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It never takes long to get from "I need to be trusted with the facts!" to demonstrating just gobsmacking levels of willful ignorance. > Social distancing had n

• mike_hearn 1y ago
  Such papers aren't worth much. For example, that meta-review claims masks work. Some other scientists did a different meta-review (the A122 Cochrane Review) that concluded the opposite (strictly speaking, that there was no useful evidence masks worked). If you dig into the details of why they disagree, you'll find none of the studies claiming this stuff works are scientifically valid whilst the Cochrane meta-review is very careful. Real-world reliable evidence > models. So what happened: activists went directly to the head of Cochrane and demanded the review be disowned, which it was, despite it having been signed off on by the org previously and there being no scientific problems identified with the study. That's how they manufacture consensus in the healthcare system: top down orders from corrupt leaders who suppress beliefs and evidence that makes them look bad. They do this because it works. After all, look at this thread. People say, look at all the evidence! Look at the consensus! They can't all be wrong! Yet a system that concludes both yes and no simultaneously isn't worth anything. The institutions of science failed during COVID, and frankly are failing most of the time hence the replication crisis. It's not specific to masks or social distancing. We can play that game for any claim you want to make about COVID, or many other topics. Science is broken. > explain ... evidence that standing close to someone is equal risk to standing further away from them? There are two components to this: 1. There's a threshold value beyond which a non-immune person becomes infected and that viral load in the exposure over that doesn't matter much. Given that viruses replicate that's not surprising. 2. That a sick person can emit infectious aerosols that can hang around in the air for long periods and travel long distances e.g. via air ducts. The intuition you're working from is that SARS-CoV-2 viruses are created in the body, that they travel only in large droplets that fall to the ground quickly due to gravity, and that risk of infection is linear in dose. Thus, being far away from an infected person should reduce the risk linearly. That's the idea the "professionals" used to justify their policies, but it's based on a model that's too far from reality to be useful. It might work for a hypothetical spherical-cow type person standing on a perfectly empty and flat 2D plane, with no air movements. It doesn't work for real world scenarios with complex layouts and complex movements of people, which is why when you look at the behavior of the virus in real settings like the Diamond Princess or jet liners the results are completely different to what the model would predict.
  • sorcerer-mar 1y ago
    Hold on there amigo. What you said is that Fauci had no reason to believe that social distancing would be helpful and knew that it wouldn’t be helpful. I just linked to very clear reason to substantiate his beliefs. Regardless of whether you agree with it or not, and even regardless of whether this view ended up actually being correct, this evidence existed. It is empirically, obviously true there was reason to hold this belief. > Yet a system that concludes both yes and no simultaneously isn't worth anything I see that you’ve never heard of science… which concludes: “we don’t know yet” on most questions most of the time. The reality is we didn’t have high certainty on most of these questions and even still they’re open for debate. But we have to make decisions in the presence of uncertainty all the time! Even the decisions that ended up being wrong during COVID (of which there were plenty) were well within the aperture of reasonability given the conditions they had to be made under. None of this gets even close to the threshold of the government propagating verifiably false information. Not even in the same ballpark. > Such papers aren't worth much. Lol. “How am I so confused about what’s going on?! Must be the institutions’ fault!”
    • mike_hearn 1y ago
      You're citing papers which came after the public health authorities decided it would work, not before. Before the sudden about face the WHO had guidance for how to handle a respiratory virus pandemic. It said don't shut the borders, don't try and socially distance, don't restrict travel. All that was torn up and replaced overnight. But there's nothing to speculate about here. Fauci explicitly told us the idea of social distancing "just appeared", which is easy to confirm just by looking carefully at the timelines. There was no evidence that led to the policy, it was just invented out of thin air. Not my claim: his. And then because academia is corrupt they promptly produced reams of papers claiming it worked great, although real world evidence showed it didn't. You can read these papers for yourself to see how motivated the reasoning is. > The reality is we didn’t have high certainty on most of these questions That's correct! There was uncertainty because there was no evidence these policies worked, which is why people got pissed off when they were presented as 100% dead cert things that only crazy Anti Science People could doubt. At no point did public health officials say, well, this might help or it might not so we'll leave it up to the citizens to decide what to do. Everything was 100% critical and had to be forced via law overnight because Science™. You're trying to excuse what they did by saying they had to make decisions, but they didn't. They could have simply admitted they didn't know, done nothing and left it to individuals and their doctors to decide what to do for themselves. They chose instead to impose policies on the whole world by force, justifying it by claiming they were doing solid science when in reality the policies "just appeared".