Well done. Last night I had an email exchange with a "health researcher PhD". She said: "vaxes are waning, so wear a mask"... I said "here are 11 RCT showing no effect and one retrospective study on high mask vs low mask regions"... she said "well we could not have opened schools without masks, so there's your proof"... I just don't know what has happened to "science"... it went out the window awfully fast
I hope I never get dunked on by Bad Cat. It's like watching a video where someone gets nailed in the nuts by a dodgeball. You can't help but wince when reading.
Well written. You actually made me nostalgic for statistical analysis class.
...and aside from me and a vanishing number of gatofans, no one will ever see it. Hundreds of thousands, though, will see Lyman's apparently unopposed "yas slay kween" rebuttal and hear that.
"Hands up, don't shoot" is the part everyone remembers.
"surely even lyman adheres to a unidirectional model of experienced time…"
I wouldn't bet on it, considering the trashing science took for the last year and a half, scraping the Second Law of Thermodynamics is par for the course.
I admit I skimmed this as I do not understand most of the "lingo". I do know that you need a baseline when conducting any kind of research. And I had to take statistics twice to pass. Not genius stuff. Glad you got this off your furry back! (and it sure isn't changing my mind about masks!)
The lead "researcher" is an economist, and as anyone in finance will tell you, no one who deals w money professionally really knows why economists even exist. Because certainly no one takes them seriously or takes their advice or believes their models. Because if they had, they would no longer be employed or solvent. Self loathing among economists is nearly universal. They don't call it the dismal science for nothing, and that is really too charitable a term for this paper. Something beneath dismal is needed. Gato's excellent debriefing aside, anyone with even the tiniest understanding of "science" would've know early on that there was simply no way such a study could ever produce valid results. You could spend days listing the potential confounders long before anyone went to Bangladesh. Finally, who the hell is this Lyman turd anyway and why does he have 22k followers? I've run across him staying stupid shit on Twitter a few times but usually just saying stupid shit won't get you to 22k.
It feels like all the sero-stuff was tacked on after the fact. Like these researchers were intending to do a study purely on how to get people to wear masks, and someone convinced them (or they convinced themselves) to add 'do they actually work' later.
Your arguments are all good, but you only have to make them because you failed to anticipate how susceptible an attack on the study's conclusions would end up being. Just step back and evaluate what it would mean if the study in fact displayed an inviolable fact about reality: i.e., post-first wave case counts can be reduced with masks. Well, so what? 2nd and 3rd waves will just have more fuel to burn, and burn it they will. We're all on wave 3 by now, and SARS-CoV-2 is endemic; it's too late to accrue any benefit from a partially suppressed first wave.
This is what I was screaming in Feb 2020 when everyone started testing for Covid, and seeing numbers go up. What the hell is the baseline you muppets, I yelled.
But no, they carried on reporting the numbers as though they were the spread of a brand new event with no evidence of any such thing. And here we are.
There is just no reason whatsoever to program a medical trial of global importance in the villages of Bangladesh.
That's a very delicate point to make, so few people will make it.
I can make it without qualms, because I love the Indian-subcontinent to bits. Know parts of it well, spent years in school there, love the people with an inextinguishable love. Fact is all my most cherished longtime personal relationships are with people from this part of the planet.
But science is science, and the truth is, Bangladesh is not just a 'poor' country. It is a VERY poor country with 160 million people. Living conditions are appalling. Families in villages are often illiterate and typically have an ANNUAL income of about 800 dollars per year.
Of course, in cities like Dhaka or Chittagong you see much higher incomes, because that's where the country's 'shining classes' are located.
But it is in the many thousands of tiny Bangladeshi villages where well over half the country's population resides.
So the data collection problems, the adherence problems, the 'please the paymaster' problems, the confounder problems and the problem of researchers eager to get the result they crave, would obviously make any such a project a non-starter - especially if it had international pretensions.
Go figure.
It reminds me of the studies in the 1970s that compared African tribal diets to those in the West, and concluded that high fiber foods were automatic lifesavers.
You are being slightly unfair to a poor study. It does seem to show wearing masks doesn't increase transmission. Granted that isn't the claim made for it nor what it was intended to show. Regardless it is a useful add to the knowledge base or would be if people looked at what is there rather than what they want to be there!
more on the bangladesh mask study
Well done. Last night I had an email exchange with a "health researcher PhD". She said: "vaxes are waning, so wear a mask"... I said "here are 11 RCT showing no effect and one retrospective study on high mask vs low mask regions"... she said "well we could not have opened schools without masks, so there's your proof"... I just don't know what has happened to "science"... it went out the window awfully fast
I hope I never get dunked on by Bad Cat. It's like watching a video where someone gets nailed in the nuts by a dodgeball. You can't help but wince when reading.
