3 ms·

I feel like bending into that with increased dishonesty only makes that worse though. There's only a 'gotcha' if you change your mind while pretending you were

I feel like bending into that with increased dishonesty only makes that worse though. There's only a 'gotcha' if you change your mind while pretending you were never wrong, if you explain what evidence changed your mind then there's not that much power in pointing out 'flip-flopping'. But at a deeper level, it shows that they should have been more careful with the messaging from the start. The actual message should have been "There's currently not enough evidence to say COVID is airborne" which is a lot easier to correct to "Actually, it appears that it is airborne" than going from saying it definitely wasn't and being completely wrong... The masks thing was also just crazy. Completely indefensible, claiming that "we had to lie because otherwise people would have panic-bought masks" just destroys trust even more into the future...

mjevans 5y ago
People DID panic buy... every damned thing anyway. Particularly the toilet paper. I'm just glad my buying habits are to retain a stock of that anyway since I buy it at a warehouse store.
xracy 5y ago
9/10 times if you flip-flop, the way it is communicated is not with that level of nuance. So you can absolutely change your mind the correct way with given data, and the way it's communicated is with a headline that says "CDC/WHO FLIP FLOPS ABOUT VIRUS". You don't get to decide how people respond to a flip-flop, so you're strongly incentivized to make them as quiet as possible because it's not valued in our society to learn from your mistakes. We just want people who were correct the first time. If you pick a stock, and it goes up you claim you know something about it. If you pick a stock and it goes down and then up, you still point to the stock that you got correct the first time. Also, if you read the article, it's not that they didn't think it was airborne. It was that they didn't believe in airborne viruses. The common wisdom was that viruses are too heavy to stay airborne long enough for them to think it possible to become sick from that.

mjevans 5y ago

People DID panic buy... every damned thing anyway. Particularly the toilet paper. I'm just glad my buying habits are to retain a stock of that anyway since I buy it at a warehouse store.

xracy 5y ago

9/10 times if you flip-flop, the way it is communicated is not with that level of nuance. So you can absolutely change your mind the correct way with given data, and the way it's communicated is with a headline that says "CDC/WHO FLIP FLOPS ABOUT VIRUS". You don't get to decide how people respond to a flip-flop, so you're strongly incentivized to make them as quiet as possible because it's not valued in our society to learn from your mistakes. We just want people who were correct the first time. If you pick a stock, and it goes up you claim you know something about it. If you pick a stock and it goes down and then up, you still point to the stock that you got correct the first time. Also, if you read the article, it's not that they didn't think it was airborne. It was that they didn't believe in airborne viruses. The common wisdom was that viruses are too heavy to stay airborne long enough for them to think it possible to become sick from that.