SENSE MAKING THE FACE MASK DEBATE

First thing we need to recognize is that the entire framing of the debate of whether or not to wear face masks is problematic. So even before we begin to engage in the conversation, we need to understand how it is flawed, how the framing is saddled with reductionist logic.

Both sides are arguing over only one aspect of the many relevant domains of inquiry. Do facemasks "work" or not? Well we need to expand what we mean by "work", first and foremost.

The way this issue is generally presented reminds me of Pascal's wager. For those not familiar, Blaise Pascal, the 17th century mathematician, argued for belief in the existence of God through a "proof" now called Pascal's wager. It goes something like this:

God may or may not exist. This we cannot know for certain. But since adopting belief in God will bring eternal salvation, and the absence of belief will lead to eternal damnation, the rational decision, therefore, is to be a believer.

Okay so we know this proof is faulty on several counts. But besides for already assuming that there exists such a thing as an eternal afterlife, he's also assuming that the decision to believe in God will not have any sort of effect in how we do go about living this one life which we can say with some confidence does exist.

Can you see how the framing of the mask wearing debate is similar?

It's assuming the only criteria worth consideration is whether or not wearing a mask reduces the spread of the virus. Then you have both sides battling this issue out, presenting evidence in support of their position, not questioning the underlying framing of the debate.

It's assumed, across both sides, that mask wearing is only a minor inconvenience. It's basically a rehashing of Pascal's wager, simply replace Mask for God.

Just as living a life with a belief in an authoritarian paternalistic God always looking over your shoulder and judging you **might** create some differences in how you see yourselves and engage with the world, the same can be said of a culture where mask wearing has become normalized.

So let's call these differences negative risk factors. And let's call the probabilities associated with any potential reduction of viral contagion a positive risk factor (as well as any other potential desirable outcomes that could come from a mask wearing culture).

To think about this issue properly then - which you could say about any issue - we must weigh the totality of the positive risks against the negative risks. This requires stepping way outside of the epidemiologist box, and putting on a lens that is broad in its scope, a brush with a much wider inter - disciplinary stroke.

So what are some of these "negative risk factors"?

Well there are many. We are just trained not to think about them because all our systems of schooling are so deeply entrenched within reductionist thinking - and hence those cultural institutions which they produce. In other words, we are conditioned to reduce complex problems to the simplest common denominator, isolating single variables at the expense of understanding the larger complex adaptive system that it lives within. This is at the heart of the scientific method, it's rooted in our language, it's everywhere...

The issue is, as systems thinking shows us, every thing is deeply inter-related with every other thing. And when we don't recognize and account for these relationships within our thought process, unintended consequences (often in the form of harm) inevitably arise.

So to think about this issue properly, we have to look at a wide range of other disciplines that could be related to the effects that wearing face masks - both individually and collectively - might have across all domains of health and well-being.

What are the physical effects, for instance, of sustained mask wearing?

Are there adverse consequences from disrupting natural respiratory cycles? Looks like we have to consult our cardiologist friends.

And what about breathing in potentially dangerous toxins from our laundry detergent? Or the dramatic reduction in diversity of germs and microbes that endocrinologists tell us are essential for a well functioning gut biome which directly effect our immune system's ability to fight off those unwanted intruders?

What about the psychological adverse effects?

Evolutionary biologists tell us that humans have evolved over millions of years to first look towards the faces of others when entering into new environments, using facial expressions as signals to gage for safety or danger. How do you think covering up half of all the faces you see disrupt this evolved heuristic?

Well, psychosomatic practicioners tell us this will put us in a state of sympathetic arousal (ie fight or flight response) which has also been shown to have a dramatic negative effect on the proper function of our immune system response.

And what effects would this have on our own emotional and cognitive faculties? Remember, the pyscholgists advise us, this is primarily happening on an unconscious basis as well so we may not consciously recognize these changes which will surface increasingly over time.

Okay so there you have a few *primary* negative risk factors. But what about all those that aren't necessarily direct - the second and third order effects?

For instance, I currently find myself residing here in Bali where almost the entirety of the local population wear face masks throughout the day - even when they are doing physically demanding tasks outside. Or what about the stories like the one I just heard about pregnant women in a hospital wearing facemasks while giving birth?

How do you account for these spillover effects of sheer idiocy within your calculation? And how do you even begin to measure any of this stuff so you can actually make a calculation to begin with? Shit, things are really starting to get complicated......

Okay so let's just leave all these negative risk factors for a moment and return to the other side of the scale.

Does wearing a mask actually reduce the risk of viral contagion? And if so, by how much? And is this a similar effect across all populations? If there is a reduction, does this apply to both symptomatic and asymptomatic carriers?

Okay so now we return to the expertise of the epidemiologists and virologists.

Now I decide to send a friend a link to a large meta - study that "proves" that wearing face masks reduces the risk of spreading influenza type viruses by X pct.

Upon receiving this, my friend proceeds to call me a gullible sheeple, sending me a YouTube video of a couple of well - credentialed epidemiologists that point out flaws in this study, giving a detailed argument why wearing face masks actually increase viral spread across the general population. My friend then attaches a link to another study "proving" that asymptomatic carriers do not even spread Covid, so what's the point of mandating the wearing of masks across the entire population, he confidently asserts more than asks.

