The submission, I agree is the best of HN; the comments, however, are the worst.
Tons of 'bikeshedding' comments offering flippant uninformed analyses that belittle established and well-researched theories. By offering 'back of a cocktail napkin' comments like 'I think such and such theory doesn't get enough attention because of my random opinion', or 'I think such and such likely happened, based on me just ruminating about this for a few minutes, versus doing years of research on'; the comments are tacitly disrespecting the work researchers whose specialty this is put into formulating theories.
We HN users need to learn to just say 'we don't know', instead of playing internet experts in every single discipline a given submission is about.
The majority have nothing of value to say, so will post nothing. The only ones who can realistically offer comments on this article are experts and those who will offer "back of a cocktail napkin" comments (as you put it), and the latter group is so much larger than the former.
But it's beside the point because HN isn't there to add anything to actual research, nor is it going to. It's for people to discuss random interesting Internet things, it's for entertainment. But there does seem to be a nerd contingent that can't accept that it's entertainment and have to believe its some kind of intellectual pursuit.
People enjoy talking about the stuff they read. Discussion is part of how one learns.
If you don't find value in reading non-expert commentary, then don't read it.
> When something makes little sense it's probably based in religion.
> Maybe nobody thought of it so far.
Plus a good handful of comments that don't acknowledge the countervailing evidence in the Wikipedia article much less evidencing any familiarity with the broader literature. Not gonna quibble about whether "belittling" is the right word, but there's certainly some casual hubris in some of these threads.
Bigger picture: it isn't about enjoying amateur commentary or not. There's arguably been a rise, with the democratization of information access, of poorly-grounded self-confidence about understanding every topic one encounters. This attitude, for example, rejects mask-wearing on the grounds that the virus is too small to be caught by the mask (ignoring that the virus is carried in larger droplets/particles). An intelligent person armed with a factoid sometimes needs a reminder like the comment you replied to.
deliciously ironic, considering your continued focus on exactly the wrong thing when it comes to mask effectiveness and policy. you're looking at the base of a tree and trying to draw conclusions about the forest by assuming frictionless cylindrical planes.
What is the right focus? Is this a running discussion between you two?
On the other side there are people who associate masks with the political left, and would be so humiliated to appear cowed by "liberal" authority figures, that they'd refuse to wear a mask even if they were convinced of the medical risk.
I think I'm coming to the conclusion that the majority of mask adherence and refusal isn't rational, but rather religious, in the sense that it's shaped by beliefs that are immune to evidence.
Cloth masks are spit shields, nothing more. As spit shields, there's good evidence for their effectiveness. I've seen no convincing evidence that they're good for anything else.
> they've become a totem for cargo-culting all sorts of inane rituals and behaviors
I was just in the hospital for a week for an unrelated illness. Every person I encountered there said they had been vaccinated, yet they still insisted on masking everyone, even when it made communication difficult.
I'm a little terrified that this madness won't ever end-- that the bureaucratic fervor for masks, distancing, and various degrees of lockdowns will emerge again in response to bad flu seasons, for example.
but with corona, while it's not undeniably confirmed yet, it's quite likely that vaccines dramatically shorten the window of infectiousness, allowing most of the vaccinated to stop wearing masks after a short window (~couple days, iirc). yet, the general recommendation remains that they be worn by the vaccinated public indefinitely. the cdc apparently is now literally doubling-down by recommending two masks be worn by everyone, completely ignoring the human social dynamics that overwhelm the assumed threat model implicit with masks.
if masks--or lockdowns for that matter--were dramatically effective, we'd see it in all the data we've fervently collected and analyzed over the past year. at best, we've found weak correlations all around (i.e., marginal effects), that suffer from unspecificity, because it's hard to unambiguously isolate independent variables from confounding ones in real world epidemiological data.
So? Besides flippant comments (who don't matter anyway), this can also produce valuable new developments.
People who establish new theories and findings about X aren't often the same people who have well examined and respect the old theories on X.
To quote Max Planck (and similar to Kuhn's idea of the same process): "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."