A quibble on the masks point because it annoys me every time it’s brought up. As you say, it’s pretty easy to work out that masks stop an infected person from projecting nearly as many droplets into the air when they sneeze, cough, or speak, study or no study. But virtually every public health recommendation that was rounded off as ‘masks don’t work’ did in fact recommend that infected people should wear masks. For example, the WHO advice that the Unherd article links to says:
Among the general public, persons with respiratory symptoms or those caring for COVID-19 patients at home should receive medical masks
Similarly, here’s the actual full statement from Whitty in the UK:
Prof Whitty said: “In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that.”
“The only people we do sometimes use masks for are people who have got an infection and that is to help them to stop it spreading around,” he added.
As for the US, here’s Scott Alexander’s summary of the debate in March:
As far as I can tell, both sides agree on some points.
They agree that N95 respirators, when properly used by trained professionals, help prevent the wearer from getting infected.
They agree that surgical masks help prevent sick people from infecting others. Since many sick people don’t know they are sick, in an ideal world with unlimited mask supplies everyone would wear surgical masks just to prevent themselves from spreading disease.
So ‘the experts’ did acknowledge, often quite explicitly, that masks should stop infected people spreading the infection, as the video and just plain common sense would suggest.
This is mostly a quibble because I think it’s pretty plausible you know this and I do agree that the downstream messaging was pretty bad, it was mostly rounded off to ‘masks don’t work’, and there was a strong tendency to double-down on that as it became contentious, as opposed to (takes deep breath) ‘Masks are almost certainly worthwhile for infected people, and we don’t really know much of anything for asymptomatic people but supplies are limited so maybe they aren’t the priority right now but could be worth it very soon.’. Admittedly the first is much more pithy.
But it’s not entirely frivolous either; I’ve had many conversations with people (on both sides) over the past several months who appeared to be genuinely unaware that the WHO et al. were recommending infected people wore masks, they just blindly assumed that the media messaging matched what the experts were saying at the time. So I suggest that regardless of one’s thoughts on myopic empiricism, capabilities of experts, etc., one easy improvement when trying to defer to experts is to go and read what the experts are actually saying, rather than expecting a click-chasing headline writer to have accurately summarised it for you.
I realize that this is kind of a tangent to your tangent, but I don’t think the general conjunction of (Western) expert views in 2020 was particularly defensible. Roughly speaking, the views (that I still sometimes hear it parroted by Twitter folks) were something like
For most respiratory epidemics, (surgical) masks are effective at protecting wearers in medical settings.
They are also effective as a form of source control in medical settings.
They should be effective as a form of source control in community transmission.
However, there is insufficient evidence to determine whether they are useful to protect wearers in community transmission.
I think each of those beliefs may [1] be reasonable by themselves in the abstract, but the conjunction together is extremely suspicious. The policy prescriptions are likewise suspicious.
Thus, I think Halstead’s evidence in that section can be modified fairly trivially to still preserve the core of that argument.
[1] Personally, my view on this is that if masks were a newfangled technology, the empirical beliefs (though not necessarily the logic that led to holding them together) may be forgivable coming from our experts. But 109+ years is also a long time to get something this important wrong. FWIW, I didn’t have a strong opinion on masks for community transmission in 2019, so it’s not like I got this particularly early. But I like to imagine that if any of the commentators here were to be an expert actively studying this, it would have taken most of them less than a century to figure this out.
I mostly agree with this. Of course, to notice that you have to know (2)/(3) are part of the ‘expert belief set’, or at least it really helps, which you easily might not have done if you relied on Twitter/Facebook/headlines for your sense of ‘expert views’.
And indeed, I had conversations where pointing those things out to people updated them a fair amount towards thinking that masks were worth wearing.
In other words, even if you go and read the expert view directly and decide it doesn’t make sense, I expect you to end up in a better epistemic position than you would otherwise be; it’s useful for both deference and anti-deference, and imo will strongly tend to push you in the ‘right’ direction for the matter at hand.
Edit: Somewhat independently, I’d generally like our standards to be higher than ‘this argument/evidence could be modified to preserve the conclusion’. I suspect you don’t disagree, but stating it explicitly because leaning too hard on that in a lot of different areas is one of the larger factors leading me to be unhappy with the current state of EA discourse.
Upon reflection, I want to emphasize that I strongly agree with your general point that in the world we live in, on the margin people probably ought to listen directly to what experts say. Unfortunately, I think this is in the general category of other advice like “do the homework” (eg, read original sources, don’t be sloppy with the statistics, read original papers, don’t just read the abstract or press release, read the original 2-sentence quote before taking somebody else’s 1-sentence summary at face value, etc), and time/attention/laziness constraints may make taking this advice to heart prohibitively costly (or be perceived this way).
I certainly think it’s unfortunate that the default information aggregation systems we have (headlines, social media, etc) are not quite up to the task of accurately representing experts. I think this is an important and (in the abstract) nontrivial point, and I’m a bit sad that our best solution here appears to be blaming user error.
Somewhat independently, I’d generally like our standards to be higher than ‘this argument/evidence could be modified to preserve the conclusion’
I strongly agree, though I usually feel much more strongly about this for evidence than for arguments! :P
I certainly think it’s unfortunate that the default information aggregation systems we have (headlines, social media, etc) are not quite up to the task of accurately representing experts. I think this is an important and (in the abstract) nontrivial point, and I’m a bit sad that our best solution here appears to be blaming user error.
Yeah, I think this seems true and important to me too.
