Public health officials told the Royal Navy to stop using lemons against scurvy because lemons were expensive and took up space. A lot of men died as a result.

In 2020 public health officials started telling us that there's "no evidence that masks work"... because hassle.

https://twitter.com/EduEngineer/status/1351419833502593030

Nowadays we are still making this mistake.

People are wearing surgical masks when we could instead be wearing KN95 masks or even P100 masks.

We could all just wear the good masks and be rid of the pandemic in a month.

Surgical masks are not that good.

If you want some really good insight porn, try this. Basically, millions of men died because of a switch from lemons to limes which was done for 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙨𝙤𝙣𝙨 without good quality scientific evidence behind it.

https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

Many errors were made in the story of scurvy because people made unforced epistemological errors, like assuming that cooking food doesn't change its relevant properties or assuming that there won't be some simple confounding effects.

The model for scurvy that was needed was this:

- disease is caused by deficiency
- the thing that people are deficient in is found in most foods
- the thing that people are deficient in is easy to destroy when you mess around with food (like cooking it too much)

Those three pieces of information were worth 10 million lives and control of the seven seas.

Amazing, isn't it?

"I was tempted many times to pick a villain. Maybe the perfectly named Almroth Wright, who threw his considerable medical reputation behind the ptomaine theory and so delayed the proper re-understanding of scurvy for many years... "

"Or the nameless Admiralty flunkie who helped his career by championing the switch to West Indian limes."