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Comment by Ansil849 | Hacker News Reader

> Tangential to this article, but can I just say that this is HN at its best. Random, curious, snippets of learning on topics that I can’t imagine hearing about anywhere else.

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.

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I don't see any "belittling" comments here, except perhaps yours.

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.

> The real reason must be...

> 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.

> "...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..."

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.

I didn't say anything about mask-wearing itself - just offering an example of naive but faulty reasoning. You're looking for a fight that I'm not interested in having.

then there's plenty of ways to phrase what you said without insinuation and hubris. or perhaps use a less-fraught example.

> your continued focus on exactly the wrong thing when it comes to mask effectiveness and policy.

What is the right focus? Is this a running discussion between you two?

No; as far as I can tell, they're just trolling.

I've developed an obsessive fascination with the social and political aspects of masks. I think very little of our masking behavior is related to actual scientific evidence, on either side of the debate. Many people feel like wearing a mask and cleaning surfaces obsessively is the obvious response to a disease of any sort, even though the evidence overwhelmingly says that COVID is not effectively spread on surfaces, or outside of confined spaces with people sharing breathing air for extended periods of time.

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.

understanding that the issue, like most issues, is multi-faceted at the very least, but that certainly too much consideration and mindshare has been lost to them due to mediopolitical coercion playing on our fears and anxieties. masks have limited utility in most common situations, beyond the fluid mechanics/dynamics at play. they're primarily only useful when you can't (or won't) distance in close quarters, but they've become a totem for cargo-culting all sorts of inane rituals and behaviors en masse, in the service of various forms of power (as a small but pertinent example, medical professionals' career advancements are based on how well they toe the official narrative). masks might snag a given virus particle in a controlled experiment, but they're not going to stop, or even meaningfully slow, this pandemic despite the mediopolitical rhetoric.

Thanks for the reply.

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.

i can actually see hospitals being a place where masks have more legitimacy, not specifically for corona, but for the confluence of many transmissible ailments accumulating there.

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.

This seems like a more general problem with the Internet or even of people (and in particular men of a more technical and nerdy persuasion, in my own experience).

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.

Agreed, I wasn't going to comment on this post because this is something I've never heard of before. There's no point for me to add a comment like "I don't know the reason behind this" because that adds no value to the discussion. Actually discussing ideas whether or not they are researched for years or not adds value to the discussion, because then you can actually discuss where those ideas are wrong or where they could be right.

The point is that any idea you could come up with in 5 minutes has probably been done to death by researchers who actually focus on the topic so no, you're not contributing anything.

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.

Exactly, I'm not claiming to be contributing anything to the research, but contributing to the discussion of the research.

which is great, as long as you're not deluding yourself into thinking that researchers would benefit at all from reading HN discussions of their work. Some people seem to think that they would.

>the comments are tacitly disrespecting the work researchers whose specialty this is put into formulating theories.

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."

They do matter because they decrease signal:noise, lower the quality of conversation, and reinforce a troubling assumption that expertise brings nothing to the table.

We are not here to do science though, and while completely unsubstantiated ideas are frowned upon, it's okay to do some mind exercise and share theories with others. It's fun to read, fun to write, and well above the populist karma-stunts.

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