I see the root cause of all this debate as a failure in scientific communication.
When it comes to complex scientific decisions with significant impacts on the public, nuanced and detailed justifications are required. Instead, we often get simple declarations written by PR departments at juvenile reading level. This spawns chaotic and poorly conducted debate in all walks of life.
What is required is a robust and transparent framework for honest analyses of topics.
For example, if the CDC has a specific recommendation, They should provide an outline of the arguments, counter-arguments, assumptions, and supporting data for each part.
It seems that the status quo is to completely ignore any arguments against a given recommendation. This suffocates any honest discussion in the crib. It also suggests to some that the justifications are not robust enough to survive the light of day. If you cant show your work, people will be skeptical that you did it all.
This is applicable to any science based public policy, but especially obvious to covid policy.
I am pretty skeptical that complex science can be explained to normal people. I just tried to explain to my school that since my child tested PCR positive then negative for COVID, he shouldn't take a PCR test for 90 days (highly prone to reporting positive even when he is non-infectious), but instead (like the doctor's note says) should take an antigen test, and if he tests negative on that (and has no symptoms) he can return to school.
I explained this fairly simply but the message didn't get through (to a reasonably intelligent person) and they thought I was saying the complete opposite of what I was saying.
Instead, they are insisting on continued PCR tests (for "more data" even though I have a doctor's note saying to use antigen tests.
This is a symptom of no centralized framework. You don't need to people to memorize or understand the entire message, but a comprehensive reference source. We ship manuals with cars, we don't expect people to memorize it at the dealer.
In your case, wouldn't it be helpful to have a a recognized stand reference you could just point them to and let them read, instead of having to explain it and point to some random web page faq that they may not trust?
> I explained this fairly simply but the message didn't get through (to a reasonably intelligent person) and they thought I was saying the complete opposite of what I was saying.
If I detected you were being condescending I would do exactly this. Mostly to piss you off for thinking you’re better / smarter than me. You may know more than this staff member on this subject but there’s an appropriate way to explain things. Assuming from the get go they’re too stupid / uneducated is offensive.
You can't, discuss a nuanced topic without detail, but It is solvable with parallel mediums. Not every debate fits in a tweet so you issue long form communication in parallel. This is common practice for many topics. You wouldn't expect a nuclear power plant or rocket company to conduct all their internal business in self contained tweets. You expand the medium used to provide the bandwidth nessicary. You might have a power point with a single slide summary, several dozen supporting slides, and then a pdf going deeper.
I would dispute the idea that nuanced /messaging/ can't happen at scale (discussions are a different thing altogether). While I understand that everyone is up in arms about COVID-19 communications these days there are lots of instances around the world of effective communication that in the end had to be fairly nuanced.. most populations understand that vaccines are useful and effective but not perfect, most populations do understand that their particular risk is low but population-level risk is quite high.
I guess we can quibble about the definition of "nuance" but the idea that vaccine science and hospital capacity management is very direct doesn't hold much water with me, maybe others disagree, IDK?
>I guess we can quibble about the definition of "nuance" but the idea that vaccine science and hospital capacity management is very direct doesn't hold much water with me, maybe others disagree, IDK?
This is what I am getting at. If we claim these decisions are science based, communicate the science! e.g. if X% more people are vaccinated, we will have Y more hospital beds, and Z more elected procedures. make an honest calculation, show the work, and stand behind it.
> if X% more people are vaccinated, we will have Y more hospital beds, and Z more elected procedures..
But the problem there is you are not asking for nuance, you are asking for.. lies? The answer is that more vaccination means more hospital beds and elective procedures but no one could credibly argue any specific numbers - it was just not possible to make that calculation without enormous error bars, you can only make the nuanced argument that vaccination produces reduced case counts and hospitalization, and that the public has to understand that this will allow for better services against an unvaccinated baseline. The good news is that a huge majority of people do understand that!
Alternatively, if you haven't done the math, or it doesn't actually support a robust position, say :"This is not a scientific argument, be we are really hoping this helps. no promises"
Speaking for Ontario, one province over from me, models with error bars is pretty much what the public was presented with every time they imposed new restrictions.
Whether you communicate, or do without communicating, there needs to be accountability.