Well written. You actually made me nostalgic for statistical analysis class.
...and aside from me and a vanishing number of gatofans, no one will ever see it. Hundreds of thousands, though, will see Lyman's apparently unopposed "yas slay kween" rebuttal and hear that.
"Hands up, don't shoot" is the part everyone remembers.
"surely even lyman adheres to a unidirectional model of experienced time…"
I wouldn't bet on it, considering the trashing science took for the last year and a half, scraping the Second Law of Thermodynamics is par for the course.
I admit I skimmed this as I do not understand most of the "lingo". I do know that you need a baseline when conducting any kind of research. And I had to take statistics twice to pass. Not genius stuff. Glad you got this off your furry back! (and it sure isn't changing my mind about masks!)
The lead "researcher" is an economist, and as anyone in finance will tell you, no one who deals w money professionally really knows why economists even exist. Because certainly no one takes them seriously or takes their advice or believes their models. Because if they had, they would no longer be employed or solvent. Self loathing among economists is nearly universal. They don't call it the dismal science for nothing, and that is really too charitable a term for this paper. Something beneath dismal is needed. Gato's excellent debriefing aside, anyone with even the tiniest understanding of "science" would've know early on that there was simply no way such a study could ever produce valid results. You could spend days listing the potential confounders long before anyone went to Bangladesh. Finally, who the hell is this Lyman turd anyway and why does he have 22k followers? I've run across him staying stupid shit on Twitter a few times but usually just saying stupid shit won't get you to 22k.
It feels like all the sero-stuff was tacked on after the fact. Like these researchers were intending to do a study purely on how to get people to wear masks, and someone convinced them (or they convinced themselves) to add 'do they actually work' later.
Yea, but he's holding a baby and you're not.
"l see the flaws pop like taking a blacklight to a hotel bedspread."
I'm summarizing using this quote for my friends who I can never get to read anything.
You broke my internet with this line ‘like, need the arecibo radio telescope to hear it weak’. Very clever and great rebuttal.
el gato, i did my last formal education 39 years ago, i did take a grad level stat for refresh 20 years ago.
i am stunned at how the advance of stat science has degenerated, at least at cdc and big pharma.
i wonder if we can getthe whole paper cdc used to push the eua's through.
i think the errors of the hypotheses, used by fda, are way too high!
optics and politics are two science beyond my knowing.
Your arguments are all good, but you only have to make them because you failed to anticipate how susceptible an attack on the study's conclusions would end up being. Just step back and evaluate what it would mean if the study in fact displayed an inviolable fact about reality: i.e., post-first wave case counts can be reduced with masks. Well, so what? 2nd and 3rd waves will just have more fuel to burn, and burn it they will. We're all on wave 3 by now, and SARS-CoV-2 is endemic; it's too late to accrue any benefit from a partially suppressed first wave.
This is what I was screaming in Feb 2020 when everyone started testing for Covid, and seeing numbers go up. What the hell is the baseline you muppets, I yelled.
But no, they carried on reporting the numbers as though they were the spread of a brand new event with no evidence of any such thing. And here we are.
Terrific, Gato. Have only one thing to stress:
There is just no reason whatsoever to program a medical trial of global importance in the villages of Bangladesh.
That's a very delicate point to make, so few people will make it.
I can make it without qualms, because I love the Indian-subcontinent to bits. Know parts of it well, spent years in school there, love the people with an inextinguishable love. Fact is all my most cherished longtime personal relationships are with people from this part of the planet.
But science is science, and the truth is, Bangladesh is not just a 'poor' country. It is a VERY poor country with 160 million people. Living conditions are appalling. Families in villages are often illiterate and typically have an ANNUAL income of about 800 dollars per year.
Of course, in cities like Dhaka or Chittagong you see much higher incomes, because that's where the country's 'shining classes' are located.
But it is in the many thousands of tiny Bangladeshi villages where well over half the country's population resides.
So the data collection problems, the adherence problems, the 'please the paymaster' problems, the confounder problems and the problem of researchers eager to get the result they crave, would obviously make any such a project a non-starter - especially if it had international pretensions.
Go figure.
It reminds me of the studies in the 1970s that compared African tribal diets to those in the West, and concluded that high fiber foods were automatic lifesavers.
You are being slightly unfair to a poor study. It does seem to show wearing masks doesn't increase transmission. Granted that isn't the claim made for it nor what it was intended to show. Regardless it is a useful add to the knowledge base or would be if people looked at what is there rather than what they want to be there!
The aptly named Lyman.
I took the liberty of posting your rebuke to the bottom of his thread. Thanks!! Was a great coffee read.