It's important not just to remember this (the incorrect guidance on masks) but to study and understand it. When I wrote my "masks work" op-ed on March 17 for the New York Times, I honestly thought I was likely ending my career as a public writer. https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1261994903007113216 …
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Why didn't we listen to the medical experts in Asia? Why was it so hard to communicate that masks are a public good (they protect others and collectively protect all of us) in a pandemic for a respiratory disease? And how did we move so fast to scolding, forgetting what happened?
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Thank you! Again, I wrote a pro-mask oped thinking that was the end of my writing career (I have a day job as an academic so a small sacrifice in the grand scheme) and people who followed the advice were sneered at and even attacked. JUST TWO MONTHS AGO.https://twitter.com/artcraftculture/status/1262067746960883713 …
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"We" keep starting the analytic clock from the moment when "we" changed our mind or got affected (Trump getting elected, for ex.). That's no way to understand the world. It's human: "we" are all blind to ourselves. It takes enormous effort to try not to be. But that's the work.
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Thank you! I also thought I was toast. I'm proud of what I chose to do but I'm also an academic with tenure. That's the whole point of tenure: to give people the opportunity to take these kinds of risks. It wasn't exactly running into a burning building.https://twitter.com/LazarusLong13/status/1262069538255826944 …
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Yes. That's how you get resilience.https://twitter.com/lydiajo/status/1262069338296680454 …
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Yes, the messaging ranged from "they don't work" to "they make things worse." The latter never had any scientific basis but gets repeated to this day.https://twitter.com/Fly_Agaric/status/1262072335315562496 …
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As usual, all of that gets mixed together. To this day, anti-maskers cite the old articles (especially the ones that falsely said masks make things worse), screenshots of CDC guidelines/tweets, WHO... It's embedded in a individualistic/liberty framework.https://twitter.com/TeflonFong/status/1262075578812948481 …
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The public health argument was very hard to get across.https://twitter.com/binneystreetbio/status/1262090664541650946 …
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You took a big risk on a critical topic where moving public opinion was/is far from trivial. Thank you.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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But... these authorities *knew* masks worked, but they spoke out against them (aka lied) because they thought easing the shortage for healthcare workers was in our best interest.
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Motivated reasoning because of that is surely a part of it but I don't think it's that simple. It's a mix of many things; important to understand. Health authorities can convince themselves too, through motivated reasoning and other dynamics.
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