I wish we had spent the last 26 years teaching people that the reason the 2000 bug didn't destroy a significant amount of our infrastructure is because *we caught it* and *spent thousands of hours fixing it* BEFORE the year 2000

@johnzajac worthwhile pointing out that many websites displayed an impossible time due to a Y2K issue in Perl. The world did not stop.

Also, the consulting companies made out like bandits. They used the concept of Y2K compliance to drive business.

Because of that I am always cautious about Y2K as an analogy.

I wish we had spent the last 26 years teaching people that the reason the 2000 bug didn't destroy a significant amount of our infrastructure is because *we caught it* and *spent thousands of hours fixing it* BEFORE the year 2000

Because within that little perplexion - people thinking the problem was a hoax because it was fixed before it destroyed shit - is an encapsulation of the current era of Western politics, including COVID mitigation, lesser evil politics, fascism, and crime rate hyperbole

I wish we had spent the last 26 years teaching people that the reason the 2000 bug didn't destroy a significant amount of our infrastructure is because *we caught it* and *spent thousands of hours fixing it* BEFORE the year 2000

Because within that little perplexion - people thinking the problem was a hoax because it was fixed before it destroyed shit - is an encapsulation of the current era of Western politics, including COVID mitigation, lesser evil politics, fascism, and crime rate hyperbole

@pjakobs @syllopsium

Look up AJ Leonardi, mask denialism, the "airborne" controversy, Long COVID denialism, "hybrid immunity", Great Barrington Declaration, and "immunity debt" if you doubt me.

These are all classic examples of how a community of experts, cut off from their comfort zones, made incredibly bad decisions based on out-of-date information or just full-stop made up notions. But still couched it in the language of expertise, which led to devastating policy errors.

@johnzajac

So there are a few things here:

- Scientists deal with reality and our current understanding of it. To speculte beyond that is generally frowned upon as non-scientific, and spoken about in terms of probabilities
- Words have different meanings in the scientific language, best exampified by the word "Theory" which almost has opposite meaning between scientific and every day language.

Given this, the mistake is to expect scientists to make political decisions.

@syllopsium

@johnzajac

Science can inform, tell us what we know, what may be probable to happen. and what may be less probable.

Mask mandates are a good point to discuss this: early on, all the data we had for masks efficacy was from hospital studies, there were, to my knowledge, no large published studies on the effects of masks in public Areals.

The correct, scientific thing to say is "we have no data".

It's for politicians to gather data and make desicions.

@syllopsium

@pjakobs @syllopsium

When I hear you describe scientists, I hear someone describing an ideology, not a group of practitioners who have a body of knowledge and a mastery of a method designed to guide them in uncovering progressively more true aspects of our reality.

"Not making political decisions" is making a political decision, and especially in this era of "data is God" scientists are, whether they want to be or not, political.

That they are not taught this is a failure of their education

@pjakobs @syllopsium

As I said, both hospital studies and RCTs are batshit dumb ways to "study the efficacy of masks", because masks are *engineered* and *thoroughly tested* for efficacy in absolute terms.

The way respirators protect from particles is well known and undisputed.

"Will people wear masks wrong" and "are masks effective" are categorically different questions.

One is a failure of training and execution. The other is an answered question of physics and engineering.

I wish we had spent the last 26 years teaching people that the reason the 2000 bug didn't destroy a significant amount of our infrastructure is because *we caught it* and *spent thousands of hours fixing it* BEFORE the year 2000

Because within that little perplexion - people thinking the problem was a hoax because it was fixed before it destroyed shit - is an encapsulation of the current era of Western politics, including COVID mitigation, lesser evil politics, fascism, and crime rate hyperbole

@johnzajac

Science can inform, tell us what we know, what may be probable to happen. and what may be less probable.

Mask mandates are a good point to discuss this: early on, all the data we had for masks efficacy was from hospital studies, there were, to my knowledge, no large published studies on the effects of masks in public Areals.

The correct, scientific thing to say is "we have no data".

