It was a flat out cargo cult belief set from the beginning

From your mask ennobles me by El Gato Malo.  Subheading: public health as pretext for hierarchical validation.  EGM tends to focus on the data and he has been a godsend through the propaganda of Covid-19.  But he also does polemics, of which this is one.  

of all the utterly discredited non-pharmaceutical interventions around covid, perhaps none stands as pervasive in its application and as universal in its failure as masks.

it was a flat out cargo cult belief set from the beginning and the inefficacy of this purported intervention was known and knowable beforehand and was confirmed, again and again, by all the emerging data.

the studies undertaken to “prove” efficacy were shams, lacked control groups, used cherry picked data, fraud, and methodologies so hilariously bad as to call into question the basic competence and honesty of those pushing them. the CDC has been a disgrace.

and yet the intensity of the push for this meaningless mitigation ratcheted ever upward. a certain class of person loved this, demanded this, needed this. no data could dissuade their desire.

even those who gathered the data that proved so helpful in proving this such as emily oster backed away from their own output because it so clearly contradicted the narrative of their tribe. she, an ivy league economics professor, disavowed her own discovery and flipped to team emotion. (another dark day for the gato alma mater)

it was sad to see, but altogether predictable.

masks are signs of subjugation. they dehumanize. they alienate. and this is WHY they are so attractive to so many.

Perhaps.  There are many potential reasons for the sheer idiocy on display for the past two years and desire to social status signal is certainly among them, though not, perhaps, the most important.  

But this polemic sheds some light on my puzzlement over Emily Oster's mischaracterization of recent pre-k research which found negative impacts.  I am not an avid reader of Oster but I do read her work and I have always been under the impression that she was both a friend of science and an empiricist.  Which was why I was so surprised at her enthusiasm for pre-k education despite all the accumulating evidence against those policies over the past twenty years.

Apparently El Gato Malo also follows her, at least in terms of her position on masks.  As he intimates, apparently she ignored the evidence in order to go along with the crowd on masks.

We have a bright and intelligent professor with a general orientation towards both science and empiricism who, in at least two important instances, is comfortable with turning away from the research and evidence in order to maintain an argument which is unsustainable (that pre-k programs are beneficial in terms of education and behavioral outcomes and that cloth masking helps reduce Covid spread.) 

Oster is still worth reading but now we have the Gell-Mann amnesia thing to be aware of.  If she is willing to ignore evidence on these two important issues, what other issues are being affected by preferred opinion over evidence?