Truth hurts. We’ve all heard the saying. Worse, we’ve all been on the receiving end of a painful truth; didn’t make the team, girlfriend wants to break up; you have bad breath. It’s so much easier to just believe we are good enough for the team, our girlfriends want to be with us and that our mouthwash works – who would ever want to be told otherwise?
The adage is a misnomer, however. Truth isn’t what hurts. Ripping away the comfortable lies – like tearing off that Band-Aid we’ve left on entirely too long – THAT’S the painful part. We don’t want to find out we were wrong. We don’t want to know that the junk we’ve been filling our own heads with is nothing but a lie.
But truth is like a Cassandra – always telling us what we don’t want to hear and often not being believed because we don’t want to hear it. It wasn’t necessary to curse Cassandra with not being believed – simply cursing her with only seeing the bad to come would have been enough. No one would believe her because no one would want to. A few millennia since that story was written hasn’t changed much.
Trust the science! Science doesn’t lie! Complete and utter nonsense. Science is just a methodology – a very useful one – but one that can be made to lie if you know how. Scientists, like the oracles of Delphi, make pronouncements received from a magically objective source but they themselves are neither magically objective nor an objective source. Just people and like all other people, some good and some bad.
But if we admit that science is not a great oracle, what does that say about us after nearly two centuries of placing science on that pedestal? Well, it says what we don’t want to hear – that we made a mistake by institutionalizing a methodology as if it were a religion; that we got lazy because we just wanted easy answers without having to analyze whether or not they were correct; that we are just as human as the ancient Greeks who thought some chick drugged out of her gourd had all the answers just for the asking. It says that we would rather cling to a lie than face a painful truth.
Wait, what? Where’d that last bit come from?
After the past eighteen months, you have to ask? I read the dumbest article today. It was written by a doctor and one who is usually pretty good (I don’t always agree with him – and that’s a good thing) but not this time. He took A SINGLE study from Bangladesh and concluded that we should be wearing surgical masks. But that’s not the worst part – this is:
The Results
The primary findings include:
Cloth masks had no advantage over the control arm (no intervention), but surgical masks showed a modest, statistically significant benefit
The surgical mask intervention reduced symptomatic seroprevalence by 11.2%; the endpoint — COVID-19 symptoms followed by a positive COVID-19 test — occurred in 0.76% of people in the control group compared to 0.67% for those assigned to surgical mask villages
Some readers highlight another endpoint: having symptoms consistent with SARS-CoV-2, without testing to prove the cause. I strongly disagree with relying on this endpoint.
Medpage today
For those playing at home, that’s a difference of 0.09. Do not be impressed – it’s barely out of a decent margin of error.
I picked this specifically because there’s a lot right in the article. I fully agree with him that the methodology seems sound and that these are statistically significant numbers – and that the US is not Bangladesh. I further agree that it’s a bad idea to use non-confirmed cases in the analysis.
But where he goes off the rails is that this is a single study – a good one but JUST one – with a barely significant result. We should not give advice based on this without repeating it – preferably in a more industrialized nation.
The cessation of mask use is also alarming – they were back to pre-study levels within 3 months. We get better than that with both abstinence and condom use in STD interventions (both fall off at the 6 month mark without further intervention). The rapid loss of intervention efficacy is a red flag that there may not have been as much buy in as believed. It’s not all that easy to watch everyone in 600 remote villages. Translation: there may be a problem, Houston.
Which ultimately translates to what every scientist knows – it ain’t real until you repeat it. Establishing an intervention policy on the back of a single study – especially one without strongly significant results – is just foolishness. Doesn’t he know that?
I think they all know it – but panicky politicians and a self interested media have run amok with this stuff. How do you tell everyone ‘hey, we were wrong’ NOW? It makes SCIENCE, THE SOOTHSAYER look bad. It makes scientists and politicians look bad. It makes ordinary people who believed them look bad. Who wants to face that kind of truth?
No one – so we look at the first decent looking study and yell ‘Hey, we were right!” I doubt it’s even conscious behavior sometimes – it’s really, really hard to face our own stupidity. Some kinds of stupid take really smart people to do – finding out you’re so smart that you’ve done something stupid? Oh heck, no – we’ll settle for anything but that.
Of course, the real elephant in the room is that truth eventually triumphs. The lights come on and we all see the murderer trying to hide his crime. The truth always come out.
Google attempting to suppress ‘misinformation’ makes folks start looking into Google’s connections to research in a certain laboratory. YouTube banning doctors makes people seek information elsewhere. It’s not as dramatic as the end of the murder mystery, but slowly and surely, the curtain is pulled away. The lies are revealed to be lies in the glaring light of truth.
We’re somewhere in the second act. The Media is still diverting attention. The Politicians are still making claims. Science, the industry, is still fudging.
But the curtain is beginning to unravel. Light is beginning to seep from underneath. What will that light reveal?
Maybe what I think – but maybe not. That’s the thing about truth – it isn’t confined to being what I want or what anyone wants. But if we can’t look at that harsh glare we can never make the world a better place. Lies make things worse – like bandages that have become fetid and fester infection. Only when we look at things truthfully the way they really are – even when that’s not what we want them to be – only then can we clean out the wound and start the healing.
Either way, whichever ones of us have been lying to ourselves, that glare is hard to face. But it only hurts as it rips away the lies. The sooner we get it over with, the better.