When there's no accountability, it boils down to power games, which is what we've always had, because as soon as you start playing accountability, you have to justify why you have power and I don't, and that makes people in power extremely nervous, because most of them are really not that bright and any requirement to use rationality exposes it all too clearly.
Totally agree. There's an inherent tension between protecting the freedom of speech and the potential harm that speech might cause. The current incentive structure motivates people to say the most click-baity outlandish things without worrying about any of the consequences. Fact-checking can never catch up with all the crazy sh!t people come up with. That's why censorship feels like a tempting "easy way out" for combating misinformation.
Maybe one mitigation is to make public figure / media accountable to the avoidable damage their speech end up causing? E.g., if I listen to your anti-vax radio program and consequently decide not to get vaccinated, before catching the disease and dying, then my family can sue you for damage as long as it can established that you have purposefully misled / failed to assess the potential harm.
After a few class-action lawsuits like this, public figure & media will probably be more careful when they want to spread misinformation.
Perhaps. I only see it as a "subset" in the sense of: many things have to go right for good communication to happen -- ethos being one of them.
But its still "upstream" from communication. Philosophy informs action.
Your original point is that our leaders need to get better at communicating nuanced issues. That's a non-starter if the people in charge see nuance as an obstacle and straight up adopt an anti-nuance attitude.
My point is, they're bad at communicating nuance in the way that a bulldozer is bad at building a house. It just wasn't their mission. And that didn't become obvious until after these emails were leaked.
In history, every time you set up an institution it becomes an entity in its own right. Company’s, orgs, religions, federal entities and countries all vie for power at their own level and within their own space. The problem with an ‘information-control/censorship/verification’ is… it’s exactly that, the age old ‘we are controlling information for the common good’. Every major nation in history eventually evolves to this point. They claim that the internet made this a new thing.
Listen to Lux Friedman - episode 254 with jay who professor the medical department at Stanford. It’s entitled the case against lockdowns.
‘ Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes co-operation impossible.’
-Bertrand Russell
Edit: lol, little disinformation quip of my own. He’s just a professor, doesn’t head the department after a quick google search.
I've seen that episode but not made that connection, very interesting.
However, the way the quote ends paints a slightly different picture:
`The doctrine of liberalism is an attempt to escape from this endless oscillation. The essence of liberalism is an attempt to secure a social order not based on irrational dogma, and insuring stability without involving more restraints than are necessary for the preservation of the community. Whether this attempt can succeed only the future can determine.`
Well - all the evidence presented in that episode would be exactly the type of information the royal society (and every other federal entity in the world) seems to be wanting to supress. Alot of the information presented is very 'anti-mask', 'anti-lockdown', 'anti-vaccine'. He makes many points that we have devolved into some kind of mass histeria when it comes to covid.
Also, the reason i left the rest of the quote out is it takes away from his argument because despite the fact of him writing an entire treaty on revolutionary thought, he didn't seem to study most of the 'Revolutions' that occured from those thoughts. You can replace 'The doctrine of __x' with anything in the sentence and it would have range true historically. when the Tzar of russia decided that liberalism was needed in the late 1800's, the more people he freed the more those people who were freed swung further and further left until everyone was screaming some kind of collecive anarchism forwarded by bakunin and the Tzar was assassinated.
I agree with pretty much everything you said, but feel compelled to point out that I think the virus origin is only a minor footnote in the communication failures. The topics of lockdowns and vaccination weigh much more heavily in my mind and I think have much greater relevancy for most people. Here the goal of informed consent was largely discarded in favor of manufactured consent. I would love to see the CDC or some authority have a transparent and reputable weighing of the tradeoffs involved.
You would have had a higher vaccine compliance if the dialogue would never have been about mandates. Just give a health recommendation. You wouldn't have reached everyone, but the science also said that you do not need to.
In some countries we will see mandates without any perspective. For the third dosage? The fourth? The opposition is correct when it says you only get your freedom back if you boot out those responsible for this in the first place. No politician comes out and admits mistakes, not even in democracies.
People talk as if a political and a scientific opinion are equivalent. That is obviously not the case most of the time.
I think that many people have a low opinion of the general public, but I think they are more intelligent than people give them credit for.