And I think we can also broaden the idea of “research distillation” to distilling bodies of knowledge other than just “research”, like sets of reasonable-seeming arguments and considerations various people have highlighted.
I think the new EA Forum wiki+tagging system is a nice example of these three types of solutions, which is part of why I’m spending some time helping with it lately.
And I think “argument mapping” type things might also be a valuable, somewhat similar solution to part of the problem. (E.g., Kialo, though I’ve never actually used that myself.)
A quibble on the masks point because it annoys me every time it’s brought up. As you say, it’s pretty easy to work out that masks stop an infected person from projecting nearly as many droplets into the air when they sneeze, cough, or speak, study or no study. But virtually every public health recommendation that was rounded off as ‘masks don’t work’ did in fact recommend that infected people should wear masks. For example, the WHO advice that the Unherd article links to says:
Similarly, here’s the actual full statement from Whitty in the UK:
As for the US, here’s Scott Alexander’s summary of the debate in March:
So ‘the experts’ did acknowledge, often quite explicitly, that masks should stop infected people spreading the infection, as the video and just plain common sense would suggest.
This is mostly a quibble because I think it’s pretty plausible you know this and I do agree that the downstream messaging was pretty bad, it was mostly rounded off to ‘masks don’t work’, and there was a strong tendency to double-down on that as it became contentious, as opposed to (takes deep breath) ‘Masks are almost certainly worthwhile for infected people, and we don’t really know much of anything for asymptomatic people but supplies are limited so maybe they aren’t the priority right now but could be worth it very soon.’. Admittedly the first is much more pithy.
But it’s not entirely frivolous either; I’ve had many conversations with people (on both sides) over the past several months who appeared to be genuinely unaware that the WHO et al. were recommending infected people wore masks, they just blindly assumed that the media messaging matched what the experts were saying at the time. So I suggest that regardless of one’s thoughts on myopic empiricism, capabilities of experts, etc., one easy improvement when trying to defer to experts is to go and read what the experts are actually saying, rather than expecting a click-chasing headline writer to have accurately summarised it for you.
I realize that this is kind of a tangent to your tangent, but I don’t think the general conjunction of (Western) expert views in 2020 was particularly defensible. Roughly speaking, the views (that I still sometimes hear it parroted by Twitter folks) were something like
I think each of those beliefs may [1] be reasonable by themselves in the abstract, but the conjunction together is extremely suspicious. The policy prescriptions are likewise suspicious.
Thus, I think Halstead’s evidence in that section can be modified fairly trivially to still preserve the core of that argument.
[1] Personally, my view on this is that if masks were a newfangled technology, the empirical beliefs (though not necessarily the logic that led to holding them together) may be forgivable coming from our experts. But 109+ years is also a long time to get something this important wrong. FWIW, I didn’t have a strong opinion on masks for community transmission in 2019, so it’s not like I got this particularly early. But I like to imagine that if any of the commentators here were to be an expert actively studying this, it would have taken most of them less than a century to figure this out.
I mostly agree with this. Of course, to notice that you have to know (2)/(3) are part of the ‘expert belief set’, or at least it really helps, which you easily might not have done if you relied on Twitter/Facebook/headlines for your sense of ‘expert views’.
And indeed, I had conversations where pointing those things out to people updated them a fair amount towards thinking that masks were worth wearing.
In other words, even if you go and read the expert view directly and decide it doesn’t make sense, I expect you to end up in a better epistemic position than you would otherwise be; it’s useful for both deference and anti-deference, and imo will strongly tend to push you in the ‘right’ direction for the matter at hand.
Edit: Somewhat independently, I’d generally like our standards to be higher than ‘this argument/evidence could be modified to preserve the conclusion’. I suspect you don’t disagree, but stating it explicitly because leaning too hard on that in a lot of different areas is one of the larger factors leading me to be unhappy with the current state of EA discourse.
Upon reflection, I want to emphasize that I strongly agree with your general point that in the world we live in, on the margin people probably ought to listen directly to what experts say. Unfortunately, I think this is in the general category of other advice like “do the homework” (eg, read original sources, don’t be sloppy with the statistics, read original papers, don’t just read the abstract or press release, read the original 2-sentence quote before taking somebody else’s 1-sentence summary at face value, etc), and time/attention/laziness constraints may make taking this advice to heart prohibitively costly (or be perceived this way).
I certainly think it’s unfortunate that the default information aggregation systems we have (headlines, social media, etc) are not quite up to the task of accurately representing experts. I think this is an important and (in the abstract) nontrivial point, and I’m a bit sad that our best solution here appears to be blaming user error.
I strongly agree, though I usually feel much more strongly about this for evidence than for arguments! :P
Yeah, I think this seems true and important to me too.
There are three, somewhat overlapping solutions to small parts of this problem that I’m excited about: (1) “Research Distillation” to pay off “Research Debt”, (2) more summaries, and (3) more collections.
And I think we can also broaden the idea of “research distillation” to distilling bodies of knowledge other than just “research”, like sets of reasonable-seeming arguments and considerations various people have highlighted.
I think the new EA Forum wiki+tagging system is a nice example of these three types of solutions, which is part of why I’m spending some time helping with it lately.
And I think “argument mapping” type things might also be a valuable, somewhat similar solution to part of the problem. (E.g., Kialo, though I’ve never actually used that myself.)
There was also a relevant EAG panel discussion a few years ago: Aggregating knowledge | Panel | EA Global: San Francisco 2016.