tl;dr: It’s this weird kind of hot take where you say something completely obvious and act as if it’s objectionable to someone. Kinda like a hot take, but instead of going to the trouble of saying something actually counterintuitive, you say something innocuous, and the hot take is that “we” aren’t admitting it. Seems kinda odd to me, but maybe this is just the next generation of hot takes.
According to Slate, a pitch should “feel fresh or original . . . Slate is known for surprising, witty, persuasive arguments.
According to Wikipedia, “Slate has been known for publishing contrarian pieces arguing against commonly held views about a subject, giving rise to the #slatepitches Twitter hashtag in 2009.”
According to the Columbia Journalism Review (cited in that Wikipedia article), a Slate pitch is “an idea that sounds wrong or counterintuitive proposed as though it were the tightest logic ever.”
But today I came across an article on Slate that was the opposite: It presented a completely unobjectionable idea but presented it as controversial. I’m not sure what to call this, maybe an #obvioustake?
The article was called, “We Need to Admit Masking Kids at School Has Some Downsides,” and already I was like, huh? Everybody knows that wearing a mask has downsides! After all, if you’re not in one of these settings:
1. Attending a costume ball,
2. Robbing a bank,
3. Working at a dusty job,
4. Concerned about transmitting infection,
5. Acting in a WW1 movie, or
6. Trick-or-treating,
then you won’t be wearing one! If there were no downsides, you’d see people wearing masks all the time, just for fun and fashion.
This made me wonder who was the audience for this article. Is there a “we” who won’t admit that asking kids at school has some downsides? That just seems weird.
The article continues in this vein, referring to “the question of whether there are downsides to masks.” This is so ridiculous! I guess the author of the article doesn’t wear glasses or she’d know that masks make your glasses fog up. Also, masks make it harder to breathe! After teaching a 90-minute class, I rush to go outside, rip off the mask, and take a deep drag of air. And I get to put my specs back on and I can see the world again. Pretty cool, huh?
That said, the Slate article, by economist Emily Oster, has some interesting parts, for example a discussion of “the observation that seeing the bottom half of the face is important for reading emotions, learning to speak, and learning to read.” I’ve done some research on that topic!
At the end, though, we get a return to the obvious: “The effects may be small, or mixed across kids, but in the absence of a disease risk, we would not have children mask at school or child care.” Halloween excepted, of course!
So this seems kinda like a Slate pitch turned inside out: a column full of unexceptional statements, but presented as if it’s controversial in some way (“We need to admit,” etc.).
Basbøll and I talked about how a good story is immutable and anomalous. “Anomalous” is the twist in the story. The above-discussed Slate article is reasonable—so much so that maybe it didn’t seem interesting enough until it was embedded in a familiar trope of controversy: bold truth-teller tells it like it is. You should be able to tell it like it is without being bold. Truth should be enough on its own without needing to be accompanied by controversy. Or, to put it another way, there’s enough real controversy in the world that there’s no reason to suppose it when it does not exist.
I guess this counts as an advance in journalism: a new way to appear to be counterintuitive. Instead of saying something ridiculous and working your butt off to defend it, you say something innocuous and just imply that you’re offering a hot take, thus moving the burden of explanation from you to those other people. A kind of journalistic jujitsu.
I like it! I mean, not really, I don’t actually like it. But I appreciate it in an intellectual sense.
Full disclosure: I sometimes write for Slate. I don’t think I ever mastered the #slatepitch, though.
P.S. The above story reminds of the classic, “Participants reported being hungrier when they walked into the café (mean = 7.38, SD = 2.20) than when they walked out [mean = 1.53, SD = 2.70, F(1, 75) = 107.68, P < 0.001]." But, to their credit, they didn't claim this was surprising.
Yes, obvious to many of us. But there really is a small but vocal group of people seriously claiming there are zero harms and we should literally start wearing masks permanently. I have encountered these people in real life as well as the nuts on Twitter.
But maybe the joke went over my head and that was your point. :)
Yes… I was also confused about Andrew’s confusion. In public discourse these days, anything seen to remotely call into question the statements of the CDC or the public health community (which generally has taken the attitude of any risk of infection should be treated as a 100% risk of infection (I’ve heard many statements of the form “x could happen” as justification of keeping every mitigation measure you could think of in my kids district)) is taking as denying that Covid exists (I’m exaggerating… but only by a little).
I’ve had the opportunity to talk to many parents, teachers, and district leaders in my small city, and this attitude is alive and well. If you suggested that perhaps kids might not need to get boosters or if you mention that vaccines don’t really protect that well against infection especially over longer time periods or if you mentioned we don’t really need to do deep cleaning of classrooms, you would be shunned out of polite society. The “not crazy” attitude that some people have taken is to recognize that various mitigation measures will need to end, but the answer to “When?” was always “Not now”.
It may be a loud minority, but it is a loud minority that school leaders (at least in blue areas) have followed.
Jfa:
See my response to Casey below. There were people at Columbia who didn’t want us to go back to in-person classes and they really annoyed me. Still, I don’t think they were saying that masks have no downsides. I’m pretty sure that I agreed in substance with the Slate article; I just didn’t like the framing that “We need to admit” something that’s super-obvious. Who is that “we,” exactly?
The “we have to admit” is akin to the ubiquitous “you can’t say X”…
… (where X would be something like Joe Rogan saying “you can’t say vaccines don’t prevent all infections without getting banned from social media.” which (paraphrasing) he claimed in his apology video for which he received much praise).
Sam:
I did not realize there were such people, but I assume they’re in the tiny minority, hence not something that “we need to admit” (as in the headline that implies that “we” are wrong on this). More accurate would be, “We wish they would admit . . . “
The lack of discussion on costs and benefits in the mask mandates indicates that most politicians, at least, see no costs to wearing masks.
Sean –
How do you know that they just don’t think there aren’t net costs from wearing masks (in public indoor spaces were social distancing isn’t realistic) and that there are net costs from arguing that there are net costs?
What would the difference between that and your assumption look like?
“What would the difference between that and your assumption look like?”
