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Comment by yostrovs | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps it's time to realize that scientists in some fields are not able to use their science for predicting purposes, unlike scientists in other fields. And therefore we should reconsider the use of words like "expert" to differentiate people's qualifications. As an example, I had a postdoc who works with viruses tell me, at the start of the pandemic, that masks don't make any difference. I laughed it off and went to wear a mask before it was recommended to the public. And yet I was right, in a sense, that they do offer some benefit. And he was just wrong. And yet he was an "expert" in this field. But was he or is his science not effective at giving him the powers to predict?

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He would likely base that comment on the fact that no pre-2020 RCT studies of masks (over decades) showed any significant protective effect against aerosol-spread respiratory viruses.

Covid epidemic curves globally similarly showed no change as a result of mask mandates.

And a massive outbreak of influenza was not deterred by a fully masked U. Mich campus.

They seem to provide a psychological benefit to some though.

As you tell it, he was certainly wrong that masks don't make any difference, even given what he knew at the time.

It's an area where precision can account for large changes in meaning. For example, it's true that the holes in an N95 mask are much larger than the viruses, but they're not much larger than the airborne droplets that contain the virus. There are ways to truly aerosolize the virus itself, but that's not how this virus is transmitted. He couldn't be sure of the transmission, but he would be wrong to assert that masks couldn't help.

It's possible that he was just dumb, or that he said something slightly different from what you report. Even an expert can be Just Plain Wrong.

Science as a whole always works from incomplete information, and revises itself. That happens even in the hardest sciences, like the way Newton's theory gave way to Einstein's. What's the same is the underlying process of trying to continually improve.

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