Comment by nvm0n2
1 year ago
Thank you to sibling ggdG for presenting even more evidence.
But I don't get your reply at all, wtallis. "the next few paragraphs should be about backing that claim up with convincing evidence and explanations" - which is what the stuff about the Diamond Princess, SARS-1 and Hong Kong was about? Evidence and explanations for why the droplet model was wrong. Do you see that? The connection is that the claim exposure as simple as inverse square law on distance assumes no aerosol transmission, which is incorrect.
It's hard not to feel that if people didn't keep flagging these kinds of discussions off the front pages, the wider HN community would be aware of all these basic facts which as the sibling post points out, is actually not controversial and hasn't been for years. HN is supposed to be about intellectual curiousity but the aggressive flagging behavior talked about by others in this thread means that too many posters here are stuck in a timewarp where it's still Jan 2020.
I think you both have made a mistake that seems all to common among people who are eager for a fight: namely, failing to recognize the distinction between someone who disagrees with your conclusion, and someone who believes your argument to be unsound.
In reply to a comment about the inverse square law, you replied with arguments about droplet vs aerosol when neither concept was mentioned in the comment you were replying to. Simply put, your argument was unsound; it lacked any connection between the concepts in your comment and the concepts in the parent comment. As written, it falls somewhere between a non-sequitur and a straw-man.
When your conclusions are correct, such unsoundness is usually easy to rectify; you've now made it at least halfway there by implying that the inverse square law applies to droplet transmission but not aerosol transmission. You now only need to reinforce that new claim with evidence to complete the originally broken chain of reasoning and have a convincing argument.
Even when you are right, you still have a responsibility to make your point using complete and coherent reasoning. I routinely downvote people whose conclusions I agree with when their explanations or justifications are clearly deficient and overreaching and don't come close to proving their point. I flag such comments when it looks like the poster is being disingenuous or displaying egregious intellectual laziness. Because discussions here are meant to be thoughtful and substantive, and you don't accomplish that by regurgitating talking points without even re-writing them to fit appropriately into the context of the discussion. Bad arguments are always bad comments for HN.
(Not having researched the droplet vs aerosol issue myself, my suspicion is that both are likely subject to distance falloff that is at least quadratic, but that the constant factors are so wildly different that effective "social distancing" for aerosol transmission would require distances that do not fit into most indoor spaces, and consequently aerosol transmission in confined indoor spaces can result in aerosol concentration becoming fairly uniform instead of maintaining a strong gradient. But that's rather more reading between the lines than you can reasonably demand from people.)
[flagged]
> Your ability to follow simple conversations is far too poor
Crossing into personal attack will get you banned here. Please don't do it again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Your ability to follow simple conversations is far too poor to judge others like this.
It's not about ability to follow "simple" conversations. It's about willingness to chase down numerous seemingly-unrelated references (that you didn't even bother providing links for) in order to discover the missing connections that you could have easily explained up front, without much a priori confidence that tracking down those references would satisfactorily fill in all the gaps.
On a forum with such a broad audience, you have to be more careful about assuming which things "everybody knows", and need to put more effort into fleshing out your arguments and explanations. Otherwise, it's hard for people who don't share your expertise or obsessions to tell when you're eliding important information because it can reasonably go without saying in some narrower community you're used to discussing the topic in, or whether you're presenting an argument that genuinely has serious holes in it. The latter happens often enough in discussions where I have expertise that I'm sure it's common when other subjects are involved.
I'm sure we'd both agree that HN has plenty of people who are not qualified to provide expert opinions on subjects like epidemiology. Whatever qualifications you you may have are not on display here, so users such as myself have to estimate your credibility based only on your comments. That evaulation will necessarily be a snap judgement, because there are too many trolls and misinformed people debating controversial subjects, and because someone who is knowledgeable and right but bad at explaining to people not already in the know isn't worth much more of my time and still isn't what people want to find when they come to HN.