what is the value...Of removing all humans from the loop

About 100L more water per meatbag removed from cockpit. More if seats and controls are removed as well.

Yeah...we would call it a "concept" but even then that's a word I usually reserve for things that don't violate known laws of mathematics, physics, biology, logic, economics, chemistry, philosophy, and...music theory...just to cover my bases here.

And it occurs to (not just) me that credulity is not confined to believing in the supernatural but to taking any claims from any authority at face value without verifying them for yourself.

"Do your own research" is of course also the mating call of the conspiracy nut and the antivaxxer as well as of the small-s skeptic. All the better I suppose for grifters and petty tyrants. If skepticism is tarnished with the woo woo, all the easier to sell the snakeoil products, philosophies, and politics to people afraid of being marked as crazy.

Part of me is outraged that this pathology persists in $current_year. Another part isn't so worried: this nonsense has been with us since we climbed down from the treetops and we seem to have done fine for ourselves despite it.

Yet another part of me remembers the "zero tolerance" nonsense of my school days thirty years back. And stories of further back when other social transgressions could ruin a kid's life. The more things change...

I've been paying attention. I've seen him call the sky blue only for every democrat-aligned pundit and academic to insist it's green, multiple times. The instance that comes to mind first is when he said schools should be in-person, followed by the dems insisting that anything other than keeping schools remote for a year and a half was anti-intellectual.

Idunno dude. If Trump says the sky is green you're encouraged to call bullshit. If he says it's blue...might want to listen.

Dude I worked with for close to twenty years...when he and I just started I was fresh out of college and he was fresh out of grad school. First year or so he worked there, came in with wearing a tie (no jacket), and plastered a printout from NYT style section on his wall about how neckties were coming back. Also introduced himself as Dr. So-and-so to newly-met colleagues and prospective hires.

These days he stalks around the place in shorts and flip flops and greets everyone with a short "yo"

"Modern understanding" implies quantitative statements.

What kinds of masks. Where. On whom. To what kind of fit.

How much ventilation. Where. From what source and to what outlet.

What kind of disinfect. At what concentration. At what frequency of application.

Reducing complex questions to simple binary statements is the opposite of cognition.

You are quite right I would have not been happy at all had the daycares been shut down. For the four months they were shut down in Massachusetts I was quite unhappy because I was unable to work a normal day and say with a straight face I was earning the paycheck that kept a roof over our heads. I was fortunate in having an accomodating employer. Other people less so. Had the situation gone on, either I or my wife would have had to quit work. Since at the time the wife was a resident making resident salary rather than a full doctor making doctor salary, it would have been her. In fact many women with small children did have to quit working.

So the question is...was it worth it? And were the masks worth it when the daycares reopened? To answer such a question, a control study of a suitable size that sampled a suitable diversity of geographies and masking policies would be necessary.

I am not aware of any such studies particular to daycares beyond the observational studies concluding that covid wasn't a problem for kids. If you have anything to add, please do. If you have nothing but generalizations to reiterate, please read the thread again.

No. We are not talking about abstractions or generalities. We are talking about nominally serious people asserting with a straight face that a masked toddler in a daycare is in any way an improvement over an unmasked toddler in a daycare.

The same daycare where toddlers habitually slobber over toys, require hands-on diaper changes, take naps (sans mask for safety of course) and eat together.

Madness.

Again. We are talking about toddlers in daycares.

My town required them to wear a mask, citing CDC guidance. This was crazy.

We are talking about two year olds.

You obviously haven't seen one operating in the wild if you can, with a straight face, assert that a mask can make any difference in that context.

And that is part of the problem. People stop listening when they hear something that is contradicted by their own direct observation. One might recall that in properly executed science, hypotheses that are contradicted by observations are discarded, not elevated on a pedestal as unassailable scientific truth, your lying eyes be damned.

Everyone is so literal. My office doesn't have jack squat on the wall. I was using what I assume was a common metaphor. Also every lawyer and physician I know (wife included) does have their diplomas on the wall and insists on being referred to as "Doctor" or "Attorney" in a professional capacity.

Where I work, the reverse snobbery rule is in effect and you get the side eye if you introduce yourself as Dr. So-and-so.

Masking toddlers in the context of covid wasn't about compassion. It was about humoring the delusions of neurotic people. I consider that harmful. Always.

I had a toddler at the time and I felt like I was being made to punish my kid for what I knew to be an absolute nonsense reason. The harm *is* I was making my kid do something uncomfortable and unnatural for an absolutely pointless reason. The pointlessness being

Yet my town's board of health spun it as absolutely essential for everyone's health. I don't blame them. I listened in to one of their zoom meetings and I came in thinking they were caricatures of arrogance but came away realizing they were scared people trying to make the best of a bad situation and deferring to what they understood to be an authority that could help them navigate it.

All the more reason I am appalled at the arrogant and downright predatory behavior of that scientific authority. People were scared, and the false certainty projected by "the science" or at the very least the failure to dispel that false certainty by individual scientists in the public eye gave people a reason to mandate stupid and harmful stuff.

That was the harm. And I will not forgive it.

Precautionary principle: a form of CYA and/or institutionalized cowardice. The social contract is not that you're my mother. It's that you manage your own risks and I'll manage mine.

Said like someone who has read about children in a book and has never seen them in person. And also by someone who must have been deliberately not paying attention to the plethora of data from January 2020 onward that showed small children were as a group not susceptible to covid the way older adults were.

Again: Known at the time to be implausible, known at the time to be pointless. Yet still mandated by people citing science and scientists who did nothing to dispell the nonsense.

And now we've seen 1) that this kind of advice was ineffective when it counted and 2) it got extended where it didn't belong, like long-form on-camera or podcast interviews and at-length blog posts where people stuck to the simple sound bites. And people listening saw the inapplicability of the general simple message to their own messy circumstances and concluded that the talking head was decidedly empty and not worth listening to.

The power move is a tool for managing subordinates who don't know their place. This does not describe the relationship of free citizens with eachother or with their duly elected government.

Science is heirarchical...a vestige of its origins in medieval universities. People who go through it forget sometimes that the rest of the world ain't like that.