2-3 months after school-aged children (the population with the lowest risk from Covid) became eligible for vaccination, California, New York, Illinois, and I believe a few other states, ended their indoor mask mandates except for in schools.
If costs and benefits were actually being considered, school mask mandates would have been the first to go… not the last.
> If costs and benefits were actually being considered, school mask mandates would have been the first to go… not the last.
That could mean that the other cases of mandates being ended are doing it too quickly.
My impression is that kids are a known big vector for disease, a population that doesn’t understand risks and benefit calculations for themselves, and a precious thing that people want to protect. It makes perfect sense to say “well adults can make their own decisions about masks, but children will have to wait until the experiment run on older people shows it’s safe.
Jerrod –
> 2-3 months after school-aged children (the population with the lowest risk from Covid) became eligible for vaccination, California, New York, Illinois, and I believe a few other states, ended their indoor mask mandates except for in schools.
>> If costs and benefits were actually being considered, school mask mandates would have been the first to go… not the last.
I interpret that comment to indicate that you think the only reason to mandate masks for young kids is to protect the kids from the risks of getting sick. Is my interpretation correct?
I’d suggest that certainly initially, but even later on one of the primary considerations was reducing community spread, and reducing the risk to school faculty and staff who might be working long hours with direct exposure with infected kids and no realistic way to remain socially distanced, and the families of those faculty and staff.
Sorry Daniel – didn’t see your comment before I wrote mine.
Joshua and Daniel:
There is plenty of research at this point to say that schools are not drivers of community spread of Covid-19. That’s how districts (that had been closed) were convinced to reopen their doors in the spring 2021. We saw this in states with and without mask mandates. We saw it in the UK when there was no mask requirements in schools and there was robust surveillance testing. We also saw it in many other countries that decided to not mask children below 12. In fact, since the beginning of the pandemic there have been several papers trying to understand why children are not the biological weapons of mass destruction they seem to be for other diseases. The experiment has been run several times.
Regarding the safety to teachers: “Is my interpretation correct?” No, your interpretation is incorrect. In the areas where adults are allowed to go unmasked, there are also other adults who work at those places who will be “put at risk” (e.g. gym staff, cashiers everywhere, salons, bartenders, etc.), all of whom have others to whom they could spread covid to. If it is determined that those adults can face the risk of serving unmasked individuals, then presumably teachers are no different. Additionally, many papers looking at this issue show similar covid infection rates in teachers and daycare workers as the general population.
So it’s more that when looking at schools vs. other places, when comparing risks, the risk to teachers differences out when comparing schools to other environments and you’re left comparing the risk to children (who are the lowest risk population) to the risk to adults (who are at much higher risk).
To recap: schools aren’t major drivers of community spread of Covid (especially no more so than other public settings for which mask mandates were lifted), the adults who work at the places where mask mandates were lifted are no less important and do not face any less risk of getting covid, the people at the places where mask mandates can spread Covid at least as well as children and are more likely to utilize medical resources in the event they do catch Covid (increasing the strain on the medical system’s capacity), and children face vastly lower risk (on par with seasonal flu) from Covid than other populations.
That’s why (in response to Joshua’s original question of what would look different if cost-benefit was being undertaken) I said that unmasking kids last shows the decisions of whom to unmask was not using cost-benefit.
Daniel –
I missed this earlier…
> There is plenty of research at this point to say that schools are not drivers of community spread of Covid-19.
Sure. But the full range of the literature is mixed, and the context is one where it would be unrealistic to expect a clear understanding without a lot of follow-on analysis. I say that as someone who posted here very early on in the pandemic regarding some modelers were saying that (what they felt was counter=-intuitively) closing schools wouldn’t reduce spread beyond the very initial stages of the pandemic.
As to your paragraph on the evidence, from what I’ve seen you’re underestimating the uncertainty.
>…there are also other adults who work at those places who will be “put at risk” (e.g. gym staff, cashiers everywhere, salons, bartenders, etc.), all of whom have others to whom they could spread covid to. If it is determined that those adults can face the risk of serving unmasked individuals, then presumably teachers are no different.
I’m not understanding what you’re saying here. What do you mean by “at those places?”
Again, you seem to be assuming I was referring only to teachers, when I wasn’t.
While the impact of NPIs in schools will necessarily have to be viewed within a larger context (even if a lot of spread did take place in schools that signal could be swamped by a lot of spread taking place across society), the fact that people wiil be exposed to risk in other places has only limited relevance to the cost/benefit analysis fo closing or masking in schools per se.
> Additionally, many papers looking at this issue show similar covid infection rates in teachers and daycare workers as the general population.
Again, you point to only one side of the literature, and don’t seem to appreciated just how uncertain and limited the research we have is (irrespective of the conclusions presented).
> So it’s more that when looking at schools vs. other places, when comparing risks, the risk to teachers differences out when comparing schools to other environments and you’re left comparing the risk to children (who are the lowest risk population) to the risk to adults (who are at much higher risk).
Sorry, but I don’t think your cancelling out logic is well-supported. It’s a theory. That’s fine. But you seem, IMO, to far outpace the evidence base.
> That’s why (in response to Joshua’s original question of what would look different if cost-benefit was being undertaken) I said that unmasking kids last shows the decisions of whom to unmask was not using cost-benefit.
Again, I think that your logic doesn’t sufficiently engage with the huge uncertinties here. Just because people don’t agree with your highly certain conclusions about the associated causality doesn’t mean that they haven’t considered the full range of costs and benefits.
Joshua:
I guess I don’t understand your confusion. And I especially don’t understand this statement: “the fact that people wiil be exposed to risk in other places has only limited relevance to the cost/benefit analysis fo closing or masking in schools per se.” Presumably doing cost-benefit analysis of lifting masks in schools would consider the same factors (infection risk, mortality and morbidity risk conditional on infection, etc.) when deciding whether to lift masking in gyms and bars and other congregate settings in schools.