If you want to someone to take an action, tell them specifically what they have to gain, dont just provide some general platitude that it is good for you.
If you want someone to get boosted, say you have X% reduced chance of death and Y% hospitalization. Make an honest calculation and keep it up to date.
If the data doesn't exist, we have much bigger problems.
This was done for COVID, and was received as fearmongering. You have “experts” saying you “will die” if you get COVID, yet stories are passing around the entire time of unvaccinated people alive after getting COVID with no long term issues and never having seen a hospital.
So you have one group of people literally scared to death and that’s why they take the vaccine, and another group seeing other data that makes them say “I’ll take my chances”
Really? I'm speaking from a US perspective, but my opinion is the communication out of the CDC has too much nuance and is too concerned about being scientifically accurate. They forget they're speaking to a largely scientifically illiterate crowd, and that crowd sees the constant back-and-forth not as scientific progress but as a reason not to trust the institution. Never mind that it's often delivered with a tone of condescension people have come to despise from their institutions, and some of their policy recommendations are... debatable to say the least (recommending mass testing for high school sports/band/choir, for a recent example).
Honestly I only trust the CDC because I have the knowledge and capacity to verify what they say and ignore the bullshit. A lot of people don't have that. And there is bullshit to filter.
The message to the public, assuming the CDC is interested in actually convincing people, needs a simple path forward individuals can take to get said individuals something they want, even if it taps into a selfish motivation and isn't 1000% technically optimal. (i.e. Get vaccinated and the mask requirements go away). And it should be repeated in every statement, regardless of new data. It should have been consistent for the past 2 years. It should have a catchy slogan. It should be on fucking billboards. People would still bitch and grumble, and some would never be convinced. But we'd probably have more people vaccinated if that approach had been taken. Instead we confused people and handed ammo to the anti-vaxxers by the truckload, relying on peoples' better natures and assuming a higher average level of education than actually exists in the American populace.
In short the CDC should optimize for leadership and "good enough" solutions, not strict scientific accuracy and trying to save each and every life in their public statements. Publish the hard science/raw data in more obscure releases that only scientists will care about. And they need a better front person than Fauci. Fauci just radiates highly-credentialed-beltway-insider arrogance however nice he tries to sound and however right he may be.
Of course you could argue such a role should be the place of the executive, and the CDC was trying to fill the gap left by a largely absent Trump administration, and by the time the Biden admin took over Fauci's position as front-man/leadership was already too solidified. Maybe so, but the CDC and public institutions in general have failed the task of public leadership, although thankfully have had success in logistics/vaccine development.
I believe this would have been an even worse strategy for policy acceptance. We were and still are dealing with unknowns and these unknowns are able to justify wearing mask as a precautionary measure without a (not so) noble lie being necessary. Society isn't a military unit and has profoundly different dynamics. Some will ignore this advice but the repercussion of that are very likely managable.
This type of PR will not work with a modern information infrastructure anymore or at least significantly less effective.
> handed ammo to the anti-vaxxers by the truckload
It is a stupid image of an enemy and policy was crafted with a steady look on these groups. That is a mistake in leadership if there is one. You have provided them with legitimacy without anything for you to gain. A complete waste for nothing and you elevated your opposition without benefit to you. That is neither competent leadership nor politics. Figuratively not looking them in the eye would be better. They are beneath you and don't even warrant attention. Few politicians would have even used the term, at least the smart ones.
That said, since I oppose mandatory vaccination I am an anti-vaxxer myself in the eyes of many.
When it comes to complex scientific decisions with significant impacts on the public, nuanced and detailed justifications are required. Instead, we often get simple declarations written by PR departments at juvenile reading level. This spawns chaotic and poorly conducted debate in all walks of life.
What is required is a robust and transparent framework for honest analyses of topics. For example, if the CDC has a specific recommendation, They should provide an outline of the arguments, counter-arguments, assumptions, and supporting data for each part.
It seems that the status quo is to completely ignore any arguments against a given recommendation. This suffocates any honest discussion in the crib. It also suggests to some that the justifications are not robust enough to survive the light of day. If you cant show your work, people will be skeptical that you did it all.
This is applicable to any science based public policy, but especially obvious to covid policy.