What does that even mean? ... like there is a separate standard of evidence and there is a "we can get by without evidence" standard of evidence?
In sports medicine there are loads of things where the anecdotal evidence is fairly strong and yet there is no rigorous evidence in favour of something. Like foam rolling, or running on your toes instead of your heels. Sometimes these things are hard to study, or simply haven't been studied yet. In those cases it's OK to fall back on anecdotal evidence, particularly when you don't have reason to believe the evidence is biased (like it would be if someone was trying to sell you a product or an ideology). Some of these things I'm sure will turn out to not be real results, if and when "proper" science gets around to studying them. But in the meantime the anecdotal, uncodified folk knowledge is better than useless.
When folk knowledge is "debunked" by science I sometimes still don't rule out that it might be true, because so much science is simply of too poor quality to be able to properly make any such conclusion. See the replication crisis.
I'm a scientist with nothing but respect for the scientific method itself, but "has this been scientifically proven" can be a really weak way to determine what's true and what's not in many cases. In those cases you kind of have to do your own reasoning with the data you have, anecdotal or otherwise, and try to get closest to the truth that you can. Which I think can be a valuable process in practice that shouldn't be discarded merely because it's not "proper" science.
Scientists are also flawed and sometimes publish results in a biased way to conform to an ideology. For example, I expect folk beliefs about gender differences to be somewhat accurate (not perfect), and for the official science to be hopelessly muddled.
But they both have scientific evidence behind them, and by any reasonable definition of meeting standards of scientific evidence, they do. The efficacy of parachutes can be derived from first principles. We know parachutes slow descent. And we know the risk of injury and death caused by force of impact. We can calculate how much a parachute slows descent snd therefore reduces force of impact snd prevents death.
The benefits of wearing masks in reducing the spread of COVID and serious disease through COVID can similarly be derived from first principles but more importantly, there are many comparative population studies that meet the standard of scientific evidence.
We don't need humans to be attached to parachutes, to test that parachutes work.
There is various research on masks effectiveness too.
Scientists are flawed. There is a replication crisis in soft science fields. Still scientific method is still a mile above anything else out there.
These things have been studied numerous times. Head over to r/AdvancedFitness or r/AdvancedRunning and you'll find people seriously disseminating acacemic, peer-reviewed research on precisely these topics.
It can take a while for certain things to go from practitioner consensus to academic consensus. But that doesn't mean academics aren't rigorously studying it. I also have doubts about your mask and parachute examples.
Also when you think about it, the permanent mask usage has some serious hygienic downsides.
1. You need to touch your face way more often (reseat+put on/off)
2. Most masks still allow viri to go through (especially on the sides)
3. Masks are often reused and used for too long (correct usage would need either a lot of money+time or hundreds of masks/month)
The positive effects of masks in this pandemic are pretty debatable especially given the "circumstantial" evidence.
[0]: https://imgur.com/a/MNlOoTN
[1]: https://github.com/owid/covid-19-data/blob/master/public/dat...
Virtually all countries that stuck to mask regimen a year ago despite the misguided advice regurgulated here have the epidemic under control for a long long while.
In other words, there are a bunch of people whose job it is to keep the enemies of their country in mask denialism and maximum COVID infection as deeply as possible, and it's primarily done through social media.
And while it's useful in a sense to put forth such intentions while knowingly coordinating bot networks and the like, it's social engineering that does the heavy lifting: the real effectiveness comes in ways you can't directly control, when people soak up the information around them and begin propagating your message (or weird mutations of it) on their own initiative, thinking they've invented it.
And that's how they getcha. So I'm not the slightest bit impressed or surprised to see spring 2020 memes persisting: they're being fed, on purpose, singlemindedly. I confess to being surprised when the same memes turned up in English in various EU countries, but when the job is to propagate the message, I guess English signs in foreign countries is all part of the game, indeed a normal part of anybody trying to send messages to the West.
I don’t even believe his comment, but I’m not going to sneer at it and call it mask denialism to shut it down. I feel better about his comment at least attempting to state an argument and evidence in support of it.
Anyway, this is a strange tangent for the OP.
See, I didn't specifically went with countering the OP line of argument because refuting BS takes an order of magnitude more effort than slinging it. It's something anyone who did try to reason with generally unreasonable people so abundant lately can attest to. The laminated checklist from March 2020 above just gives that vibe of someone brining up their homework here and all reasoning is going to be futile.
All this relates to discussions of lying because the fundamental structure of the gallop, plus numerous other forms of BSing, requires the implication that everybody is in good faith: you're meant to grant that and then examine the arguments and see how they shake out. There's a lot of stuff happening in modern discourse where an anchor point to the argument is, 'since everyone here is in good faith and we just believe different things, let's break down the sides of the arguments'.
But we're not. When you're desperate enough about winning (or not losing important things), good faith is disposable, and then people lie, for advantage, because they badly need advantage and aren't getting it from truth and good faith.
Hence, the OP question of 'How can you tell if someone is lying?'. People will con themselves, but they will also lie on purpose to accomplish a goal.
Btw Swedes live mostly in the south and in big cities (100k+). You didn't even check that.
His type believes that scientists are part of a cabal that is lying to the public for nefarious reasons.
I won't say that he himself is deranged, but his thought pattern on this issue is.
Anyhow, for those who believe in science: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118
While you were smearing me you missed to make an argument.
You apparently think that you can believe in science as some kind of religion, but that is not how any of this works. There is not single science answer for these kind of topics, so you can't avoid arguments. Try refute it! I wanna see it.
I thus say “several parts of virus” or “several programs of virus”, — an elegant solution, I would say.
And yes, I do say “octopodēs”; I am not some bourgeois peasant.
Such I stand atop such lesser men of lesser etymological knowledge, that I unironically præfer the spelling of “lim”, for the “b” is but a false etymology, an was never there.
I demand nothing less than perfection, and I shall receive it.
I don’t know if that’s what the official means, but all kinds of common sense things never end up being studied because they’re commonly believed to be true.
Edit: having read the article more closely, however, it sounds like the official may be referring to things scientists believe they have debunked.
What we need to be careful of is making judgements about innocence or guilt based on subjective opinion.
Hence, it's a pretty easy tell that this person is lying to you.
Ironic.
I’ll add that I think profiling is a necessary evil in tense situations, and terrible as a blanket policy (racial profiling en masse).