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Comment by glofish | Hacker News Reader

What is your interpretation of the following quote then?

> The pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks.

> There were no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infection.

Who is the "believer" in your opinion? The one that after reading the above says "mask don't work" or the person that says "but, masks might still work"

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It seems very problematic to provide those quotes without the immediately preceding context:

> There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect.

> Who is the "believer" in your opinion? The one that after reading the above says "mask don't work" or the person that says "but, masks might still work"

In the face of known uncertainty, the only conclusions one can draw are ”masks might work” and “masks might not work”. The person who concludes “masks don’t work” based on this analysis alone did not understand the analysis.

The conclusion seems far closer to “we don’t really know”, than “masks do nothing”.

Thank you for this. Exactly my take but I didn’t write as I’m sick and tired to speak reasons with the worst categories of believers: the ones accusing you of being one while applying their own logic like OP

But it’s the same thing, in the end, effectively. Isn’t it?

That highly depends on what you mean by “thing” and how you define “effectively”, but in general, not as far as I can tell?

If we learned tomorrow through some better study with more certain data that masks reduced deaths by X percent, I don’t think you could fairly claim that during the period of time without that information, behaving as if masks did nothing was the same as behaving as if they are effective.

The cost of betting wrong is asymmetrical in the two scenarios.

Right.

But consider actual masking practice, rather than the theoretical undertaking.

In practice, they are used in a way that legitimises closer contact (socialising, working, travelling, supporting) than would otherwise be appropriate.

At the point it matters, for example getting to see an elderly relative in hospital, masking isn’t effective enough that it should be counted. Yet it is.

If I was to make a bet, it would be that if masks are eventually identified as being useful, the confounding factor is exactly that they make us increase contact so much that it offsets their entire benefit.

> In practice, they are used in a way that legitimises closer contact (socialising, working, travelling, supporting) than would otherwise be appropriate.

You are seamlessly slipping from a claim of practice back to just a theory.

Those are fine things to speculate about, and lead to some interesting conversations, but these are not practical claims.

One could further speculate that the emotional needs of a deeply social species would have still overridden whatever guidance was given, and in a no-mask world the primary difference might be that some people mentally adjust for a greater degree of perceived risk (and still carry out their planned visit) than they otherwise would have.

If your bet is correct, I think it's necessary to consider more than one dimension of benefit when evaluating the overall scenario, e.g. the benefit of seeing one's loved ones one last time (and similar scenarios) needs to be considered when evaluating which policy would have been better (assuming the impact of a masking policy is roughly equal to the impact of a non-masking policy).

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