I’ll grant you that there is some uncertainty on whether schools contribute to covid spread (though I think the bulk of the evidence suggest school-acquired infections are not drivers of Covid spread), but the only way that uncertainty would favor keeping mask in schools and allowing optional masking at other gathering places is if we thought the spread was possibly more prevalent in schools than in non-school locales under consideration, and I haven’t seen anything to suggest that gyms, bars, nightclubs, churches, etc., are associated with less covid spread than schools.
If policy makers are actually using cost-benefit analysis to make the decision of which places to go maskless, it still would seem that schools should be the first in line. My prior is that the cost to masking are higher for children (especially younger pre-puberty children) (this seems to be a widely held belief, but if you want to contend that masks are more costly for adults to wear than children, I’m open to considering those arguments). If we assume masking reduces spread equally for any given population (which given how kids wear mask my prior would be that masks are not as effective as they would be for adults), then the benefit of masking would accrue mostly to the adult population, since kids face much lower mortality and morbidity risks than adults.
So when looking at where to unmask first (from a cost-benefit perspective), the population (i.e. mostly adults) receiving services in other congregate settings (bars, gyms, churches, grocery stores, banks, court rooms, etc.) have a lower benefit and higher cost from going mask optional than the people receiving services from school (i.e. children). So that’s one part of the equation. Then we look at who works at these places. The risk to school workers is (at most) similar to the risk to workers in other places where people gather. (I say “at most” because a consistent finding is that infection rates in school and childcare staff is similar to the general population (in both mask mandatory and mask optional locations).) I will note that mask optional also applies to employers that don’t serve customers on site (such as meat packing plants). This is ignored in the above analysis but the population in those places would also face lower benefit and higher costs from removing masks than the population at schools.
So if policy makers used cost benefit analysis to determine that people should be allowed to go maskless in non-school settings (where people face higher costs and lower benefits from going mask optional), then the same type of cost benefit analysis should lead to the conclusion that children should be allowed to go maskless to schools.
Could you give some examples where you think cost-benefit analysis would recommend making mask optional in the non-school settings that were allowed to go mask optional but that would keep masks mandatory in schools?
Having followed her Twitter account through the pandemic and her COVID school data project, I feel like there’s plenty of reasons for her to feel like any positions contrary to “COVID maximalism” are controversial, no matter how innocuous. It was sad to watch, but a lot of Twitter fits that bill.
Here’s an article describing a bit (probably flawed, just googled to find a link)
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/brown-professor-gets-hounded-off-twitter-for-article-saying-its-okay-to-take-your-kids-on-vacation/
Casey:
I clicked through and read the article, and I agree with its authors that infection and transmission risks go up and down, and we can’t stay cooped up forever. There are people out there who favor what I consider to be unnecessary precautions. There were some people who tried to stop Columbia from going back to in-person classes last semester, and that really bugged me! I love in-person teaching, I think it’s much better for students, I was really annoyed that people were trying to stop it from happening, and I very much appreciated that Columbia held firm on this. So I think that on the substance of the matter I’m pretty much in agreement with the author of the Slate article and the author of that National Review article.
Again, though, what bothered me with the Slate article was that it was framed as if “we” think that masking has no downsides. And that’s ridiculous. The real question is about tradeoffs, not about the existence of downsides.
As I read the post, I was thinking “this is something economists do all the time” and then discovered the article was written by an economist! Naturally. This also relates to the very recent discussion about elasticities. The statement that there is a downside to wearing masks is obvious – but what economists often mean by statements like that is: mask proponents assume masks are good, they ignore the negative impacts, but these impacts are real, in fact, they may be so large as to make mask wearing a bad thing, once again proving how misguided such policies can be.
The appealing thing about this chain of logic is that it permits the obvious statement that there are negative impacts of mask wearing to substitute for proof of the more contentious statements about the net impacts of mask wearing. Put in terms of elasticities, the elasticity of public health (measured somehow) with respect to mask wearing is less than one but could be negative.
While I detest the rhetorical trick involved, I still hesitate at the default assumption that such elasticities are positive. I can accept that they are positive, but if they are not materially different than zero, then the headline is over-hyped (no excuse for that) but making the basic point that the policy may be far less effective than its proponents believe.
The real damage of taking the potentially accurate last statement and over-hyping it in the ridiculous #obvioustake is that it promotes quantitative illiteracy. Don’t the numbers matter? Exactly how effective is the policy? Rather than provide evidence and try to determine the effectiveness, it becomes a vacuous debate about whether or not wearing masks is a good policy without any meaningful data. Proponents assume the elasticities are large, objectors assume they are zero or negative. There is no need to determine the net size of the impact because the arguments have been stated in the extremes. Good for headlines, good for tweets, but not good for increasing understanding.
I suspect if you were a member of any neighborhood facebook groups where school masking policies were being discussed, you’d know the “masks have some downsides” claim isn’t as uncontentious as it seems. On my neighborhood FB group in which parents have recently been arguing over whether to maintain the mask mandate in elementary schools, I regularly encounter people making arguments of the form: “if masking prevents even one infection, it’s worth it”. Maybe they don’t explicitly say masking has no downsides. But they do make arguments that seem to presuppose that. Getting people to admit there are costs on both sides is the first step to having a discussion in which you try to get a sense of the magnitude of those costs and then compare them. But at least in blue state suburbs like the one I live in, a lot of people aren’t willing to take that first step.
Daniel –
There is a reverse phenomenon which is very much in play. I have run across many people (on social media) who make arguments like “people have gotten infected despite wearing a mask” – as if any infections at all wearing masks implies that “masks don’t work.”
Similarly, I have encountered quite a bit where people assume significant costs to mask wearing without substantial evidence (e.g., that they are causing massive developmental delays among school aged children).
I would suggest what we have is an interplay between the phenomena on both sides.
> Getting people to admit there are costs on both sides is the first step…
In other words, (imo) some of the overreaction – as if there aren’t any costs – is directly tied to an overreaction about those costs and a lack of respect for the uncertainty regarding benefits. So the first step, imo, is for people (on both sides) to be less tribal (and stop pointing fingers at the other side for creating the problem by being tribal).
