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Your examples of parachutes and masks are not examples of useful truths that don’t meet standards of scientific evidence. They are examples of useful truths that have not been tested through double blind randomized control experiments.

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.

Deriving from first principles is not the only way parachutes, masks can be proved to be effective.

We don't need humans to be attached to parachutes, to test that parachutes work.

There is various research on masks effectiveness too.

Sure, but in a legal regulatory context, "scientific evidence" means different things than your "reasonable definition".

It is a too charitable interpretation. Another interpretation of not requiring hard evidence is to imprison somebody just because police thinks that they look guilty.

Scientists are flawed. There is a replication crisis in soft science fields. Still scientific method is still a mile above anything else out there.

"randomised trials" is not the gold standard of scientific evidence it just one method and there are a lots of other methods. It's used in medicine because we have a very weak understanding of what's going on and it's the only method that permit us to progress in this situation : It permit us to get some useful results without having a working model of the situation.

> Like foam rolling, or running on your toes instead of your heels.

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.

How do masks not meet the scientific standard of efficacy? I understand you're not making an anti-mask argument, but I'm just genuinely curious to understand why you say this. Besides the obvious benefit of masks mitigating the spray of viral aerosol, as far as I am aware, masks have a lot of scientific support for their efficacy.

Not OP, but the primary studies saying masks are effective are basically experiments of function, such as, does a mask block particles more than not wearing a mask? However, studies on their effectiveness in the past have never found actual protection from diseases. For example if every one covers their mouth were they sneeze anyways, then what is a mask really doing? Do people touch their face more often with masks, reuse masks, and actually bring more particles to their face? Diseases are not all airborn and live on surfaces, so is all this interaction with your face to large untrained groups actually increasing the risks? The best we have now is comparing groups of people or states with different policies, which is also not proving masks are effective, but could that cause be due to people still following rules even though the policy isn’t forced or some other unknown reason such as hers immunity being reached, etc.

Or so much of science is filled with jargon that a regular person isn't going to bother understanding. This is why I never call BS on folk stories and such. Even with every story there is a grain of truth to it. Regardless of how much BS.

In the field of psychology and trying to determine what's going on in some particular person's mind, "common sense" doesn't really work, even if it may sometimes work in more objective scientific fields.

Here is the paper about parachute in your example: https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5343

To be fair, the last wave suggests that wearing masks has no effect in this pandemic[0][1]. Comparing Sweden and Germany (which have at least similar health systems and count similarly) the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 is about the same, where Swedes rarely wear any masks and in Germany it is mandatory indoors (accessible to the public) and even mandatory in some zones outdoors.

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...

“Viri” is not the plural of “virus”. https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-the-plural-of-virus-112199

Personally, being a compulsive perfectionist, I always use “virus” in English as a mass noun, and never pluralize 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.

The guy I knew who used “scenarii” instead of “scenarios” would probably drive you up the wall :)

Indeed.

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.

Bravo, this made my day. Kudos to you. :)

I'm impressed to see spring 2020 WHO mask denialism persist all way into this season.

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.

I'm not impressed so much as dismayed. My theory is that it is warfare by decentralized means, worked through witting and unwitting subjects.

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’m both impressed and dismayed that both of your comments don’t do a single thing to refute mask denialism, specifically whatever his point is on Sweden and Germany.

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.

Why not compare Sweden and Norway, in many ways a better comparison in culture, population density and geography than Sweden and Germany? …oh.

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.

There's a thing called a Gish Gallop (all this is actually rather on topic for discussions of lying) where the counter to someone arguing your points, is to pivot and rapidly throw out more points, pretty much anything you like, too fast to properly refute. It's a rather effective tactic for socially disabling an argumentative opponent: just not for anything truth-related. Might not be truth-related but it's still very real.

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.

Effectiveness of masks should be so easy to proof, but just isn't. It should be obvious to anyone when you're so desperate.

Btw Swedes live mostly in the south and in big cities (100k+). You didn't even check that.

He was using the equivalent of a Facebook infographic to "prove" that epidemiologists are wrong.

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

My thought pattern is deranged, because I compare countries with similar state of health care. One where masks are mandatory and one where it isn't. Well, Sweden also has no lockdown, but it pretty much does not matter since the death count in countries should be way higher if most people do not wear masks even indoor.

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.

There are actually a lot of reasons masks are not effective. Obviously they block particles but do they actually stop the spread of disease is the question, and the evidence there is extremely questionable. Besides the posters arguments and comparisons, there is the obvious question of why did we see this winter surge when all lockdowns and masks mandates were imposed and at their highest peak? If everyone is covering their mouth when they sneeze then or appropriately staying home when they get sick, would that be as effective as blocking particles, your hand or elbow is much better protection than masks as they are non permeable. Why is it that the supposed white right wing anti-maskers have the lowest death rate of any ethnicity? These are not easy questions to answer and I’m not saying they are all not able to be explained but the effectiveness of masks is very far from proven.