[ramraj07]

Not everyone knows who geohot is and even if they do they may not see the url handle. They may (like me) think why is a glorified shower thought tweet on top of HN.

They may not know that this dude was an anti-masker (with nuance) for example. This could really make them decide not to even spend too much time thinking about the passage which in theory is profound for 10 seconds but no further.

As much as ad hominem attacks are not great approaches, the one scenario I feel it's justified is in cases like this.

[zozbot234]

> They may not know that this dude was an anti-masker (with nuance) for example.

Why are we supposed to care about that? There was a time when "masks do not work" was very much the conventional wisdom.

[whizzter]

Masks didn't work for people needing an immediate cure, but it was never that, it always was a multiplier, and even an multiplier with only 30% efficiency would translate to 4x reduction in spread through 4 levels.

And that reduction was there to give healthcare workers a chance to not be overwhelmed as they were for a large part of the initial pandemic.

[jatari]

There was literally never a time where mainstream medical advice was "masks do nothing".

[froglets]

Public health recommendations aren’t medical advice though. The advice agencies give is given to everyone and so has to take things like supply chains and the economy into consideration before making recommendations.

[giwook]

Conventional for whom?

[wizzwizz4]

I might be misremembering, but I think the WHO claimed this at some point?

It was obvious nonsense, and did not comfort me as I watched an avoidable catastrophe become, day by day, an unavoidable one; politicians caring more about pacifying the populace with platitudes than about taking measures to render SARS-CoV-2 extinct in the wild – measures which would have been several orders of magnitude cheaper than the extended pandemic lockdowns, disabilities and trauma, loss of life, and now a new disabling endemic disease we're going to have to fight the hard way, for centuries, until it can finally go the way of smallpox.

[UncleMeat]

There was an extremely brief period where public health advice discouraged the general population from masking. This was because there was a huge undersupply for medical workers and because we hadn't fully figured out whether covid aerosolized mere weeks into the pandemic.

Once we had a bit more information in a rapidly evolving situation public health advice switched to recommending masks and stayed that way for years.

We cannot possibly expect public health advice to get everything right immediately during a once-in-a-century pandemic and this error should definitely not be used as a general "wow public health officials are dumb idiots or engaged in a malicious conspiracy", as this error is often used.

[wizzwizz4]

There was indeed a huge undersupply for medical workers. The appropriate response from public health officials should've been something like "surgical masks help protect others, and right now, we need to protect hospital patients", not "we want to keep masks available in hospitals where they're needed, because they're important, so let's tell people they're not important to make sure they're available". This is the kind of plan that would be used as an example of Adults Are Useless in a children's novel (ref: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdultsAreUseless): it was never going to not backfire. (Does it even count as backfiring if you point the gun at your foot, and lean down to watch it go bang?) Institutional dysfunction can produce decisions that no individual would ever author, but there's a reason the Evil Overlord List has #12:

> One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

And… it's SARS-CoV-2. Of course it aerosolises. The "we hadn't fully figured out" was sheer incompetence (see doi:10.1080/02786826.2024.2387985); just like the "we aren't sure whether it's reached our jurisdiction yet, so be vigilant", "oh lots people are showing symptoms", "actually turns out it reached us 3 weeks ago and is now endemic, haha oops" pattern we saw playing out in country after country, region after region, while open source intelligence collated on LessWrong obviously showed what the governments apparently could not see until tens of days too late. "Paranoid" early lockdowns could've lasted two weeks, allowed us to identify who was affected, and then allowed us to give them top-of-the-line isolated care while they recovered, and while the rest of the region got back to doing an economy. Instead, COVID-19 is still claiming new victims today.