Sam, Casey, Dale:
Sure, but the author of that article is not saying, “We Need to Admit Masking Kids at School Has A Positive Net Benefit”; she’s saying, “We Need to Admit Masking Kids at School Has Some Downsides.” I agree with all of you that there are people saying that masks in school are a good thing, and that there’s legitimate disagreement on the net effects—I don’t have a strong feeling on this one myself; obv it depends on circumstances—but everyone agrees (or, as the Slate headline writer would have it, “admits”) that masking has some downsides.
Again, when she says, “in the absence of a disease risk, we would not have children mask at school or child care,” I’m like, no duh! Everybody knows that, in the absence of disease risk, students would go maskless 364 days of the year. So this just seems like a Captain Obvious statement framed as it it’s controversial.
I agree with Dale that there is legitimate controversy here, so maybe the author was implicitly thinking about net effects but then she somehow forgot this when writing the article.
Her first paragraph literally lays out the case that people discussing the “off-ramps” to mask mandates (not advocating their immediate cessation) were seeing pushback. That means that those opponents were considering masks as zero-cost. She wrote the article to support the discussion on when the net effect might change, and the need for weighing the COVID risks against the costs of masks.
Sean:
The headline is:
I agree with the second sentence. I think the first sentence is silly in that it implies that “we” aren’t admitting that masking has downsides.
In retrospect, maybe one thing that annoyed me about the Slate article is that I do agree with many or most of its points, which made me even more bothered that the framing was that “we” were so thick-headed that we needed to be told obvious things such as “in the absence of a disease risk, we would not have children mask at school or child care.” Again, Halloween excepted.
I think you and I just have different “bubbles.” I’ve encountered dozens of people who claim that there are no downsides to masks. Mostly online. Maybe they’re bots. Oster, of course, has had thousands of people screaming at her that acknowledging any downsides is a moral atrocity.
Sam:
I don’t think I’m in a bubble, exactly. It’s complicated. On one hand, I know many people who are covid paranoids and I don’t know any covid deniers. On the other hand, I’m a teacher and I’ve seen how difficult it is to do online learning, also my kids are in school and I’ve seen how difficult it’s been for them, so that gives me a strong motivation to move toward in-person interactions. Also I personally hate wearing a mask as it fogs my glasses and gives me a headache. Not the world’s biggest deal but it does affect my thinking on the issue!
Anyway, I don’t think that even the most covid-paranoid of my friends and family would deny that “Masking Kids at School Has Some Downsides” or would disagree with the Captain Obvious statement that “in the absence of a disease risk, we would not have children mask at school or child care.” So, in that sense, I guess I’m in a bubble of people who are not completely nuts on the issue.
“So, in that sense, I guess I’m in a bubble of people who are not completely nuts on the issue.”
Lucky you. :)
Indeed, lucky you.
There are a lot of bubbles out here.. a lot of PTA groups.. school boards… and DEFINITELY community parent facebook groups .. where even hinting that mandatory full-day masking is anything more than a “minor, negligible inconvenience” … and that the mere theoretical possibility that it might save even just one life someday, somewhere is enough to justify it… is akin to hate speech and will lead to bullying and possibly getting kicked out of the group for spreading misinformation. There is definitely a party line that must be followed.
Stepping back, it’s hilarious Slate felt the need to be edgy by saying something SO OBVIOUS, but the sad truth is their headline IS sacrilegious to a lot of communities. Of course, I’m sure they all just canceled Slate for this transgression.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90639818/will-we-wear-masks-forever-the-answer-might-depend-on-where-you-live
I think it’s fair to say that if there is a change in society in the sort of places where Slate-reading is relatively high to use masks as a signal that you care about society rather than as a means of warding off disease that the advocates of that view must find the *costs* of that gesture as trivial. I take your point that trivial != non-zero, but I’m going to defend Oster here, who is probably reacting to the personal vitriol that has come her way in the last two years… in her Twitter feed this view is far from rare,
Jonathan:
I’m not impressed with the low-budget anthropology of that linked article (“The Great Plains are still sparsely populated, so people tend to be more self-reliant and individualistic, whereas New England, with its religious Puritanical roots, tends to be more collectivist” etc etc), but, yeah, I’m annoyed that we’re still required to wear masks on the subway. On the plus side, Columbia has had in-person classes this academic year, and soon will no longer be requiring masks.
From the other direction, the other day I had an email exchange with someone who referred to mask wearing as “dehumanizing,” and then there was the TV personality who said that you should call the police if you see kids wearing masks while playing. I can’t stand that sort of over-the-top control-freak rhetoric. It’s political polarization at its worst.
Hey! The linked article was the best one I could find from the first page of Googling “masking forever.” [And I had to scan *three* other articles to get there.] But yeah, citing bad takes out of MIT in Fast Company is pretty weak.
Jonathan:
Your comment motivated me to look more carefully . . . the Fast Company article says, “New England, with its religious Puritanical roots, tends to be more collectivist,” but if you go to Figure 1 of the PNAS article, you’ll see that the New England states (Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine) are in the middle of the pack in collectivism. Other than Hawaii, the most collectivist states according to that paper are southern states: Louisiana, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Maryland. So, yeah, that Fast Company article is really bad, in that it doesn’t even accurately summarize the claims that it is hyping.
Jonathan –
>… who is probably reacting to the personal vitriol that has come her way in the last two years… in her Twitter feed this view is far from rare,
Not to excuse the vitriol, but…
I think that (1) there’s a fair amount that Oster could do to proactively limit some of that vitriol (without refraining from expressing her views – such as avoiding rhetoric like “we have to admit.”) and, (2) Oster benefits from taking provocative contrarian stances.
And just as I won’t defend the virtriol, I think that it’s also fine to have a standard that people with a public platform like Oster should rise above reflexive responses to vitriol directed their way.
Perfectly fair. Heat and kitchens and all that. I was more *explaining* than really *defending.* Full disclosure: her father taught my grad school macro class and her mother convinced me (by example) that I never wanted to be in academia, so I’ve followeed her career with interest.
Point taken (although I didn’t read it as a defense).
