6 ms·

It is interesting to note that Thomas Lars Benfield's Danish mask study, whose empirical results are at odds with the "majoritarian view" mentioned in the artic

It is interesting to note that Thomas Lars Benfield's Danish mask study, whose empirical results are at odds with the "majoritarian view" mentioned in the article, has yet to be reported by the BBC.

nojito 6y ago
Because there are actual peer-reviewed studies about mask use and COVID. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3003_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3003_article https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6947e2-H.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6947e2-H.pdf
- jjgreen 6y ago
  Benfield's study has been peer-reviewed and published in Annals of Internal Medicine.
  - acqq 6y ago
    As Anthony Fauci already pointed, one study can be both peer reviewed and be wrong.
    - acqq 6y ago
      I refer to July 31, 2020: https://news.yahoo.com/fauci-shoots-down-flawed-hydroxychloroquine-183931215.html https://news.yahoo.com/fauci-shoots-down-flawed-hydroxychlor... Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.): "it was peer reviewed" Fauci: "It doesn't matter. You can peer review something that's a bad study."
  - liversage 6y ago
    And the conclusion was that based on the data they were not able to determine if face masks protects you from infection or not. For some reason this has led to media concluding that face masks do not protect you but that's not the same. Another important effect of wearing a face mask is that it may protect other people from being infected by you but that effect was not part of the study.
  - chillacy 6y ago
    ESP (extra sensory perception for predicting the future) has been peer reviewed. Stripped of all the political connotations it's actually kind of an interesting debate for scientists to have. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/science/06esp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/science/06esp.html
ahelwer 6y ago
Taleb has been going pretty hard all week on how that study doesn't demonstrate what certain people really, really want it to demonstrate: https://fooledbyrandomnessdotcom.wordpress.com/2020/11/25/hypothesis-testing-in-the-presence-of-false-positives-the-flaws-in-the-danish-mask-study/ https://fooledbyrandomnessdotcom.wordpress.com/2020/11/25/hy... Check out his Twitter feed for more.
- jjgreen 6y ago
  I await his peer-reviewed response with interest.
  - ahelwer 6y ago
    He isn't responding to the claims in the actual paper (which are quite weak - they explicitly say the paper doesn't show masks are ineffective) but rather the crowd of charlatans who have hoisted this paper upon their shoulders to push anti-mask bullshit.
    - timr 6y ago
      "they explicitly say the paper doesn't show masks are ineffective" No paper can ever show that. You cannot prove a negative (except in extremely bounded cases, of which the mask proposition is not one). This is why statistical studies attempt to provide evidence supporting an alternative hypothesis. If you cannot accept the alternative hypothesis, you must accept the null. Studies do not attempt to disprove the alternative hypothesis, and accept it otherwise. This study attempted to find statistically convincing evidence that masks provided personal protection, and failed to do so. Does it mean that they have proven that masks don't work? Of course not. There are many reasons why they might have failed to detect a real effect. But it does imply that whatever effect is being hypothesized is smaller than the power of the study they used to detect it.
pjmorris 6y ago
Limitations summary, quoted directly from Benfield study[0]: > Limitation: Inconclusive results, missing data, variable adherence, patient-reported findings on home tests, no blinding, and no assessment of whether masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others. I would not be quick to promulgate or depend on the study. [0] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817 https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
- goalieca 6y ago
  It is easy to dismiss any scientific study based on their limitations but to date, no other study has attempted to place any controls. We have mechanistic models based on incomplete transmission knowledge (is it airborne?) and we have observational studies where we look at what happened and attempt to adjust for certain variables. It seems obvious by now that universal mask policies have not been very effective at controlling the transmission rate when compared to other variables: known and unknown. Maybe it is a little bit effective but that has not been conclusively shown yet. Where I live, the Ro value dropped below 1 before masks were required and shot well above 1 months later. Compliance is high, probably as high as any public health policy
  - kemitchell 6y ago
    Does it matter if other studies have done better? If no study to date has met standards, do we lower the standards until a published study rises to the occasion? I hope not. After all, the point of standards includes defense against confounding---your "other variables", known and unknown---especially in combo with motivated reasoning. During a pandemic, reason doesn't lack for motivation! As for studies that do meet standards, they are hard, not easy, to dismiss. That work tends to get meta-analyzed and synthesized, not brushed off, at least by the reader community at large. I wish more of it got replicated, too, but that's a different thread. Meanwhile, we still have to make decisions. But not entirely without scientific guidance. We can reason from studies of how the disease spreads and how potential countermeasures work. We can argue by analogy to what science has revealed about apparently similar phenomenon, like flu. Those aren't scientific arguments so much as other kinds of arguments hopefully informed by science. Pending better science as such, that's what we've got.
addicted 6y ago
The study doesn’t even attempt to measure whether or not masks protect others, which, until recently, was the only claim health organizations were making. So the study doesn’t even attempt to study the primary effect of mask wearing. Beyond that, as the link tm Taleb’s blog posted by a commenter below shows, if anything, the study shows a positive effect for mask wearers.
chatzi 6y ago
TLDR of Talib's take: The study says: "We are not sure whether wearing a mask OUTSIDE YOUR HOUSE (but not at home) will give you more protection than distancing from catching Covid INSIDE YOUR HOUSE." Statistically, junk!

