"Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that 'masks don't work', which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation."
Next sentence: "It would be accurate to say that the review examined whether interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses, and that the results were inconclusive."
... which is what I just said: some people got mad at them because their review found no reliable evidence that masking worked (or rather, that mask mandates worked, but these are virtually the same thing).
The null hypothesis for any medical intervention is that it has no effect. You start from that and then try to prove your hypothesis that it does have an effect, which is what medical studies are for. If you can't prove something works then we fall back to the null and assume it doesn't. So that isn't a misleading or inaccurate interpretation of the results, though it would certainly have been politically convenient for the Cochrane organization if their reviewers could have supported the claims of public health authorities.
That sentence doesn't say what you think it says. It says "interventions to promote mask wearing". That's not mask wearing, it's telling people to wear masks. It is both true that wearing masks helps and that it's hard to tell if promoting mask-wearing changed enough behavior to matter. Mostly, those interventions do nothing.
That's an ambiguous sentence. The main results of the study conclude:
Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness (ILI)/COVID‐19 like illness compared to not wearing masks (risk ratio (RR) 0.95, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.84 to 1.09; 9 trials, 276,917 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence.
The original Plain Language Summary for this review stated that 'We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed.' This wording was open to misinterpretation, for which we apologize.
> no reliable evidence that masking worked(or rather, that mask mandates worked, but these are virtually the same thing).
No it's not the same thing, and that's the key point.
If you tell people that masking doesn't work (which is false) then of course mask mandates won't work because adherence will be low. A self-fulfilling prophecy really.
Compliance for COVID mask mandates was measured and found to be extremely high, especially at the start (>95%). These mandates were enforced by harsh penalties so high compliance levels is no surprise. Thus you can't argue mask mandates didn't work because of low compliance.
Also health authorities told people masks were highly effective. That's what justified the mandates. So you can't argue mask mandates didn't work because people were told it wouldn't work.
Therefore there's no self fulfilling prophecy here. It didn't even matter what individuals thought anyway, we all had to wear masks.
Although Cochrane much prefers to use RCTs, people have run regressions over the data and there was no link between levels of mask wearing and infection rates. It sucks but it appears that masks just can't stop aerosolized virus, which spreads like a gas. They aren't designed to do that so it's no knock against the manufacturers, who in some cases explicitly warned people that their products would be useless for that purpose (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EfNmzptXkAEg9Od?format=jpg&name=...).
> ... which is what I just said: some people got mad at them because their review found no reliable evidence that masking worked (or rather, that mask mandates worked, but these are virtually the same thing).
This is not virtually the same thing. Comparing those two is wildly disingenuous and you know it.
The unstated goal of the phonics test with the nonsense words is to make it impossible for teachers to cheat by having students rote-learn a bunch of high-frequency words. They can only pass by actually learning the grapheme-phoneme correspondances. It's a good thing.
But there is no sense in which that's a skill required for effective reading. English spelling and pronunciation have too many random corners for it to be anything other than a distracting academic exercise.
Recognising a bunch of high-frequency words is very much the foundation of reading.
Historically reading was taught by learning words with some very basic rules for pronunciation. It worked pretty well for a long time. But the pronunciation of non-trivial words - and some trivial words - has to be heard to be learned.
For example: it's not unusual for bookish people to mispronounce obscure words because they've never heard them. They know what the words mean, but the correct pronunciation just can't be worked out from the spelling.
The only way to learn it is to hear someone saying it.
Except that's wrong - there are rules to English pronunciation that work like 99% of the time. It's why most people would pronounce "ghoti" something like "go tee" or "go tie" instead of "fish".
Just because there are exceptions doesn't mean the rules are nonexistent. We're just rarely or never explicitly taught these rules.
As a parent with kids who struggled (actually, performed average) on these nonsense word tests, I do think that is bullshit. If you somehow manage to cheat and get your kids to recognize all the high frequency words they need to be fluent, congratulations, you have taught them to read.
Let's keep kids' achievement measures out of the cynical distrust of our teaching staff.
Edit: Yes, I am biased. And, TheOtherHobbes made better and clearer points than me in my sister comment.
It clearly is still a controversial opinion to hold that phonics is not the "end all be all" it has been made out to be.
Despite challenging the statistics in the original paper, it doesn't provide evidence that phonics actually is better than the teaching techniques prior to that.
"There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” ... this belief is utterly false."
Whiteness and maleness are not and cannot be material facts and it is a category error to insist otherwise, nevermind elevating them as the axiomatic center of your worldview.
The inequity resulting from the material consequences of appearing in, being raised in, and interacting with society as white and male is a well-established statistical fact.
A nice bit of wordplay but that's nonsense. The difference between statistical facts and material facts is, one is a(system-scale) summary of the other (individual-scale) measure.
I fail to see the nit you're picking at with that second bit. Are you saying they are categories? Suppositions? Made up? Do you mean to imply then that they are "spooks" and their presence in the minds of physical agents has no bearing on physical outcomes?
But the dei perspective is the one that is hegemonic at this point. Something off a paradox for those possessed of it, displayed in such absurdities as believing that viewpoint diversity is the (precise) aim of dei.
What if the political appointee publicly states they would like Spotify to censor Joe Rogan? Perhaps 'the government' is simply too ineffably abstract an entity to attach to any individual actor commonly regarded as comprising it.
Why would we "see" Piaget if his work, as you correctly note, his theories have been refuted? Educationalists, who have never personally and successfully taught anythingmarried simply wrong theories of learning, are a good 50% of the problem.
Most of the broader ideas that he espoused and is famous for were refined in a way that made them accurately generalizable. Typical research timeline where an idea is introduced and is refined over time.
Some of the specific ideas he stated (and typically backed with data) was not generalizable to broader populations and was therefore refuted as an absolute. The data and conclusions were not necessarily wrong for the sample of the population studied, but they were not found to be as broadly true as initially believed.
This additional research led to the refinement of his theories, to great effect, imho.
This is extraordinarily vicious, and yet entirely par for the course, a good example of the basically pro forma denunciation OP is arguing should be verboten in the work place.
Being unable to countenance good faith disagreement is not a persuasive argument against your ideology being a cult.
As an alternative approach, you can cut the gordian knot of being against anti-racism without being in favor of racism by simply noting that the thing is not what it calls itself.
https://www.cochrane.org/news/statement-physical-interventio...