I’m visiting Berkeley now and I walk past the local elementary school and I see all these kids running laps around the basketball court. Wearing masks. Gosh, PE class was bad enough back in my day… I talked to a high schooler walking by and they said that (in their school at least) they aren’t officially required to wear masks but they all do it anyway. Even outdoors. How long will this go on? I’m interested because if the answer is "years" this influences my choice of where to send my daughter to school. Presumably not every school district is like this. I created a prediction market for (a variant of) this question: https://manifold.markets/DanielKokotajlo/will-most-boston-public-school-kids (For context: I am pretty against kids wearing masks these days, especially outdoors. Because I think the amount of micromorts thereby prevented is really, really, ridiculously small, too small to justify the inconvenience. I’d be interested to see if anyone has crunched the numbers and come to a different conclusion. I haven’t crunched the numbers myself recently.)
I want to write a full post on this sometime, but at at my high school there’s a pretty sharp division between social groups of whether to wear masks or not. The Asian kids driven by their parents to get good grades, the theatre kids, the nerds, and the emo kids mainly wear masks (as our local Blue Tribe representatives), while the majority of the other social groups (Red Tribe, athletic kids (which make up greater than 25% of students), everyone else who isn’t strongly in one of the above groups) don’t wear their masks.
In Virginia, the mask mandate was lifted only a couple weeks ago, and so we’ve seen more people stop wearing their masks over time. The first couple days after the mandate was lifted, everyone was still wearing masks due to peer pressure, but at this point around 60% of the students are still masked and 75% of the teachers are, give or take 20% for both estimates.
At the magnet school that I spend half my time at (Academies of Loudoun), the tribal differences are even more pronounced. The kids in the technical education program have the most variance, as the students in the more "low-status" pathways (not to be confused with income) like welding/construction/car repair mainly don’t wear their masks, but the ones that seem more Blue Tribe (filmmaking, graphic design, graphic communcation (read:fashion)) are more mask-reliant. The kids in the computer science/general science pathways almost exclusively wear masks, even now.
Reasons: The science pathways are more predominately Asians driven by their parents, and Blue Tribe. When the mask mandate was first lifted, I overheard one girl say that her parents had told her to wear a mask regardless (it was implied she’d be wearing it anyway), and separately someone in my class said something along the lines of "most people here are still wearing their masks, because we follow the science".
As for me personally, I started by wearing it 24⁄7 out of peer pressure, but now don’t bother for classes at my local high school or at Academies. I’m the only person in my Academies class not to.
Anyway, long story short, I’d be surprised if more than 25% of students were still wearing masks when school starts next year (barring any substantial COVID wave before then), and think that the chances of the linked prediction are maaaaybe 4%? I haven’t done much forecasting in general, so may be miscalibrated.
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Fascinating. Thank you! I encourage you to write a post about this.
This is completely stupid. I am quite far on the covid-paranoid side (one of the few remaining people in my bubble who didn’t get covid yet), and yet I use a simple rule of thumb: mask inside (other than at your home), no mask outside. Wearing masks outside is not about micromorts; it is costly social signalling. A group that chooses "masks outside" as their signal of loyalty seems quite stupid to me. But of course, the more stupid something is, the better costly signal it makes. (Someone please tell those kids and their parents that it is scientifically proved that wearing masks outside is racist… probably the only argument they would listen to.)