Australia managed it, and everyone could've copied that, but they didn't. China could have managed it right at the start, and saved the world, if their accountability culture hadn't favoured a cover-up. (Their belated attempts to pursue a zero-COVID strategy were not particularly effective once it was a global pandemic and multiple strains were circulating, because it turns out you can't persuade people into not being ill; and sealing residential buildings is neither necessary nor sufficient contact tracing / isolation.) Zero-COVID would've been feasible as a global strategy, even starting as late as February 2020, if not for all the politicised bullshit. (No, "don't kill your neighbours by giving them a novel respiratory virus while all the hospitals are full" isn't authoritarianism. Sensible precautions are not setting a bad precedent, because it's a conditional precedent: if we were to wipe out the disease, there would no longer be a reason for those measures. In fact, the cryptographers figured out how to do privacy-preserving contact tracing, and shipped the protocol very quickly, so that the best available system was inherently anti-authoritarian.)

While I wouldn't use the phrase "dumb idiots", public health officials are, largely, responsible for long-term policy decisions, not rapid response. (If a response to a seasonal respiratory disease fails, you've usually got 8 months to put together a better one.) They had had little practice making the snap decisions, and they almost invariably made bad ones when it mattered. Replacing soap with diluted alcohol gel at handwashing stations, for example, is stupidity. Soapy water is one of the most effective anti-coronavirus measures disinfectants there is. A roughly 70% alcohol solution is a close second. (There are viruses that are not denatured by soap, for which alcohol is a much better disinfectant: I can only imagine that people got confused.) 30% alcohol solution is basically useless. Alcohol gel is useful because it's portable, but it's not as good for removing SARS-CoV-2 as washing your hands with soap and water.

So many resources were used (and entire supply chains were established!) ensuring that every surface is wiped, even though it's a respiratory disease and surfaces were not a major transmission vector; but very few resources were employed to ensure sufficient ventilation which, again, respiratory disease. It does not take a genius to make the link between "it infects your air holes" and "we should ventilate or filter the air". (Yes, I witnessed many people closing windows using the disinfectant cloth as a glove, to avoid touching the handle, right before filling the room with occupants.)

We were not prepared for the pandemic that happened, and I will condemn that, because are we going to do any better next time? Have we put measures in place to ensure that accurate information about the disease, including appropriate disease-specific hygiene measures, are rapidly disseminated? Have we ensured that international authorities and the populaces will calmly overreact, because overreaction is cheap and allows each patient to receive specialist treatment and maybe lets us wipe out the disease entirely? From where I'm standing, the WHO is weaker than ever, we've traumatised a generation to the point they'll resist any attempt to impose another lockdown (even though acting early means it might only last a few weeks, or even a few days!), and we've gained a political playbook for profiting from pandemic denialism.

A once-in-a-century pandemic should be expected to happen once in a century. Allocate a hundred people around the world whose jobs it is to know how to deal with that, and then listen to them if the rare event shows up. It's not conceptually difficult. That this is difficult for us in practice is damning.

[jatari]

>are we going to do any better next time

The US is completely fucked if another pandemic hits within the next ~20 years. Or at least until a large percentage of the anti-vaxers created in the covid pandemic age out of the population. Having a decent response when half the country is going to be on team virus is not possible.

> Have we put measures in place to ensure that accurate information about the disease, including appropriate disease-specific hygiene measures, are rapidly disseminated.

This is irrelevant if half the country has the through process of "goverment says it therefore it is fake news bill gates microchip conspiracy".

[shpongled]

The title is >Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns.

Isn't being an anti-masker the opposite of this viewpoint? Literally saying, I only care about the returns for myself, even if creates negative value for others.

[rdevilla]

It's so we can definitively identify this person as a Nazi, as persona non grata, so we can feel better about ourselves while we break quarantine and contravene public health orders to get clandestine haircuts and attend illegal cross-household parties.

    So you must be careful to do everything they tell you.
    But do not do what they do, for they do not practice
    what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads
    and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they
    themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move
    them.

    Everything they do is done for people to see: They make
    their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their
    garments long; [...]

[giancarlostoro]

Full stop disagree. This is not what HN is for, and should never be for. I have spent hours on IRC with geohot back in the late 2000s / early 2010s mind you, I never liked him, but this is not what HN is for, and not what it should ever become. You can do all of that on reddit, let's not ruin a good rare slice of the internet with meaningless bickering.

[neuralkoi]

Ad hominem attacks are never good approaches. They're irrational in nature. Ad hominem is one of the first fallacies taught in a critical thinking class.