She’s been an interesting person to follow during the pandemic.
Here was a thread where an Oster article was criticized in a (more detailed) manner somewhat similar to this post from Andrew
:
https://twitter.com/Joey__Schafer/status/1478988462879494144?t=E0HlAC9YIMXJX3XKe9pYFA&s=01
This was the article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/university-covid-policies-remote-learning-mental-health/621159/
I dunno… I’ll defend Oster on this one. I think those who don’t like how the headline was phrased don’t really get how toxic the conversation around Covid was and continues to be. Last fall, if you suggested that a vaccine mandate might not be appropriate for children to attend school, in many blue areas of the country you’d have been yelled at. In my town, if you pointed out the downsides of wearing masks, the common response was “my kid doesn’t have any problem with it”. I don’t think these people are going through cost benefit calculations or even considering that there are any costs. Any recognition of costs came with the response of “kids are resilient”.
People were afraid to reduce any visible sign of mitigation, and many who support the continued use of masks in schools (especially in low transmission areas) probably haven’t thought much about the downsides of masking kids (or how low the risk are that children face from Covid). I think this was highlighted when several states dropped their indoor mask mandates… except for schools.
I would also note that the article was published in November of 2021. If you perused the CDC website on masking in schools, you would not have found anything on the downsides of masks in their many summaries on why mask should be worn in schools. And there were still calls for schools to be closed in response to Omicron (even though it was clear at that point that schools were not high risk environments for Covid transmission). There’s a lot that many people still had to admit in November (much of which they probably still need to admit).
Jerrod:
Believe it or not, one of my kids has no problem with wearing masks. She’ll wear it outside too and sometimes she just forgets she has it on! But that doesn’t mean that I’d say that masking “has no downsides.”
If the CDC document did not mention downsides to masks, that doesn’t mean that people thought there were no downsides. It’s just that the downsides are so obvious that they didn’t need to mention it! Of course people don’t going around wearing masks unless there’s a good reason for it.
I agree with you that (a) calls for closing schools in response to Omicron was a bad idea, and (b) there were loud voices calling for that. So I’m all in favor of people writing articles for Slate or whatever and taking strong positions on these issues. But in that case the key point is the tradeoff, not the empty statement that masks have downsides. I do feel that if the Slate article had a different title and if a few passages in the article had been changed, it could’ve been just fine. I agree with Dale’s comment below.
I don’t know Andrew. Tons of people think the benefits of masking are obvious and the CDC provides tons of info on it. Why no info on the downsides?
I think you and the people posting here are very different from the intended audience of Oster’s article. I’ve been fairly active in my kids’ school community over the past few years, and the number of people who won’t even consider the possibility that masking has downsides is astonishing. They are dumbfounded that any children would have issues with masks.
Jerrod:
I think the reason there’s no info on the downsides in those documents is that the downsides are harder to quantify. That’s a big bias in many areas of life, that things that can be easily measured or counted are overemphasized. Just for a simple example, I’ve known people who drive somewhere rather than taking some other mode of transport because they think driving is cheaper, but that’s because they’re only considering the cost of gas, not other costs such as depreciation on the car or the possible need to buy a second car.
To get back to masks: the costs are obvious: masks are uncomfortable, they give headaches, they fog up glasses, they make conversation more difficult, etc. No need for a document to make this kind of obvious point. But I see your point that when these obvious things aren’t mentioned, people can inappropriately downweight them.
Jerrod –
> They are dumbfounded that any children would have issues with masks.
I find that hard to believe. For example, my guess is that any parent could conceive of some children complaining energetcially about having to wear a mask. As to (1) how widespread that phenomenon is, (2) what to do if it happens, (3) whether mask wearing is actually effective and, (4) whether people have some sort of social obligation despite the uncertainty and objection, are all another matter.
I suspect that you’re conflating all of that into what is effectiely arguing from incredulity (you can’t see why someone would disagree with you about manates in schools for masks without being “dumbfounded” that some kids might not want to wear masks). Or maybe you meant something else by “hae issues with?” But even there, I think the same basic structure applies. Of course anyone who has talked to anyone wearing a mask could see that wearing a mask might, for example, make it harder for people to interpret speach. But the differences would arise regarding different views on net effect, and the relative importance of different aspects running in different directions. People diverge on this kind of issue in ways that they can wind up in posisitons that don’t actually reflect the full spectrum of their underlying thinking.
It’s as Peter Dorman describes below – where people (on both sides) have difficulty in engaging with those who disagree about potential drawbacks in their favored positions. To do from that to a characterization that they’d be “dumbfounded” that there are any drawbacks to any degree seems a
….seems uncharitable.
Joshua:
When I say dumbfounded, I actually mean dumbfounded. I had the opportunity to run for school board last year (thankfully it was relatively civilized), and I talked to maybe 2000-3000 people about lots of issues (including masking, vaccines, school closures, etc). I live in a very “progressive” community. A lot of people’s identity these days is wrapped up in what political tribe they are part, and for better or worse, the Democrats in my area (and many others) felt that one of the markers of their tribe was masking.
My oldest didn’t have any issues with wearing a mask, my youngest hated it. When I discussed masking with various people, most of those who favored mask mandates and whose kids didn’t mind wearing masks expressed consternation that other kids would have a hard time wearing it.
Maybe (by my bringing it up) they thought I was trying to get rid of the mask mandate (I wasn’t), but it seemed that they were resistant to the fact that masks had downsides. When one person said kids should be in N95s, I said that there were no NIOSH-approved N95s for children, and I also pointed the person to a couple of papers showing the side effects of head-aches, difficulty breathing, skin irritation, and acne from prolonged wearing of N95s (one was based on a survey of hospital staff… if I find the reference I’ll post it). The person was nearly apoplectic that I would want to endanger children because I was denying the effectiveness of masks.
Now, are the people really dumbfounded that there are downsides to wearing masks… I don’t know. But those are the reactions that people had. I will add that those who opposed mask mandates expressed the sentiment that mask didn’t do anything and putting them on children was child abuse. I’d say that is an equally stupid sentiment as denying the downsides of masking, but that’s how people expressed themselves.
