6 ms·

Well, it depends on the topic. Choosing rationally between the most green of two tomatoes is easy. You are limited by your ability to distinguish colors but you

• not2b 5y ago
  A rationalist would recognize that we update our beliefs as new evidence is available and not attack people for having erroneous beliefs before that evidence was available. The "masks don't work" advice was active for a short time in March 2020 and almost immediately dumped. They thought at the time that only n95 masks would be good enough, these masks were in short supply and health care workers needed them, this was the "politics" of it. But by mid March 2020 people were already being encouraged to make cloth masks and how to do it. That is when my daughter got out the sewing machine and made a bunch, based on instructions from nurses.
  • polote 5y ago
    There was no new evidence. I'm not sure we have even learned anything regarding the efficacy of masks trough the pandemic. All what we know was already known prior of it.
    • kbelder 5y ago
      'We' as the scientific community may not have, but 'we' the unwashed public learned much.
      • polote 5y ago
        Being rational doesn't prevent you to be wrong. If your assumption is that the government tells the truth and you conclude that mask don't work. Then you have reasoned rationally. But if you dont trust the governement, and for this specific case you followed them, then this is not rational.
        • mcguire 5y ago
          Aside: As a general rule of thumb, conspiracy theories are not rational.
          • UnFleshedOne 5y ago
            2 years ago I would agree with you 100%. Lately though conspiracy theories become conspiracy facts with alarming frequency. And the speed with which media reaches "We've always been at war with Eastasia" zeitgeist on each shift does not inspire confidence.
    • btilly 5y ago
      First, there is active research and we demonstrably have learned something. See https://aricjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13756-020-00763-0 https://aricjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1375..., https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7, and https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118 for several examples. Second, your simplistic analysis demonstrated that you, personally, are ignorant of the real tradeoffs involved in whether masks work. Wearing a mask reduces how much virus leaves your mouth. But when you breathe out, most of the virus is in larger droplets that quickly hit the ground. However breathing out through a mask creates perfect conditions to create an aerosol, which can allow more of the virus to stay in the air for an indefinite period of time. So there is a tradeoff, and there were reasons to question whether cloth masks were better than simple social distancing. It turns out that what matters most is not that you get exposed, but rather the initial viral load that you get. You see, the virus will go on an exponential growth until the relatively fixed time it takes the immune system to figure things out and start shutting it down. If the virus gets a solid head start, the odds of serious illness go up. Therefore the lingering aerosol from a mask is (except if it accumulates in poorly ventilated indoor spaces) of less concern than an unmasked person talking directly to you. So the result is that masks work. Even crappy cloth masks work.
      • varjag 5y ago
        …and as they mentioned, we knew that masks work already.
        • btilly 5y ago
          The quality of our evidence is easy to misjudge in retrospect. The last opportunity to study the effectiveness of mandating low-quality masks in preventing community spread during a pandemic was around a century old. (Literally, the Spanish Flu epidemic.) In the meantime a lot of new and untried modeling tools were in use, as well as updated disease models, and lots of reasons to question old data. See https://www.albertahealthservices.ca/assets/info/ppih/if-ppih-covid-19-sag-mask-use-in-community-rapid-review.pdf https://www.albertahealthservices.ca/assets/info/ppih/if-ppi... for an idea of what was reasonable for educated specialists in public health to believe. Note phrases like, "There was agreement that although the evidence base is poor, the use of masks in the community is likely to be useful in reducing transmission from community based infected persons, particularly those with symptomatic illness." So it is accurate to say that we had reason to believe that masks work. But it is easy to overstate how much we "knew" it to be true at the time.
  • tunesmith 5y ago
    What a lot of people have forgotten is that in March 2020, they thought COVID was droplets, not aerosol - remember all the emphasis on washing hands and hand sanitizer? - and as such, masks would be overkill for most. Combine that with the worry that people would hoard masks when PPE was in short supply for people would be interacting directly with patients, then the initial discouragement on masks seems more understandable. As the science changed to suggest that COVID was aerosol, scientific opinions on masks got updated as well. It also didn't help that some hyper-rational people got hung up on ranting about how masks weren't perfect, and how the virus could still get through if you wore a mask. It was as if they imagined they heard someone said "masks are 100% effective" and really really wanted to register their counterpoints. So they said "they don't work!" when they meant "they're not 100% effective!", and other people heard "they don't work!" and took it to mean "they're 0% effective!" That's one of those patterns you start to see all over the place when you know to look for it - people confusing "there exists" and "forall".
• notsureaboutpg 5y ago
  >You are limited by your ability to distinguish colors but you can still decide rationally. Rationally, the ability to distinguish colors varies between human beings, so much so that with a sufficient number of tomatoes (say 50), you will have different people have different answers for which are the greenest. Knowing that your ability to distinguish these colors of tomatoes might not be as strong as, say, a tomato farmer's (since he likely works with these specific fruits and colors all the time), you may be rationally inclined to follow his logic in choosing which are the greenest. Do you follow your intuition or trust an expert? Your contrived example is already difficult to actually make the most rational decision for.