[UncleMeat]

Ad hominems are formal fallacies. They are not valid deductive reasoning.

But people basically never use valid deductive reasoning for anything. Using available evidence to make predictions about things and act on those predictions is fine. If somebody has a history of poor thought or writing and then I encounter more of their thoughts or writing it is not unreasonable to say "this new material is likely to be poor and I don't need to spend time on it."

If somebody says "hey do you want to see Transformers 7", responding "I did not like Transformers 1-6 so I'll pass" is fine even if it is not deductive proof that you won't like Transformers 7.

[fsckboy]

if ad hominem attacks were of no value, humans wouldn't have evolved the strong tendency to engage in them.

they are not proofs in logic, hence the fallacy, but that does not mean they are irrational. it's irrational to think that human discourse can be capture by logic.

[otterley]

Isn’t rational a synonym for logical, though? People can subjectively rationalize their behavior, but that doesn’t make it objectively rational.

[pydry]

>They may not know that this dude was an anti-masker (with nuance) for example

If you're going to ad hominem, at least give a citation.

>As much as ad hominem attacks are not great approaches, the one scenario I feel it's justified

Because reasons?

[lnxg33k1]

> Not everyone knows who geohot is

But I guess people can get pretty much to the same conclusion by reading any of the blog post, I had the same idea just by reading the title here

[jpadkins]

what's anti-masker?

[denverllc]

Some people thought that surgical masks wouldn’t stop you from getting Covid

[wizzwizz4]

Surgical masks don't stop you from getting Covid. That was never what they were for: they were to reduce the viral load you exposed others to, between when you got infected and when you noticed that you were infected. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surgical_mask#Function.

Some cloth masks can (when dry) also trap small particulates through electrostatic interactions, although they are less effective as a mechanical filter than surgical masks; and many washing methods destroy this effect.

[stavros]

Right, but that still makes the people who refused to wear one selfish assholes.

[ludston]

They didn't. The point is that they stop you from giving covid to other people.

[petcat]

It's a distinction without a difference. Masks served to reduce the herd from spreading covid. Including other people giving it to you.

[wizzwizz4]

The distinction is important! The mechanism by which surgical masks prevent you from getting COVID-19 is peer pressure: it's important for people to know this, so they know how to protect themselves. (And there are fitted masks that protect the wearer: there was just a shortage of them, because despite all the warnings we were not prepared for a pandemic.)

[ludston]

The distinction does matter, because by not wearing a mask, instead of indicating that you don't care about your own safety, you're indicating that you don't care about anybody else's.

[drcongo]

You do realise that surgeons don't wear those masks to stop them from catching something right?

[petcat]

> Some people thought that surgical masks wouldn’t stop you from getting Covid

You do realize that masks would help prevent you from getting covid if other people are wearing the masks, right?

The comment just talked about masks, not whether you are the one wearing the mask.

[mrguyorama]

It was more nuanced than that and importantly, "Anti-masker" as a derogatory statement was about "This person is literally unwilling to do anything at all that doesn't pay off for them personally" because a goddamn mask is such a simple thing to do, and they just couldn't handle it, because it was someone else telling them to do something and some people just cannot function when that happens.

People lost their damn minds because "Hey could you maybe take a single small step to ensure you don't sneeze on produce" was protest worthy.

I do not believe someone saying "Masks made out of T-Shirts don't work well" or "Surgical masks aren't as effective as real N95 masks" are an "Anti-masker".

It was about vice-signalling. All the people who get pissy about masks do plenty of things for their "health" that have zero science behind them.

These people often did other things like hiding or downplaying any symptoms, and choosing to go to events while sick, and were often basically superspreaders.

This was all well understood like 25 years ago when WoW did that blood plague thing and people put effort into spreading it as much as possible. We've seen this with other diseases including ones that have no real controversy or political angle. Some people are just that insistent about doing everything they can to make the world a worse place.

It just sucks so much.

[mvcosta91]

Thank God I lived long enough to forget COVID-era terms.

[pelagicAustral]

I'm taking, Covid-era anti-masker (?)