It's for politicians to gather data and make desicions.

@syllopsium

@pjakobs

But this is recapitulating one of the early mistakes about mask science. We _did_ have data - on the size of aerosol particles likely to carry viruses, and the size of particles caught by different filter materials. When you know the physics, you can deduce things directly about the efficacy of different types of masks, without having to wait for them to be used inconsistently by humans and then try to sieve the resulting signal out of the noise.

(Then of course we run into the denial that airborne was important. But quite a lot of people were right about that from day 1, and had data to strongly suggest it should be taken seriously. I've not forgiven the WHO for denying it.)

@johnzajac @syllopsium

@unchartedworlds

I will just say: what would have been a better approach.

Scientists are sometimes a weird bunch, only trying to state publicly what they are absolutely sure of, and hopefully only for the field they have expertise in.

So if you ask a virologist "do masks work" they will look for a study of reduced infectivity.

@johnzajac is right, we have good engineering data on masks, but that's engineering data, not scientific, and it would not be a virologist's expertise.

@syllopsium

@unchartedworlds

The WHO is a different beast, that's a public health commitee, they're job is it to collect the available data and make policy proposals.

I guess that's where the gravity of the situation makes an impact: you see something coming that is large, do you cry "wolf"? How often do we see things that turn out to be nothing burgers? At what point *was* it obvious that mask mandates were the best first course of action?

@johnzajac @syllopsium

@unchartedworlds

In January/February 2020, I was in New Zealand, and it was interesting to see that the Asian Population there started to mask upon the first news from Hubei, in fact, I remember first learning about it from a receptionist at a motel in Christchurch who wore a mask. That was in the last week of January, a full two months before any measures were taken back home in Germany.

I guess what I wanted to say is: I am not sure that it is that easy.

@johnzajac @syllopsium

@unchartedworlds

In January/February 2020, I was in New Zealand, and it was interesting to see that the Asian Population there started to mask upon the first news from Hubei, in fact, I remember first learning about it from a receptionist at a motel in Christchurch who wore a mask. That was in the last week of January, a full two months before any measures were taken back home in Germany.

I guess what I wanted to say is: I am not sure that it is that easy.

@johnzajac @syllopsium

@pjakobs @unchartedworlds @syllopsium

The answer, of course, is "ask an engineer" or "yes", because ostensibly you'd know that answering outside of your knowledge level was, not to put too fine a point on it, foolish.

The entire purpose of the "precautionary principle" is to assume the worst and be proven wrong, because to assume otherwise and be proven wrong results in... 300+ million deaths and the worst mass disability and persistent chronic illness crisis in human history.

@pjakobs

Did you ever read this article about the aerosol / droplet argument? It's interesting.

https://archive.ph/ifEwW

@johnzajac @syllopsium

@unchartedworlds

I had not, thank you.

I don't think it changes things.
We agree that early in, mistakes werde made, heck, even some of the virologists I trust most were initiallly dismissive about mask efficacy (Vincent Racaniello) and had to correct themselves.
Would it have been wetter to know then what we know now? Absolutely!
Did we?
The article is written through the eyes if people who challenged consesnus at the time and it turned out they were right

@johnzajac @syllopsium

@unchartedworlds

I had not, thank you.

I don't think it changes things.
We agree that early in, mistakes werde made, heck, even some of the virologists I trust most were initiallly dismissive about mask efficacy (Vincent Racaniello) and had to correct themselves.
Would it have been wetter to know then what we know now? Absolutely!
Did we?
The article is written through the eyes if people who challenged consesnus at the time and it turned out they were right

@johnzajac @syllopsium

@unchartedworlds

That's great, that‘s how science should work. Would it have been better to understand this earlier? To self-correct quicker? Yes.
I am by no means saying everything went right, not by a long shot, I‘m saying that, in the situation back then, I understand why people werde unwilling to go out on a limb.

I said it earlier: to me, the situation was easy, I believe I understood the situation as good as I could, I had access to developing information

@johnzajac @syllopsium