Never argue with someone you have to educate first.

Seen somewhere today:

Never argue with someone you have to educate first.

I encounter those situations a lot.

It is a form of public service to continue the conversation but it yields little personal benefit and often is ineffective at moving the conversation forward. Many people are mostly interested in arguing about the implications of their predicate assumptions rather than examining those predicate assumptions for accuracy.

Indeed, if you examine the predicate assumptions, you are breeching decorum and are seen as being needlessly combative, in fact, pointlessly aggressive.

My oldest son was mentioning just such an instance this past week. He was with a person whose company he enjoys. Just as part of the conversation, he mentioned how striking it was for the public guidance on mask wearing to keep oscillating between "They make no difference" and "They are an important prevention of transmission."

The young lady countered that there had been been no oscillation, they had always been recommended and were still recommended.

It was a conversation. No one wins by proving a point. He had been paying attention and had seen the oscillations. She had always believed masks to be important and had never noticed the oscillations. Best to drop it than argue over it but an example of not arguing with someone you have to educate first.

And of course epistemologically, the relative value of mask wearing is an empirical question that can be resolved by a well controlled study. Plenty of studies have been done but they are lab based or not well controlled. As far as I am aware there is no study that demonstrates the effect size on slowed transmission at different levels of population adherence to mask wearing.

I am perfectly comfortable believing that they are beneficial. But I don't know how much benefit is gained under what conditions nor the likelihood of those conditions being met. Those are important things to know.

As a hypothetical, I could believe that there might be a strong effect size at a low degree of compliance. Maybe transmission is reduced by half with only 30% of people wearing masks.

In a communitarian culture such as Japan where there are long established norms of health related mask wearing, that might be easily achievable. In a strongly individualistic culture with no such tradition perhaps not. And what might the effect by in a highly diverse nation where there are both strong pockets of individualism and strong pockets of communitarianism?

All empirical knowledge which we do not have yet.

But it all goes back to the adage: Never argue with someone you have to educate first.

Unless there is a clear prize to be obtained from the effort invested in that education.