Top all-time · #7517
Justin Hart
Personal blog · rationalground.compoliticseconomicshealth
Justin Hart's personal blog at rationalground.com covers politics, economics and health. Since 2020, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 20 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (13) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link Justin Hart's mask-chart posts as graphical evidence that mask mandates left no visible mark on Covid case curves. The comments cite them as support for their own points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 13 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
From politics to the economy and a splash of artificial intelligence, Justin Hart is here to guide you in a post-Covid world.
Most-linked posts?
- /post-thanksgiving-mask-charts-still-no-evidence-that-masks-work/4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-12-15
- /mask-charts/2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-10-31
- /more-mask-charts/2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-02-14
What Hacker News says?
The internet is full of them but my favourite source is just the raw data. Look at case graphs for different regions. Look at the dates when mask mandates were added and removed. There should be very sharp, inorganic looking drops and spikes but there are none. Many people have put together the charts with arrows indicating the dates when things changed, for example https://rationalground.com/mask-charts/ That site…
Comment linking /mask-charts/
on “The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins”Submitted Florida outperformed lockdown states on excess deaths, education, and economy as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAt least one study was done in Florida comparing counties that had mask mandates vs those that did not. The general conclusion matches your observation, mask mandates did not appear to have a material effect on any covid related metrics (infections, hospitalizations, deaths, ect.) This is a bit nuanced because lots of people wore masks without a mandate, but it is also true that many people are pretty anti mask and…
Comment linking /post-thanksgiving-mask-charts-still-no-evidence-that-masks-work/
on “There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic”Submitted A Rational Path Forward as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI don't believe I've ever said "it's the same as a cold" or linked to anything saying that. Cite it if you can. I don't delete but I'll quote-tweet it to correct the record. If you can't cite, as I suspect, what are you doing here? Population density early tweet: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1259222845353103360?s... (worth a look at the linked thread). Pop. density, latent immunity due to ancient CoVs (thi…
Comment linking /more-mask-charts/
on “Brendan Eich on the Lex Fridman Podcast [video]”On Fauci, see https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1342752109486166016 among other tweets from me naming him. I think Fauci fell a beat behind the narrative marching band in March when he said no to masks for the general population, and so had to make up a dumb story in June about how he nobly lied to save PPE for frontline workers in March. This is obviously false (HCWs wear fitted N95 or better masks, must maint…
Comment linking /more-mask-charts/
on “Brendan Eich on the Lex Fridman Podcast [video]”I've read a lot of public health papers in the past year, probably more than 50. Here are some of the problems that cropped up in papers that were used by governments to support policy decisions. Many of those policy decisions later turned out to be incorrect, like lockdowns and mask mandates, both of which easily count as drastic and neither were textbook. In fact pre-COVID pandemic control plans by the WHO explici…
Comment linking /mask-charts/
on “The Gaslighting of Science”The data tells a different story. https://rationalground.com/post-thanksgiving-mask-charts-sti...
Comment linking /post-thanksgiving-mask-charts-still-no-evidence-that-masks-work/
on “Estimated 1.56B face masks will have entered oceans in 2020”Idaho doesn't seem to be in trouble based on the capacity dashboard. https://rationalground.com/hospital-and-icu-capacity-dashboa... Also, if you go back in look for headlines of hospitals being overwhelmed, you will see they exist for the flu for almost every year as well. https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2018/01/24/Hospitals-overwhe...
Comment linking /hospital-and-icu-capacity-dashboards/
on “England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says”Masks don't work at all so your whole premise is false, and there's a lot of lying about this unfortunately. Here's just one example: https://twitter.com/uncivengin/status/1337536854753595399/ph... If mask mandates worked, they'd have a clear impact on incidence graphs. Many such graphs exist, none show any impact whatsoever - not even a small one. https://rationalground.com/mask-charts/ Nobody wants to throw up the…
Comment linking /mask-charts/
on “Daily U.S. death toll will exceed 9/11′s for months, CDC director says”Normally, you'd expect people demanding awkward and massive social change to show evidence that it works and isn't dangerous. You should not invert this by demanding people prove things don't work and aren't dangerous; that way lies madness. But at any rate, we can see for ourselves how great an impact those mask mandates had: https://rationalground.com/mask-charts/ https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/franc…
Comment linking /mask-charts/
on “Masks Work. Really. We’ll Show You How”https://rationalground.com/post-thanksgiving-mask-charts-sti... https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
Comment linking /post-thanksgiving-mask-charts-still-no-evidence-that-masks-work/
on “Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge”https://rationalground.com/post-thanksgiving-mask-charts-sti... https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
Comment linking /post-thanksgiving-mask-charts-still-no-evidence-that-masks-work/
on “Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge”They are desperate to retroactively "prove" that this nonsense measure "works", when it is obvious from real world data that they don't. Dehumanizing nonsense. The Bangladesh study was dreadful. A good explanation of why here: https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/bangladesh-mask-study-do-... Some real world data here: https://rationalground.com/more-mask-charts/
Comment linking /more-mask-charts/
on “Masks for Covid: Updating the Evidence”There are mask studies with different conclusions: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/do-masks-stop-the-spread... https://rationalground.com/post-thanksgiving-mask-charts-sti...
Comment linking /post-thanksgiving-mask-charts-still-no-evidence-that-masks-work/
on “Politically Homeless: How I Kept My Soul in 2020”
