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Comment by ryanjshaw | Hacker News Reader

If you want to be truly scientific you also need to discuss the risks of mask wearing. Then, in relation to COVID response, you have to weigh up the costs vs. benefits of a mask wearing policy.

Some of those costs are hard to quantify scientifically or intangible e.g. restrictions on individual freedom, and even the scientifically quantifiable data may have large variability so you have to take an opionated position. Different cultures will obviously take different positions due to different weights they place on risks and values.

Therefore, at this point you leave the realm of science and enter the realm of politics. For whatever reason, people like to pretend it's entirely a scientific discussion but it's not.

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> Therefore, at this point you leave the realm of science and enter the realm of politics. For whatever reason, people like to pretend it's entirely a scientific discussion but it's not.

I mean discussions are typically both science and politics. Masks lower the amount of people that get sick is scientific fact; why do you think they wear them in the operating room? Whether or not that is "worth" wearing a mask is politics though. However, if you want to convince people of something (aka politics) you may want to appeal to them using logic and for that you'll want to use facts.

Having large variability doesn't make something not a fact. Plenty of males 20-24 do not get in car accidents but that doesn't mean that none of them will or that if you were to insure say 100k males 20-24 and 100k females 20-24 that the males wouldn't in aggregate have higher claims. But given a specific male and specific female its entirely possible that the female gets into an accident first.

> if you want to convince people of something (aka politics) you may want to appeal to them using logic and for that you'll want to use facts

I used to think this way, but this advice needs to be conditional.

Dispassionate or distant parties can sometimes use facts to drive a decision. It's not even clear that it's the "correct" decision, since nobody has all the facts, and presentation, ordering, accessibility all matter tremendously.

Once you add an emotional reaction, well, people will logically or rationally pick or ignore facts to justify the emotion. Surely you've had someone tell you that you logically shouldn't be angry, and you greatly appreciated that insight and recalculated your emotions, right?

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/01/logic-or-emot...

If you argue purely with logic you won't convince everybody but that doesn't mean you won't ever want to appeal to somebody with logic; just that not _every_ time you won't want to.

The different words in "Pathos, Logos, and Ethos" all have their place and if somebody is acting emotionally it'd be better to use a Pathos arguement.

They're worn in theater to prevent the surgical team from contaminating the sterile field they're all huddled together around.

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