant that contagious people would know about their status (from the symptoms) and mostly stay at home. When we found out that you can be contagious and not have a clue about it, the recommendation to wear simple "community masks" changed. The scarcity of "real masks" and the wish to save them for the health sector played into the public statements that authorities made (partly because it was a true concern, partly because it's an explanation that people understand easily). In hindsight, those statements were a mistake, because many people now think the authorities flip-flopped. They did, but because there was new information.
- mercer 6y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if in various post-mortems we will conclude that advising against face masks even though they do 'work' was a mistake. It's understandable that our governments might advise against their use because of limited availability, but I think 'doing PR' on this issue hasn't really helped when it comes to our trust in said government in our information age. Perhaps it would have been better for the government to be honest from the start, explain that they believe masks are crucial for care workers and of relatively limited use to the rest of us, and either leave it at that, or actively disallow ownership and usage if necessary. Lying about the whole thing just feeds the flames of a public that already has a large amount of skeptics.

throwaway2048 6y ago

Yeah, I mean, who is to say that reptile shape shifting aliens living in the hollow earth aren't secretly controlling the world government via the Illuminati that are enslaving the population via vaccines and 5G-coronavirus from a secret muslim pizza parlor basement where they murder children. That has every bit as much claim on the truth as Einstein's Theory of Relativity, so much so that people should be in fact forced to publish favorable information about it, (people rightfully cry out every time a private party dare to censor something with equal claims on validity to The Truth) After all how can anyone ever possibly know what truth is?

microcolonel 6y ago
We get your point, that you expect the public to be more wrong than the authorities. Except in this case, all of the foremost authorities have been wrong repeatedly and in ways that delayed productive caution, and extended unproductive policy. More of WHO's early guidance was dangerously misleading or false than was true; they actively denied every important observation which turned out to be critical to getting a handle on the virus. Ordinary members of the public were ahead of the WHO for months in disseminating factual information and productive advice.
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  Its completely possible for the authorities to be wrong, its also completely possible for charlatan opportunists and insane people to make a bad situation much worse.
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    > Its completely possible for the authorities to be wrong, its also completely possible for charlatan opportunists and insane people to make a bad situation much worse. In this case, the foremost authority was so wrong that no charlatan opportunist with reach outside the “maybe I should drink bleach” set of the public did any worse than them, and a majority of the “non-authoritative” sources I consulted this year got the important facts (evidence of human-to-human spread, a long tail of very long incubation periods, difficult-to-ascertain asymptomatic carriers, asymptomatic transmission, unlikely to have been transmitted in a purely natural setting) straight as soon as information was available, while WHO was still denying these things without evidence to back up their denials. Added to clarify: For example, if you watched Tim Pool's (political commentator, often struggles to read and understand things he's covering) podcast, he was able to tell you early this year that some reports saw the virus incubating for upward of two weeks, and transmissible during at least some of that time; and if I recall correctly, at that same moment, the WHO's official position was that there was “no evidence of human to human transmission”, a statement that would be irresponsible even if it were true at the time. While the WHO was denying early concerns that it could spread through aerosols, the same podcast was presenting the evidence for this, and cautioning people to be aware of it (but not to panic). If you ask me, this random independent podcast handled this subject so much more responsibly than the mainstream media (who were at the time saying that it was no worse than the flu, making fun of people for being concerned about it) and the WHO (who were basically advising people to ignore evidence entirely, and not take precautions, until they deemed it sufficient).