It is interesting to note that Thomas Lars Benfield's Danish mask study, whose empirical results are at odds with the "majoritarian view" mentioned in the article, has yet to be reported by the BBC.

nojito 6y ago

Because there are actual peer-reviewed studies about mask use and COVID. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3003_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3003_article https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6947e2-H.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6947e2-H.pdf

jjgreen 6y ago
Benfield's study has been peer-reviewed and published in Annals of Internal Medicine.
- acqq 6y ago
  As Anthony Fauci already pointed, one study can be both peer reviewed and be wrong.
  - acqq 6y ago
    I refer to July 31, 2020: https://news.yahoo.com/fauci-shoots-down-flawed-hydroxychloroquine-183931215.html https://news.yahoo.com/fauci-shoots-down-flawed-hydroxychlor... Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.): "it was peer reviewed" Fauci: "It doesn't matter. You can peer review something that's a bad study."
- liversage 6y ago
  And the conclusion was that based on the data they were not able to determine if face masks protects you from infection or not. For some reason this has led to media concluding that face masks do not protect you but that's not the same. Another important effect of wearing a face mask is that it may protect other people from being infected by you but that effect was not part of the study.
- chillacy 6y ago
  ESP (extra sensory perception for predicting the future) has been peer reviewed. Stripped of all the political connotations it's actually kind of an interesting debate for scientists to have. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/science/06esp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/science/06esp.html

ahelwer 6y ago

Taleb has been going pretty hard all week on how that study doesn't demonstrate what certain people really, really want it to demonstrate: https://fooledbyrandomnessdotcom.wordpress.com/2020/11/25/hypothesis-testing-in-the-presence-of-false-positives-the-flaws-in-the-danish-mask-study/ https://fooledbyrandomnessdotcom.wordpress.com/2020/11/25/hy... Check out his Twitter feed for more.

jjgreen 6y ago
I await his peer-reviewed response with interest.
- ahelwer 6y ago
  He isn't responding to the claims in the actual paper (which are quite weak - they explicitly say the paper doesn't show masks are ineffective) but rather the crowd of charlatans who have hoisted this paper upon their shoulders to push anti-mask bullshit.
  - timr 6y ago
    "they explicitly say the paper doesn't show masks are ineffective" No paper can ever show that. You cannot prove a negative (except in extremely bounded cases, of which the mask proposition is not one). This is why statistical studies attempt to provide evidence supporting an alternative hypothesis. If you cannot accept the alternative hypothesis, you must accept the null. Studies do not attempt to disprove the alternative hypothesis, and accept it otherwise. This study attempted to find statistically convincing evidence that masks provided personal protection, and failed to do so. Does it mean that they have proven that masks don't work? Of course not. There are many reasons why they might have failed to detect a real effect. But it does imply that whatever effect is being hypothesized is smaller than the power of the study they used to detect it.

pjmorris 6y ago

Limitations summary, quoted directly from Benfield study[0]: > Limitation: Inconclusive results, missing data, variable adherence, patient-reported findings on home tests, no blinding, and no assessment of whether masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others. I would not be quick to promulgate or depend on the study. [0] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817 https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817

goalieca 6y ago
It is easy to dismiss any scientific study based on their limitations but to date, no other study has attempted to place any controls. We have mechanistic models based on incomplete transmission knowledge (is it airborne?) and we have observational studies where we look at what happened and attempt to adjust for certain variables. It seems obvious by now that universal mask policies have not been very effective at controlling the transmission rate when compared to other variables: known and unknown. Maybe it is a little bit effective but that has not been conclusively shown yet. Where I live, the Ro value dropped below 1 before masks were required and shot well above 1 months later. Compliance is high, probably as high as any public health policy
- kemitchell 6y ago
  Does it matter if other studies have done better? If no study to date has met standards, do we lower the standards until a published study rises to the occasion? I hope not. After all, the point of standards includes defense against confounding---your "other variables", known and unknown---especially in combo with motivated reasoning. During a pandemic, reason doesn't lack for motivation! As for studies that do meet standards, they are hard, not easy, to dismiss. That work tends to get meta-analyzed and synthesized, not brushed off, at least by the reader community at large. I wish more of it got replicated, too, but that's a different thread. Meanwhile, we still have to make decisions. But not entirely without scientific guidance. We can reason from studies of how the disease spreads and how potential countermeasures work. We can argue by analogy to what science has revealed about apparently similar phenomenon, like flu. Those aren't scientific arguments so much as other kinds of arguments hopefully informed by science. Pending better science as such, that's what we've got.

addicted 6y ago

The study doesn’t even attempt to measure whether or not masks protect others, which, until recently, was the only claim health organizations were making. So the study doesn’t even attempt to study the primary effect of mask wearing. Beyond that, as the link tm Taleb’s blog posted by a commenter below shows, if anything, the study shows a positive effect for mask wearers.

chatzi 6y ago

TLDR of Talib's take: The study says: "We are not sure whether wearing a mask OUTSIDE YOUR HOUSE (but not at home) will give you more protection than distancing from catching Covid INSIDE YOUR HOUSE." Statistically, junk!