Well, as soon as I see this message, I search for ways to discredit the "psuedoscientists", thereby disqualifying all of their arguments. I also ignore the other link he sent - because, well, I just can't be bothered - and proceede to write a scathing rebuttal to this anti-science Conspiracy Theorist, piling on a mountain of more links of "real" science in support of my view.

We keep going back and forth in this fashion, with each iteration, both of us becoming angrier and more convinced of the correctness of our respective positions.

Nevermind the fact that we know we are getting all our information from social media companies who are required by fiduciary mandate to harvest our attention, utilizing vast resources to build algorithms to feed each of our insatiable need for confirmation bias with more and more sensationalized content.
We both know this and understand that these big tech giants don't have our interest in mind, only a concern to increase profit which invariably means creating more addicted and polarized users. But we can't consider the implications of any of this, none of it matters now, all that matters is winning this debate...

So does all this mean it's impossible to say for sure whether or not wearing a face mask will reduce the risk of contagion? Of course not. It does mean, though, this is certainly not a simple issue and that we'll have to overcome some deeply hard-wired cognitive heuristics that are substantially amplified by our current information ecology.

Since my brain tho is starting to hurt at this point, let's just go ahead and assume that wearing a face mask does reduce the risk of contagion by some certain percentage.

But is reducing the spread of the virus the real risk factor, or is it a proxy for something else? Maybe we have come to associate the virus with all those repeated clips of body bags being carried out of overcrowded hospitals, repeated to us over and over and over? So in that case, that would mean we need to look at the data and try to estimate a mortality rate, and look at the risks across different cohorts.

And again, we come across a bunch of different studies all with their own set of assumptions. But for arguments sake, let's go with the Center for Disease Control.

Based on their data, and some very conservative assumptions about asymptomatic carriers, they estimated the overall death rate at 0.26 pct, with only a 0.1 pct rate for those not residing in nursing homes...

A hand darts up in the back of the classroom. It's the philosopher.

"Well, yes, all that's true of course, but..."

Oh no, here we go again.

"We have to remember, we're not talking about "saving" lives here. That's impossible. No lives will be saved - everyone's gonna die after all, right? What we are discussing is the possibility of extending some lives by some certain amount of time. That could just be extending the life a few days, months, or years, or in some cases, even decades.

So how do we value this potential extension in life versus all those negative risks? And more generally, how do we value a human life at all?

Is all time worth the same for all humans? We have to consider that maybe living is about more than mere existence - maybe it's about how we exist, the subjective quality of those years as well, right? And these questions naturally tie back into those negative risk factors you mentioned earlier which reflexively feed in..."

I can't take any more of this, excuse me for a moment.

[At this point I run off to the bathroom, splash some cold water on my face, greedily swig at the bottle of Arak that I keep in my back pocket (the local Balinese liquor) and entertain myself with memes of cats flushing toilets and performing other miraculous feats.]

Okay, I'm back with you...

You don't seem too happy to see me though.

But I hear you loud and clear: "enough already - shit's complex - I get the picture for Christ's sake!"

And I'm right there with you - I've had enough of this sense making business as well.

I also understand that the only reason you've read this far (for those that aren't included in the group of one that consists of my mother) is because you're waiting to hear where I stand.

You can probably guess "my position", but you want me to be explicit about it so that you can fit me comfortably inside your carry on luggage and know whether or not you can call me friend or foe.

And despite the fact that I think my opinion is largely irrelevant and that revealing it just serves as a distraction from where I'd like to direct attention, you have been patient, so I guess I'll play along.

So what's "my side" on the facemask debate?

Well from a policy standpoint, I think the issue is pretty clear: legislating facemask wearing across the entire population causes substantially more harm than good. In other words, however many thousands of years of life extension for a small part of the demographic that might result from a mask wearing mandate, those years pale in comparison to the immediate and mostly longer and mid - term damage that will be inflicted to the entire population by the negative risk factors.

Note that this is not a solid immovable position I cling to, but is held loosely and flexibly, completely open to revision. Back in March, for instance, when the World Health Organization was estimating a 3.5 pct mortality rate for this virus, and when the possibility of longer - term health consequences were much more uncertain, this would lead to a very different calculation (and possibly a greater weighting towards "playing it safe"). But for now, given what we do know, I think the issue is quite straightforward.

There's a rub though.

Just because the issue may be straightforward to me, that doesn't mean that will be the case for you. You may hear all these arguments and they might not be the slightest bit convincing, thinking that I'm over-reaching with all these negative risk factors...

Well this presents another major hurdle on our sense making journey.

Maybe the reason you don't think these negative risk factors are "that serious", and can therefore be glossed over, is because you haven't spent the sufficient time considering these effects to properly understand them?

Which brings us to a crucial piece of the sense making puzzle...

We don't see reality "as it is". This illusion that places each of us outside of an independent world, rationally compiling evidence to arrive at our views, this idea was discredited over a century ago by modern physics. And more recently, fields as diverse as neuroscience, fractal mathematics, and epigenetics - as well as many other disciplines - have continued to beat this dead horse down to a bloody oblivion.

