[Erem]

The tough thing about this approach is that the borders of each expert’s sliver of knowledge is not known to the reader, and maybe not even to the author themselves.

On top of that, individual experts still carry their own biases in their heads, and they lack any sort of editorial board to service the reader by separating knowledge from bias.

It’s easy for me to cast stones but I also have no answer. The best I’ve come to is to read broadly on topics you need to truly know and compare what you find in your sources. For less important topics just accept that you are likely off the mark and have much to learn.

[jameshart]

During the early days of the pandemic, as advice to wear masks started to propagate into the population, and laypeople started to have to develop familiarity with concepts like ‘N95’, a community of helpful experts (often nurses and doctors, people with actual qualifications and real experience) piped up to tell the world that they had been trained in the proper use of PPE, and that there were very important donning and doffing procedures that needed to be followed (not touching the outside of the mask, eg), without which ordinary untrained mask users were going to be exposed to enormous risks. If you tried to use such masks without following these procedures you might as well just rub a dead bat on your face.

The thing is, though, that the PPE handling requirements which practitioners like nurses and doctors are trained in, for working in a clinical environment with patients who are highly infectious or highly vulnerable to infection, are not the same as the PPE handling requirements for walking around a supermarket during a public health emergency. Public health usage of masks was not supposed to solve the same problems as masks solve in surgery or in infectious disease care contexts.

Experts are vulnerable to having highly specific knowledge about how something works in a very narrow domain, but overestimating how well that knowledge applies to even quite closely related nearby domains.

[bee_rider]

This is an aside, but I don’t really think donning and doffing an N95 mask requires expert knowledge. It is easy to screw up if you don’t know to be careful, and the stakes are sort of high. But you can learn to do it by, like, reading the material that comes with the mask and watching a YouTube or something.

Rather, I thought the anti-mask advice came before it was known that masks helped. At the time this was the prudent advice: what they don’t want is people acting like the masks will fully protect them.