Steven Pinker on the Tribal Roots of Defying Social Distancing

> potential increased risk of self-contamination due to the manipulation of a face mask and subsequently touching eyes with contaminated hands

This one seems very real to me. I've always been a bit of a germophobe, so I'm careful not to touch my face after shaking hands or using a greasy door knob etc... Now that masks are required in my area (questionably enforced, but an actual mandate from the mayor), if I'm in the grocery store and my mask slips a little, I have to touch the mask to adjust/fix it. Of course my hands have been on the shopping cart and such.

When my gym opens up, they're going to require masks too. I'm not sure how that's going to work when doing cardio. Am I going to be huffing out my sweat through the fabric on my face?

> Mindbogglingly stupid on WHO's part.

WHO is front organisations for a gaggle of medical professionals who between them have a lot of different opinions on the effectiveness of face masks. At the top sits a politician of sorts who job it is to seek a consensus on various topics. His job is comparable to asking computer professional to canvas Hacker News for the consensus position on which is better: react or vue, and report back to the masses on what they should use.

Translation: right now asking for the consensus opinion of the medical fraternity on face masks is asking for something that doesn't exist. Come back in a few years time.

In previous years, when people wanted to cite an "anti-Fox" they would say MSNBC. Nowadays people say CNN.

Is the general perception that CNN is as left wing as Fox is right wing? I only see snippets of each but from that small sample, there is absolutely no comparison. CNN doesn't come across as left wing at all.

> I do wear a mask when I go to the grocery store - I'm not an idiot

I'm very skeptical that my wearing a common mask protects me from anyone else. I do suspect that it reduces the possibility of me infecting someone else (hypothetically, assuming I'm asymptomatic).

I think the parent was asking for sources.

It always baffled me how people keep demanding "evidence" for the benefits of wearing masks when even a simple observation provides it.

There's plenty of videos of experiments you can conduct yourself (like the the aerosol ones or just people trying to blow out a candle) showing how masks stop spreading the virus.

Also, have a look at you own monitor screen. See all the funny, dirty dots? That's your spit. Does that compute now?

And fortunately, it's easy to understand the mechanism of action that explains the positive impact of masks: the primary means of covid spread is virus conveyed not individually but in large water droplets. Any filter that impedes the flow of these droplets is very likely to diminish the spread of the contagion. Therefore, anyone who is physically within the field of oral spray of an infected person should benefit from BOTH parties wearing masks.

If all scientific explanations also came with strong and plausible proposals of causation, science-based advice would be much harder to dismiss, whether that dismissal is motivated by mechanism-free (and evidence-free) theories like tribalism or not.

The paper doesn't actually say that. It says nobody really knows basic things you'd need to determine that, for example:

Given how little is known about the production and airborne behavior of infectious respiratory droplets, it is difficult to define a safe distance for social distancing

There are plenty of scientists saying masks have no effect when worn by people who aren't actually both visibly sick and working in healthcare:

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commenta...

In fact manufacturers of ear loop/cloth masks specifically say they can't stop COVID:

https://off-guardian.org/wp-content/medialibrary/EYZu2Q2X0AA...

The WHO said:

https://www.foxnews.com/world/who-guidance-healthy-people-we...

"If you do not have any respiratory symptoms such as fever, cough or runny nose, you do not need to wear a mask," Dr. April Baller, a public health specialist for the WHO, says in a video on the world health body's website posted in March. "Masks should only be used by health care workers, caretakers or by people who are sick with symptoms of fever and cough."

There's plenty of contradictory research out there. Maybe a mask helps if you're literally coughing up phlegm all over the place, but COVID has a dry cough and obviously symptomatic people don't seem to be the only way it spreads.

This is a good source. I'm baffled by people still asking for "evidence" of mask effectiveness despite tons of proof for it.

Something tells me this comes from people who cannot be satisfied with rational/scientific proof anyway.

In section 7 of the elsewhere-mentioned http://archive.is/QHU1H , Scott Alexander concludes (with explanations) that the initial policy of not recommending masks was not a deliberate attempt to prevent hoarding. Note that, in coming to this conclusion, he reversed his initial opinion on the matter.

And while there is little doubt that maskless protests of any sort cause spreading, there is little evidence so far of them causing the transmision to "explode".

> Similar is the pretense that the race protests wouldn’t explode the transmission of COVID — how could they not?

Well, so far its looking like they did not. There seem to be three reasons:

1. High rate of mask wearing,

2. They were outdoor events where people were moving about a great deal, and

3. Only 1-2% of the attendees were infected.

You need to get a certain amount of a given virus to actually get infected. For most respiratory viruses if you are just briefly near an infected person and they do not do something to emit a large number of viruses at one (such as cough or sneeze right near you) you won't get enough viruses from them to become infected.

Here's an article about this for the Minnesota protests [1].

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/what-minnesotas-protests-are-rev...