So even though our systems of schooling (ahem indoctrination) have yet to receive the memo, the evidence is unquestionable: we don't see the world as it is, we see the world as we are.

It's always through that cloudy filtered lens of our conditioning in which we form our beliefs, and by extension, our views and opinions.
We look out into the world, and through the unavoidable bias we bring in with our perception, we direct our attention to a tiny slice of the unfathomably large Reality Pie. We then internalize this little slither and give it meaning as a function of all the prexisting data points we've been exposed to - ie experiences - that have constructed our unique "map of Reality".

Returning to our example, if you don't have the requisite "data points" of experience - in this case some background knowledge in those fields related to the negative risk factors I mentioned - you'll likely either underweight their importance - or possibly not weigh them at all.

This brings us back to the topic of reductionism.

Maybe you've heard before the expression: we live in an age drowning in information but starving for wisdom. What else to expect in a culture that incentives hyper - specialization, in a world of exponentially increasing complexity where time has been converted into money? The Renaissance Man of times past is quickly becoming an extinct species. But these are the times where we need him (and especially her) the most. How do we bring this type of broad holistic thinking back into the mainstream conversation?

To answer this, it might be helpful to consider the difference between information and wisdom.

The way I see it, information consists of data bytes of Reality that can be translated into knowledge. Wisdom, on the other hand, is weaving together these different informational nodes across the entire landscape of knowledge to help us build a coherent framework for making better decisions.

Information by itself is blind; wisdom gives it eyes to see. Wisdom brings together, connecting these different informational nodes, expanding the terrain of relationship.

So in this sense, you could say wisdom is the paired opposite of reductionism.

Were talking about the same reductionism that has spawned a civilization predicated on the tenuous assumption of infinite growth on a finite planet; that has given us a society that pits us against each other in brute survival of the fittest competition; that en-culturates our minds with the illusion that we are separate individuals acting in a world fundamentally apathetic towards us, necessarily leading to systems of control and domination and violence.

In other words, it is a way of thinking that has created an entire system that is inherently contradictory and self - terminating. Looking over the cliff at a civilization on the the edge of collapse: this is where reductionism has brought us.

So yea, we need less of that.

This means starting with ourselves by developing the necessary skill sets to cultivate wisdom. We can do this by catching those instances where we regress into reductionist thinking, take a pause, and then look for how we can expand our view.

How can we see more connections and relationships?

Asking ourselves, what could I possibly be missing from my limited vantage?

And how can I build upon this partial truth contained within my perspective through adding other layers of partial truth, thereby including and transcending my prior relative smaller self and stepping into a greater and more integrated framework of thinking and being.

The virtues of humility and curiosity are natural allies in this journey, and will strengthen correspondingly as we deepen our wisdom cultivation practice. And an easy tell to let us know when we're slipping into reductionist frames is when we see in our interactions that we are lacking these two virtues...

*******

I'm sure you can gather at this point that my goal in this meandering essay has little to do with "exposing the truth" about the facemask debate. And it certainly has nothing to do with trying to convince you of how YOU should behave and what YOUR response should be. This is a deeply personal issue, and you've gotta do your own calculation. And this personal calculation is embedded within the larger calculation that we discussed earlier.

So your perspective of whether or not to wear a facemask is going to be completely dependent on your own unique factors. Maybe you even agree with me that facemasks as a policy response, are a net harm; but still, you decide to wear one when you go into public spaces because you'd prefer to not have to invest the time in calmly explaining to a throng of belligerent shoppers screaming for you to die in the most horrific of ways how they're likely underweighting all these negative risk factors and failing to appreciate the complexities of our perceptive faculties. This strikes me as a completely rational decision and gets to the heart of what systems thinking is all about after all: what are the consequences - all those spillover effects - which could result from my choices. Unless we consider these before acting, we are almost certainly causing unintended consequences - and as such, inflicting unnecessary harm to ourselves and to others.

So no, it's not about any of these details, it all boils down to the Big Picture: that unless we fundamentally change HOW we think, as a species, we're toast.

My aim in writing this was to show a thought process that could serve as a model for what proper sense making might look like. I have no attachemente to the viewpoint that I've arrived at, and it's almost certain that I'm leaving some risk factors out or overweighting others within my subjective assessment.

That's all besides the point though. The focus here is the type of thinking that gave rise to this viewpoint. That is what I believe is correct, and that is what I believe is worth emulating and extrapolating.

The primary way, after all, that we make sense of the world is through mimicking and modeling the thoughts and beahviors of others. For the vast majority of us, this has been almost entirely an unconscious process, at the whim of the environmental circumstances we find ourselves within. But the Quantum Leap in human evolution - when we grow out of our current adolescence into our adulthood - this happens when we consciosly seize control of this process.

Whether this phase shift in humanity actually plays out, or whether we end up extinguishing ourselves first, who knows. But from my vantage, it sure makes a hell of a lot more sense playing for the former. And to do that, we'll need to fundamentally change how we think - that means transforming how we relate to the world, to each other, and to ourselves.