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I will say, I have a young child, and the experience of caring for a newborn does not inspire faith in the CDC. Specifically, I'm sure their recommendations ar

I will say, I have a young child, and the experience of caring for a newborn does not inspire faith in the CDC. Specifically, I'm sure their recommendations are all data-driven in isolation, but the overwhelming impression is that there's been no triage based on consideration of what is feasible, in aggregate, for new parents. The result is that, when you talk with other parents, after a glass of wine or two you all end up admitting that you did all the CDC recommended stuff for a couple weeks, maybe even a couple months, but you couldn't keep it up and you stopped boiling the bottles and you gave him a little security blanket and oh, yeah, he's alive now. So there are a lot of people out there (including BosWash hispters like my wife and I) basically trained to think of the CDC as an organization that tells you to do a bunch of onerous, in-the-aggregate impossible tasks that you disregard for your own health and sanity.

jlokier 6y ago
> think of the CDC as an organization that tells you to do a bunch of onerous, in-the-aggregate impossible tasks that you disregard for your own health and sanity. This is the central dilemma of public health policy and public health messaging everywhere. I read a fascinating book once about public health messaging. The gist was, for the health of people, messaging from public institutions has to be extremely over-simplified and made rather blunt, because people in aggregate just won't follow nuanced, "more correct" advice effectively. But if they overdo the over-simplification, then it's not useful any more. People who are looking for nuance see that the advice is blunt and over-simplified, and may point out to each other that the institution is giving such advice, undermining trust in it. So it's a difficult line to walk. We have seen this recently in the England with Covid-19 advice to the public: It was too complicated, now it's changed to the "rule of six". The former advice was probably better advice if people had followed it, but people didn't follow it, for many reasons. So it had to be simplified into a simple, catchy message, in order to take into account people's reactions in aggregate to the type of advice. I tend to imagine this is frustrating for well-informed public health scientists.

jlokier 6y ago

> think of the CDC as an organization that tells you to do a bunch of onerous, in-the-aggregate impossible tasks that you disregard for your own health and sanity. This is the central dilemma of public health policy and public health messaging everywhere. I read a fascinating book once about public health messaging. The gist was, for the health of people, messaging from public institutions has to be extremely over-simplified and made rather blunt, because people in aggregate just won't follow nuanced, "more correct" advice effectively. But if they overdo the over-simplification, then it's not useful any more. People who are looking for nuance see that the advice is blunt and over-simplified, and may point out to each other that the institution is giving such advice, undermining trust in it. So it's a difficult line to walk. We have seen this recently in the England with Covid-19 advice to the public: It was too complicated, now it's changed to the "rule of six". The former advice was probably better advice if people had followed it, but people didn't follow it, for many reasons. So it had to be simplified into a simple, catchy message, in order to take into account people's reactions in aggregate to the type of advice. I tend to imagine this is frustrating for well-informed public health scientists.