I stopped discussing data with people very quickly because when I mentioned that Covid had similar hospitalization and mortality
risk for children as seasonal flu, some woman started yelling at me saying that kids were dying (I got similar, though less vociferous statements, from others).
So do people actually believe the things they told me? I don’t know. If your identity is wrapped up in wearing masks and having your kids wear masks, then hearing that there are downsides to that can be hard to take. This was back in the fall of 2021 during the delta wave, so people may have been primed to defend their chosen path by burying their head in the sand. But the “you have to admit that masks have downsides” message is something that a lot of people needed to hear in November. It may be something they can come to grips with after reading an article like Oster’s, but if it’s not talked about they won’t move past it.
Jerrod:
I see your point about people stating belief in ridiculous things because it fits their politics. Given that there are people out there stating that 5 million votes were stolen from Trump, and people who say that Obama is a Muslim, it should be no surprise that there are people saying that masks have no downsides. Do they really believe this or are they just saying it? I guess that for many people there is no clear distinction.
Jerrod –
I have no inherent reason to question your report of your experience.
But on the other hand, I could fairly be called a progressive with a fair amount of contact with progressives and I can’t imagine any one of them who would be “dumbfounded” at the idea that some kids would I next to wearing masks, or that wearing a mask would make it harder for people to understand each other clearly. No one who has worn a mask, imo, would not be aware of that “downside.”
But I’m quite sure I know a lot of people who would argue that those “downsides” are relatively trivial or at least acceptable in exchange for what they belive to be the upsides.
Is it possible that some would say “There are no downsides” when engaged with an interlocutor who says “masks don’t work” or “masks are child abuse?” Of course I wouldn’t rule that out – but yeah, despite your experience, my experience tells me that I’d be hard pressed to find anyone, if I were to say “I know of a kid who objects to wearing a mask.” or “Sometimes I have a hard time understanding someone when they’re wearing a mask.” who would respond with “I’m dumbfounded that you would say that.”
Not sure how to resolve our different experiences but my guess is that the way in which you presented your counter-arguments might have had something to do with the reactions you got.
Joshua:
I don’t think we’ll resolve our differences (and I would also consider myself fairly progressive), but I do want to respond to this: “Is it possible that some would say “There are no downsides” when engaged with an interlocutor who says “masks don’t work” or “masks are child abuse?” ”
To be clear, when I was discussing masking with people, I did not say any of those things (as you seem to imply, even though I explicitly say in my comment that those beliefs are “an equally stupid sentiment as denying the downsides of masking”). I mostly discussed masking in relation to future off-ramps.
But perhaps this gets us closer to a solution. In saying “we have to admit that mask have downsides”, perhaps the issue is not with people understanding that there are downsides. Perhaps the issue is actually talking openly and honestly with someone who might hold a different view on policy. It is in that type of environment that people should actually “admit” that masks have downsides. So when we say people need to “admit” masking has downsides, it needs to occur in the context of public discourse, not just neighborhood chitchat with friends.
Jerrod –
> To be clear, when I was discussing masking with people, I did not say any of those things (as you seem to imply, even though I explicitly say in my comment that those beliefs are “an equally stupid sentiment as denying the downsides of masking”).
Sorry for creating that impression. I was speculating about a scenario where I could see where someone would say “I’m dumbfounded that you’re saying there might be some downsides” (where downsides would be defined as a kid complaining about wearing a mask, or having some difficulty understanding someone speaking while they’re wearing a mask).
I agree with your final paragraph. I find the focus on “admit” to be counterproductive in that context. I think it’s better to just advocate for good faith exchange across differing points of view (starting with oneself). When someone starts bringing “admit” into the discussion, they’re almost invariably polarizing the discusison and likely to get a defensive, if not agreesive response.
Now I’ve read the article. I like most of it. The exceptions are the title (over-hyped, too extreme, and as Andrew is saying, states a straw-man argument – although I see there is some evidence that it is an argument made by some) and the conclusion:
“Which means that there are strong reasons to consider when we will feel the COVID risks are such that we can remove masks, probably even before the youngest kids are vaccine-eligible.”
That also seems overstated, particularly given the thrust of the article that we are not likely to have enough evidence to know. So, if there is really anything about the article that bothers me it is that it buys into the polarized opinions to get both attention and to suggest a conclusion, not based on evidence, but based on an appeal to those opinions.
It is a little strange in that the gist of the article is to say that the evidence is missing and/or difficult to get, but that it matters. Then, the conclusion appears to materialize without the necessary evidence. It feels like a classic economics technique – identify all the relevant considerations, state that we don’t have the information we need, then venture conclusions absent the evidence. This is the type of argument Tyler Cowen makes on Marginal Revolution all the time (maybe I should say “much of the time”).
Were the downsides considered before implementing mask mandates?
If not, that is implicitly setting it to zero effect when it matters.
Ventilators, masks, lockdowns, vaccines. In all cases we see a systematic exaggeration of the benefits and underestimation of the risks.
People trying to pretend this didn’t happen are only further hurting the credibility of science/medicine.
I mean, the other day I saw an interview w CDC director Walensky where she claimed no one ever mentioned waning and variants.
Go to 28 min: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I_hYgIpxM4A
Anon:
Of course the downsides were considered before implementing mask mandates! If there had been no downsides, the mandates would’ve been more widespread, would’ve begun earlier, and would’ve ended later.
Do you have a source for them being considered before implementation? Eg, from the CDC or local health official. Even NYT, etc would be interesting to see.
“It’s this weird kind of hot take where you say something completely obvious and act as if it’s objectionable to someone.”
I don’t know. I came to this post via Jesse Singal (twitter feed), who thinks that Slate does not publish this sort of thing in an effort to manufacture controversy via hot take, but because they know their readership are actually people who do find it objectionable. I agree. Here in a deep blue town in deep blue MA, people are still walking around outside in their N95s even though town infection rates are as low as they have been since March 2020. These are the people who are reading Slate. Slate simply knows their market.
anon –
> Here in a deep blue town in deep blue MA, people are still walking around outside in their N95s even though town infection rates are as low as they have been since March 2020.
