I think that if you are attempting to model the physical world, the hypothesis ‘covering your face is not helpful unless you do it exactly right, and backfires often enough we shouldn’t tell people to do it’ simply does not make any sense, as your MIL correctly figured out. I don’t get how someone who knows how viruses spread could think this wasn’t true. In particular, the idea that masks were actively dangerous strikes me as completely absurd. And it’s not like we didn’t have the example of a billion Asian people in several countries wearing masks on a regular basis already.
I do think it’s reasonable to think surfaces are far more important than they are, or make several other mistakes, or to think the big lie was net positive at the time.
The alternative hypothesis is something like ‘these people are so twisted by Science(TM) and No Evidence and a general complete contempt for people’s ability to do anything or think anything’ that they are incapable of modeling the physical world at all. At which point, it’s a philosophy question whether this is a genuine mistake.
I think that if you are attempting to model the physical world, the hypothesis ‘covering your face is not helpful unless you do it exactly right, and backfires often enough we shouldn’t tell people to do it’ simply does not make any sense, as your MIL correctly figured out. I don’t get how someone who knows how viruses spread could think this wasn’t true. In particular, the idea that masks were actively dangerous strikes me as completely absurd. And it’s not like we didn’t have the example of a billion Asian people in several countries wearing masks on a regular basis already.
I do think it’s reasonable to think surfaces are far more important than they are, or make several other mistakes, or to think the big lie was net positive at the time.
The alternative hypothesis is something like ‘these people are so twisted by Science(TM) and No Evidence and a general complete contempt for people’s ability to do anything or think anything’ that they are incapable of modeling the physical world at all. At which point, it’s a philosophy question whether this is a genuine mistake.