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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   38822 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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where public health measures were treated the same as risk factors ("The virus knows if you're sitting or standing, so it's only safe to sit unmasked in a restaurant")

As an aside, this sort of argument by ridicule can be used against any Schelling point rule meant to identify an easy cutoff point between two undesirable extremes (see also the old "she was only 17 years and 364 days old, you monster" jab). Clearly the intent was to make people wear masks as much as possible, except when incompatible with other desiderata like being able to consume food in a public setting; what do you think would have been a better rule to settle this trade-off without causing uncertainty and enabling a lot more disruptive haggling?

As for people like OP, who fail a sort of "guardian-guarded distinction" and transfer some of the sanctity of the things a rule or law is intended to defend against onto the rule or law itself (or conversely treat violators of the law as instances of the bad thing the law was meant to prevent), I understand your annoyance but it's also easy to see how they are part of the grease that makes our society run. Their existence protects against sliding into the sort of illegible system where the written rules are never the actual rules, enabling corruption and causing friction everywhere.

Clearly the intent was to make people wear masks as much as possible, except when incompatible with other desiderata like being able to consume food in a public setting; what do you think would have been a better rule to settle this trade-off without causing uncertainty and enabling a lot more disruptive haggling?

"You should wear a mask except when predominently engaged in activities that require being maskless". Eating takes up most of one's time in a restaurant.

As for people like OP, ... Their existence protects against sliding into the sort of illegible system where the written rules are never the actual rules, enabling corruption and causing friction everywhere.

Trump's prosecution was already a case where the written rules aren't the actual rules, because people are not usually prosecuted for his crime. The OP was being a concern troll, not trying to follow a universal rule.

"You should wear a mask except when predominently engaged in activities that require being maskless". Eating takes up most of one's time in a restaurant.

But then you would get people trying to lawyer "predominantly", walk around with food in hands or just pockets to avoid wearing masks (lots of people, myself included, already did this seated), ...; also there is an argument that when walking around you cover more ground (germs don't fully disperse in dining settings, cf. those norovirus outbreak analyses where correlation with seat distance is seen).

OP was being a concern troll

Doesn't mesh with my understanding of that term, and OP seems to be my political near mirror image. Boomercons hating Trump for breaking rules and decorum seems consistent.

OP is almost certainly not a boomercon and her writing style is a near exact match for rdrama's favorite reddit mod Bardfinn or ex-Mottizen Impassionata.

If it was safe enough to eat in a restaurant sans mask, it was safe enough to walk into the restaurant without a mask and around the restaurant without a mask. There is no trade off in that scenario.

What does "safe enough" mean? COVID had a transmission rate that was far from "approach infected person -> you get infected immediately 100%", so the appropriate mental model is that there is some positive correlation between time length of exposure and likelihood of transmission. If you believe masks reduce the likelihood of transmission while you wear them, then wearing a mask half of the time is strictly better than never wearing a mask, and wearing a mask always is strictly better than either. However, if you wear a mask 100% of the time, you can't eat. There's your tradeoff.

You are sitting in a room full of patrons. They are eating and drinking and talking. The idea that a mask worn while going to the bathroom would have any meaningful impact on concentration of virus is fanciful.

It still takes time (and time you are moving around, covering more area), so under the assumptions that believers make it might well reduce transmission risk per visit by like 10%. Do you have any proposals other than just "you don't have to wear masks in restaurants", which is reasonable if you believe they don't do anything anyway but clearly not a solution to the "what easy rule can maximise mask wearing while allowing people to eat" problem that the rule-setters were trying to solve? What you are doing seems analogous to someone who believes air travel is evil and unnecessary asserting that plane designers are stupid for putting wings on planes because they could save materials if they didn't.

It still takes time (and time you are moving around, covering more area), so under the assumptions that believers make it might well reduce transmission risk per visit by like 10%.

The base rate of people having Covid at all is very low, this was true even during the height of the pandemic, especially if they show no symptoms. The reduction in transmission from masks is also very low, even if worn correctly(they won't be). Wearing a mask only part time reduces this further. If you multiply all these low probabilities together you get an absurdly low probability.

The whole thing was security theatre. That 10% reduction sounds like a lot until you realize the base rate is .01 and no one is actually following the protocol enough to actually reduce it by 10%, more like 1%

Do you have any proposals other than just "you don't have to wear masks in restaurants"

"Takeout only"?

Outside seating only if dining in.

Not the person you're talking to, but I think "restaurants are closed" would have been a reasonable policy. So would "you don't have to wear masks". It's the halfway point of "wear a mask but not the 90% of the time you're at your table" which I found ridiculous.

All the ended up being unimportant as the end point of the pandemic was everyone gets some natural immunity.

The big difference between the entire town locks themselves in a basement and plays twister for 48 hours and everyone always maintains 6’ of difference is the twister playing people all get covid the first week and the 6’ people it takes 3 months for the entire town to be infected.

(Of course there were reasons to delay infection early for hospital capacity and waiting for vaccines but the true end point was everyone gets it)

The question whether COVID rules like this particular one are reasonable ways to implement a particular goal (reduce transmission rate) given particular assumptions (masks work, ...) is orthogonal to the question of whether the goal and the assumptions are sound, and I doubt we'll get much out of relitigating the latter here for the gorillionth time. It is possible for COVID policy to be misguided, masks to be ineffectual, and the restaurant masking policy to be reasonable (as in sensible given its proponents' beliefs) yet susceptible to the sort of anti-arbitrary-cutoff zinger that the poster above posted, simultaneously.

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