I’m trying to understand what you conclude from that.
Consider that there may be people who don’t see a downside to walking around outside wearing an N95 mask. As for an upaide, for one thing I know a lot of people who have observed that they haven’t gotten a cold or the flu since the started wearing masks, and irrespective of COVID 19 want to continue with that. If you’ve traveled in Asia, for years people walked around in public wearing masks.
Perhaps people are wearing masks because they care about others and think there’s a benefit. Perhaps they’re just “vitue signaling” to avoid being judged.
I walked around for years wearing N95s to combat allergies well before COVID. It’s crazy high allergy season now.
“I’m trying to understand what you conclude from that.”
Well, I simply conclude that Slate might not be incorrect in thinking there is a market of people that find it objectionable to say that masking kids at school has downsides.
The very Wikipedia article Andrew linked to with the section about their contrarianism concludes by citing Daniel Engber on how they’re not like that anymore. Former Slate contributor Matthew Yglesias writes about the death of the Slatepitch here:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/slatepitch
Social media has been blamed for that, but Josh Barro blames Slack instead.
https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/1494335334812848133
#Slackpitch.
Seriously, though, that linked article by Yglesias is excellent. The only thing he’s missing is that Slate has always had a fair number of occasional contributors . . . like me! I think that the articles by expert outsiders add something too.
Separate from the discussions of masks, there’s the general issue that too many articles these days start with titles like “We need to talk about” or “We Need to Admit” or “Let’s talk about”, … — weasely statements that grate on my nerves with their presumption that I’m somehow part of the author’s team. It’s one of many reasons I find much of mainstream media increasingly unreadable.
And don’t get me started on the meaningless, ubiquitous, “problematic.” If something is “problematic,” actually state what it’s problem is!
This has been your daily dose of crankiness. As a counterbalance, note that they found Shackleton’s ship, perfectly preserved in frigid waters! (The videos are great.)
“mainstream media increasingly unreadable”
Mainstream media is a clickbait manufacturing operation, not a news reporting operation.
Anon:
You write, “Mainstream media is a clickbait manufacturing operation, not a news reporting operation.”
No. It’s both. Just as old-school media was both an advertising platform and a reporting operation. Just as Columbia University is both in the education business and the credentials-selling business.
This blog, of all places, is not the place to engage in all-or-nothing simplifications. It’s a waste of time and is contrary to everything that we stand for.
Raghu:
Yes, another way of putting it is: Who exactly is the audience for this article?
Presumably anyone who really believed that masking at school had no downsides wouldn’t believe the article, and anyone who recognized the downsides but wouldn’t “admit” them is also unlikely to be convinced? So then the audience is people like all of us, who know and readily admit there are downsides and think of this as a problem of tradeoffs.
In that sense, the Slate article is implying that there is some group who is out there refusing to admit the obvious. This might well be so, but in that case it seems odd to refer to those people as “we” rather than “they.”
At this point it might sound like I’m being super-picky with the wording, but that’s not my point. My point is that one way to understand any article is to consider its audience, and here the audience is not clear, which makes it hard for me to understand what’s going on.
Generally speaking, when a headline starts with “We need to talk about” or “We need to admit” or “Let’s talk about”, one can discern the true thrust of the article by simply substituting “Those idiots” for “We”. This also identifies the target audience: people who actually are on the author’s team, not those idiots in the outgroup.
This also helps eliminate the momentary pang of guilt when you decide not to click on the headline.
Agreed.
It’s like if you read “When did it become illegal to talk about X” (where X is something like vaccines not preventing all infections). Or “Why is it that you never hear anyone talking about X.”
You could almost always translate that in to “Those idiots disagee with us about X, and give us a hard time when we talk about it. Aren’t we such victims?”
Although I suppose there are some exceptions where there’s accuracy to the statement.
I think I’m in a middle zone here. I agree with Andrew that there is a something-out-of-nothing attempt to get a wow factor out of what should be an obvious, uncontroversial statement. That nebulous “we” is also annoying.
But it’s also the case that quite a few people have difficulty acknowledging that things they approve of have drawbacks, or that things they oppose have upsides. A useful framing is the “good begets good” heuristic as described by Leiser and Aroch. (Leiser, David and Ronen Aroch. 2009. Lay Understanding of Macroeconomic Causation: The Good-Begets-Good Heuristic. Applied Psychology. 58(3): 370-84.) I’ve seen this over and over in teaching, where students just can’t accept that things aren’t all one way or the other. My suspicion is that this heuristic is a first cousin (or closer) to cognitive dissonance avoidance. It’s healthy to broadcast that choices often do have disparate consequences.
It bugs me no end when these choices that inherently involve lots of interdependencies are contemplated in isolation.
I’m prepared to agree that masks for very young kids (say, under 5) are particularly costly, so it seems like the best way to get rid of them is to turn up all the other, lower-cost measures to reduce transmission generally (e.g., keep & enforce mask mandates in all other indoor congregate settings) and especially those with the closest spillovers to these young kids (e.g. provide & require KF-94s in grade school, where older siblings are likely to be).
I get so annoyed when someone proposes X that would be reasonable if we do A, B, and C … and then we just go ahead with X and no A, B, and C.
My university wanted to have in-person classes, which I think would be fine with a requirement to wear a high quality mask correctly, a vaccine mandate and regular testing. I agree cancelling in-person classes is costly, so let’s have classes in person and do the other very low cost things.
So we started with in-person classes with a very weak vaccinate-or-test policy plus a mask “requirement” that involved a lot of low quality masks not even covering noses. Then we dropped the vaccinate-or-test policy. Then the masks. Infuriating.
Zhou –
Presumably whatever the timing, the population with the lowest risk from Covid should be the first to have restrictions eased.