• dahfizz 5y ago
  > You could just say, well, if we transmit covid by air, then putting something in front of my mouth is going to decrease the spread. That's what is being rational. If I squint at a statement like this, I guess it could be called rational, but it is certainly not rigorous or convincing. You brush over too much and are making lots of assumptions. Are these statements rational? The sun is warm, so if I climb a ladder I will be closer to the sun and therefore warmer. Masks impede airflow, so if I wear a mask I will suffocate. Bleach kills germs, so drinking bleach will make me healthier. It is very easy to make an incorrect idea seem rational. You should wear masks because rigorous science tells us that it is effective. That is the only valid justification. "Common sense" is used to justify a lot of junk science.
  • nonameiguess 5y ago
    I think yes, you can call those statements rational, but that just gets at an additional level of difficulty here. Bayes only gets you so far as holding a belief with maximum probability it is true, given some level of seen evidence. To actually get maximally probably true beliefs without the qualification, you need to actually gather more evidence. In some cases, that may just mean accumulating knowledge that other people already generated, but in some cases, you may need to generate knowledge from scratch. The ability to do that may be severely bounded by resource and time constraints. One person can't personally do all science, so now you need division of labor and assignment of workers to efforts, so you need optimal matching and scheduling algorithms. These are theoretically not computationally intractable, but the algorithms rely upon pre-existing accurate ability and preference ranking, so now you need to go back to information gathering and suddenly you have a bootstrapping problem here that feeding your algorithm the data it needs to tell you how to gather data in the first place requires you to gather data first.
  • clairity 5y ago
    > "You should wear masks because rigorous science tells us that it is effective." you've really just glossed over the hard part, which is when and where masks work, which is in turn the difficult political problem to solve. simplifying, covid spreads mouth-to-mouth with a brief stint in the air, not mouth-to-air-then-(much)-later-to-mouth, which is the mediopolitical narrative that's being pushed vehemently but irrationally, and upon which masking policies are erroneously based. what's always ignored in these narratives is that the virus falls apart quickly all by itself outside the cozy confines of the body, not to mention floats away to oblivion quickly when outside. if we're really concerned about masks working, we'd have to force people to wear them among friends and family in private spaces like homes, not outside and in grocery stores where they have basically no effect. "masks work" is a grossly overreaching blanket political statement, not a summary of "the science". scientific evidence suggests masks reduce droplets (and aerosols, with better masks) being ejected into the air. there's less clear evidence that it reduces airborne viral particles being inhaled through the mask. but there's almost no evidence that the way we've deployed masks is doing much other than signalling our fears and concerns. i'd be open to supporting mask policies that are based on actual evidence (e.g., wear them when socializing at home), but not the mediopolitically fearmongering policies we have.
• mcguire 5y ago
  > At the beginning of the pandemic, when politics were saying mask dont work. Are straw-man statements rational? "Then there is the infamous mask issue. Epidemiologists have taken a lot of heat on this question in particular. Until well into March 2020, I was skeptical about the benefit of everyone wearing face masks. That skepticism was based on previous scientific research as well as hypotheses about how covid was transmitted that turned out to be wrong. Mask-wearing has been a common practice in Asia for decades, to protect against air pollution and to prevent transmitting infection to others when sick. Mask-wearing for protection against catching an infection became widespread in Asia following the 2003 SARS outbreak, but scientific evidence on the effectiveness of this strategy was limited. "Before the coronavirus pandemic, most research on face masks for respiratory diseases came from two types of studies: clinical settings with very sick patients, and community settings during normal flu seasons. In clinical settings, it was clear that well-fitting, high-quality face masks, such as the N95 variety, were important protective equipment for doctors and nurses against viruses that can be transmitted via droplets or smaller aerosol particles. But these studies also suggested careful training was required to ensure that masks didn’t get contaminated when surface transmission was possible, as is the case with SARS. Community-level evidence about mask-wearing was much less compelling. Most studies showed little to no benefit to mask-wearing in the case of the flu, for instance. Studies that have suggested a benefit of mask-wearing were generally those in which people with symptoms wore masks — so that was the advice I embraced for the coronavirus, too. "I also, like many other epidemiologists, overestimated how readily the novel coronavirus would spread on surfaces — and this affected our view of masks. Early data showed that, like SARS, the coronavirus could persist on surfaces for hours to days, and so I was initially concerned that face masks, especially ill-fitting, homemade or carelessly worn coverings could become contaminated with transmissible virus. In fact, I worried that this might mean wearing face masks could be worse than not wearing them. This was wrong. Surface transmission, it emerged, is not that big a problem for covid, but transmission through air via aerosols is a big source of transmission. And so it turns out that face masks do work in this case. "I changed my mind on masks in March 2020, as testing capacity increased and it became clear how common asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infection were (since aerosols were the likely vector). I wish that I and others had caught on sooner — and better testing early on might have caused an earlier revision of views — but there was no bad faith involved." "I’m an epidemiologist. Here’s what I got wrong about covid."(https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiology-covid-self-criticism/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiolo...)