But we don't need the top HN comment giving vague trigger warnings about an author.
If you're going to attack the author as a top-level comment, at least attack concrete positions they hold so that others can respond instead of "he's stupid" and "he doesn't do the research".
Why are we supposed to care about that? There was a time when "masks do not work" was very much the conventional wisdom.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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; [...]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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.