The reason we don’t wear masks outside of 1-6 above is that they make everything slightly less comfortable. That’s completely different from the “reasons we’re not talking about” which include things like childhood language development, etc. And there really is a lot of anti-(anti-mask) argument that says, “Why are you against making this small sacrifice to save lives?”, as if the “make everything slightly less comfortable” was the only relevant reason (and indeed, until COVID, it is the only reason most of us would have immediately thought of). So yes, there are bunch of reasons that most people (including most maskers, most anti-maskers, and most anti-anti-maskers) haven’t been talking about, and now we are.
I am older than most and the weather is cold in Minnesota, so I watch a lot of Alex Jones’ Infowars website. As a result, the discussion today about masks and kids, upsides and downsides, seems far too reasonable. Sure, there could be an adult conversation about the conceivable benefits and drawbacks of masking kids. But there isn’t in general because people like Jones thrive on inflaming a considerable proportion of the population into believing that masks, vaccines, social distancing, etc., are all part of globalist plot to enslave us. If you feel I am exaggerating, I suggest you tune into his program which often includes medical experts with legitimate degrees who insist that behind it all is the Literati, Rothschild and Soros. Not to mention “Big Mike.” If the last one does not ring a bell, you haven’t been watching what I have.
You’d think that Jones would be focused puppet masters that are behind the scenes manipulating popular figures like Barack Obama, rather than worrying about this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mike_(rapper)
“Big Mike” as the cognoscenti are aware, refers not to a rapper, but to Michelle Obama who the followers of Jones know to be a male. If this strikes you as insane, you are out of touch with a considerable portion of the populace.
Paul – that a an attempt at a joke.
I’ve been having a lot of dental work done lately (catch-up after having work postponed by COVID). The dentist’s office mask requirements are that the patient can take their mask off while they are in an individual treatment room (kinda “duh”, because the staff can’t work in the patient’s mouth if the mask is on), but must put it on if they go outside of that room (e.g., if they go to the restroom). They also are very firm with delivery people: The delivery person must put on a mask before entering the dental office.
(I think these policies reflect that dentists and their employees are used to wearing masks, so have probably thought about them more than most people have.)
We need to admit that treating kids like they don’t have any risk has some downsides:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/11/us-child-covid-deaths-omicron-surge
My kids were vaccinated the first day it was available. I was appalled that they delayed availability until Nov when tons of kids were being sent into schools with Delta surging (essentially because of bad statistical practices at the FDA + drug companies). Then when Omicron surged they didn’t even consider a delay in re-starting our local schools. Almost all of the kids infected and detected in testing in our schools throughout the entire pandemic were infected in Jan. Our area has very high vaxx uptake and Delta didn’t spread because the older sibs and parents were protected from infection by the vaccine, but Omicron was a different story, and hundreds of kids were infected in a couple weeks.
We are going to go around in circles on this for decades, I suspect: Interpretation: FCM mandates in schools were not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 incidence or transmission, suggesting that this intervention was not effective.
There will of course always be risk. We need to be honest about the effectiveness of interventions, and tradeoffs we make when we implement them.
Have we suddenly accepted that lack of rejecting the null makes it ok to mean “suggesting that this intervention was not effective?” Also – and I admit I didn’t read the study you linked so I may not understand what they did – is effectiveness of masks determined by looking at infection rates in the children? What about the families, friends, etc.? Did they measure that?
Author’s words, not mine. I should have included quotes. Though, yes, they do feel it means that the intervention was not effective. The intervention being school mask *mandates*. They were not trying to determine the effectiveness of masks. Nor were they trying to assess the tradeoffs. You can take a quick look at the linked abstract to get a sense for what they did.
Regardless of whether **masks** specifically are effective or not, people keep treating kids as if they have “very little risk” from COVID, but that’s not an appropriate way to deal with things. They have perhaps “very little risk” of **death** from COVID, but that’s not the same thing, nor is that risk zero. A child lost is perhaps 80 years of life lost, an 80 year old is perhaps 10 years of life lost. But more to the point, a child who has say permanent kidney damage or chronic fatigue type symptoms is 80 years of suffering. And a child who transmits to a parent with a heart condition for example may cause the death of their own parent, a huge amount of suffering for everyone. I’m really tired of the narrative that this is a relatively benign disease in children. It’s especially bad when everyone started to say “Omicron is less severe” and used that as an excuse to not worry so much about kids. Turns out it’s **more** severe in kids because it preferentially infects upper respiratory tissue that kids have a larger percentage of and smaller airways.
Withholding vaccines from 5-12 year olds for the incredibly stupid reason that we hadn’t completed a vaccine effectiveness trial (which was measuring the wrong kind of effectiveness anyway, effectiveness against initial infection instead of against hospitalization or severe outcomes) was a stupid mistake, and so is withholding them from under 5 year olds because they got the dosing wrong and have to re-do the trial with a higher dose or a 3rd dose or some such thing… again stupid, all of it incredibly stupid, and justified by religion like belief in RCT + NHST and completely wrong-headed thinking about risk to kids (weighing risk of vaccine side effects, which are known to be very low, against risk of disease in kids which are known to be easily an order of magnitude higher even before the trial started).
538: “There’s no evidence that mask-wearing is broadly harming children’s development.”
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/covid-19-updates/?cid=rrpromo#question-0
The details that follow acknowledge there is “limited evidence” (reminds me of a post that I think appeared on this blog about the difference between “no evidence for X” because there are no studies yet vs there are studies and they fail to offer support for X).
Either way, I was surprised when I read it the other day because I thought I had seen a few published articles in cognitive development suggesting otherwise.
“After teaching a 90-minute class, I rush to go outside, rip off the mask, and take a deep drag of air. And I get to put my specs back on and I can see the world again. Pretty cool, huh?”
Yes, pretty cool. Unfortunately, tens of thousands of toddlers and young children (many who wear glasses too) were given no such “mask breaks” after 90 minute intervals. Many subject to masking indoors and out, all day every day, with only 20 minutes to “eat and breathe” during an enforced-silent lunch.
Children (and many adult workers) do not have the autonomy you do to go out and take a deep drag of air. And hence, many want to demand a higher bar for proof and size of efficacy to justify something so painful — and for which, of course, longer-term developmental risks have not been studied.