Comment by light_hue_1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by light_hue_1 | Hacker News Reader

Sensationalist garbage "science". Scientific American should be ashamed of itself. The author, David J. Lewkowicz from Yale, is trying to shove his totally unrelated study on lip reading into the debate in order to get exposure. As a scientist, I'm ashamed that a colleague would do this on such a serious issue.

There is literally zero evidence that masks are harmful provided in the article or in any of the research done. Not a single study. Not even one number. This article should be titled "I think that masks can be detrimental". And that thought should carry all of the weight of a random conjecture by a random person who knows nothing on the topic because it simply hasn't been studied.

PS: Blind children learn language just fine. There is no significant evidence anywhere that blind children's understanding of language and their ability to speak is any lesser than that of sighted children. So this conjecture by this disgraceful researcher is probably very false.

> There is no significant evidence anywhere that blind children's understanding of language and their ability to speak is any lesser than that of sighted children.

I'm not an expert but this is from a 2015 paper which does a literature review citing many papers arguing just that.

> In summary, although the research to date is not fully supportive of a link between VI and SSP deficits, the mixed evidence provokes compelling reasons to hypothesize that access to visual cues supports early speech perception and subsequent auditory discrimination and phonological mapping.

- Brouwer et al.: SSP Deficits in Children With Visual Impairment (2015) https://pubs.asha.org/doi/pdf/10.1044/cicsd_42_S_33

I would agree it's not exactly an air-tight case (as would Brouwer et al given their hedging), but you are making a very strong claim with "no significant evidence anywhere".

There are many visual cues still apparent with a mask on, therefore it’s challenging to make any assertions on “evidence” on correlations between mask-wearing and the experience of children with visual impairment. (Nevermind the article mostly (and sloppily) addresses the mere existence of masks and not their likely-relevant usage patterns.)

I agree, the article doesn't argue the case very well. It's particularly tricky with the claim about babies, since most of the research on this (in general) deals with older children. (It's hard to study language acquisition in those who can't speak yet!)

I think you may be confusing emotional/gesture communication with visual speech cues. Because there really aren't that many visual cues for speech apparent with a mask on. Lipreading focuses on the lips, jawline, tongue, teeth, and nostrils (all covered up) along with the eyes and eyebrows and throat.

Anecdotally, I'm pretty much deaf, and I can lipread pretty well. I sometimes cannot even tell if someone is speaking or not behind a mask, let alone figure out what they're saying. I am poor at localizing sound. I'll hear a voice, or think I hear a voice, and I'm scanning all the masks trying to figure out which one is wiggling. With my residual hearing and lipreading I used to be able to pass as hearing in most contexts. These days I just do the "No, I'm deaf" up front because I just can't understand most people who are masked. The severity of it surprised me. I knew I relied on lipreading, I just didn't realize it was that much.

From that, it seems almost obvious to me that I would have had a much more language-poor environment in school under such conditions. Unfortunately I don't have much more than anecdote to rely on here; most deaf and HoH people I know have expressed similar sentiments.

There is literally no evidence at all that masks affect development. Never mind significant evidence. None.

That study is a survey of people that work with children who have visual impairments to see what they think. Not only does this have nothing to do with masks, it doesn't even claim there is a link! It just says that we should probably look into seeing if there is a link.

About that study, there are many reasons why they would see this correlation, ones that have nothing to do with anything sensational. Not the least of which is that they don't correct for multiple comparisons and have very weak statistical evidence for a correlation (tables 4 and 5; you give me 20 tries, I'll eventually see something significant if I don't correct for multiple comparisons). That there can easily be simple explanations for their data (the folks being studied who have visual impairments may have them due to genetic causes which are correlated with speech). That their data is biased toward seeing an effect (many children have undiagnosed language deficits or delays, of course if you have a population where experts are paying more attention you will see more deficits when you compare those statistics to the wider population).

This Scientific American article is just shameless propaganda by a scientist who wants to promote his research above the well being of people and society.

I linked that for the extensive literature review at the beginning of the study that touches many papers which largely support their claim. (I find the survey of speech-language-pathologists itself, to be quite uncompelling for the same reasons you do; too subjective.)

If your going to say "as a scientist, I'm ashamed..." because of this, then you should have been ashamed a dozen times by now by the CDC for the equivalent the past two years. Are you? Or is it acceptable when an "authority" does it?

The CDC and the American Academy of Pediatricians has both said very clearly that there is no evidence linking masks with developmental delays or language deficits.

https://www.healthychildren.org/English/health-issues/condit...

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br... "The limited available data indicate no clear evidence that masking impairs emotional or language development in children."

But if you're asking if I'm ashamed of the CDC's pandemic response? A lot of scientists and medical professionals have complained about the CDC. Yes. They have completely botched the messaging on both masks and vaccines. There should have been a simple statement in March 2020: wear a mask. That's it. Instead, they made the issue so incredibly complicated and polarized that almost a million people died.

> The CDC and the American Academy of Pediatricians has both said very clearly that there is no evidence linking masks with developmental delays or language deficits.

In what way is this not simply a naked appeal to authority? Have the CDC or AAP conducted long-running randomized trials to determine what the effects of mass masking might be? From what you have linked, this seems like nothing more than that well-worn rhetorical jibe where they just proclaim "there is no evidence" of some thing they're not actually looking for in the first place.

> Instead, they made the issue so incredibly complicated and polarized that almost a million people died.

Is it your impression that more consistent messaging or public compliance would have prevented all of those deaths?

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