3 ms·

Social media, mainstream media, if you were a public figure, other public figures, if you were a doctor, then the licencing board... and well also wikipedia wou

Social media, mainstream media, if you were a public figure, other public figures, if you were a doctor, then the licencing board... and well also wikipedia would consider your post a fringe conspiracy theory.

kube-system 3y ago
In the context of making a statement to the general public, or publishing a journal article? Audience matters, because literacy and messaging makes a difference in how people interpret messages and take action. Statements that are actually factual are some of the strongest supporting evidence for false conspiracy theories, when given to audiences that don't fully understand the context of the situation. As a basic example, many people misinterpreted things like "you can still get COVID if you wear a mask or vaccinate" as being equivalent to "masks and vaccines don't work", because they're not intimately familiar with how viruses spread and/or how disease impact may vary in outcome. Most people unfamiliar with a topic will have a more general, black-and-white approximate understanding of something, and this is no different for public health topics. Whether or not a statement should be frowned upon or not really depends not just on the factuality, but also a lot on the context and what it might suggest to the audience. If someone sees someone else smoking a cigarette in a crowded theater, yells "fire!", and then people die in a stampede to the exits, the statement should be frowned upon, regardless of the fact that it was factual. "Being right" is not always enough.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  But we're talking for example about a CDC director talking to concerned public, and she says: > vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data. This does not require you to be scientifically literate to be able to understand what she's saying. It's not a scientific show, they're not using greek symbols and formulas, but "vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick". This means that a vast majority if not all vaccinated people don't carry the virus and don't get sick (as they don't with eg. polio vaccine, mumps vaccine, whooping cough etc. vaccines). If we put a scale from "totally work" to "don't work at all", the vaccines would be closer to "don't work". The cigaretta analogy is bad. This is like seeing dark smoke coming from a long hallway at work, your boss closing of the hallway, saying "we have everythng under control, go back to your office" and your coworker getting arrested for saying "the burning will burn down, run outside".... and then the building burns down.
  - kube-system 3y ago
    > If we put a scale from "totally work" to "don't work at all", the vaccines would be closer to "don't work". The vaccines are highly effective at preventing people from dying or becoming seriously ill. Which is the entire reason to be afraid of the virus to begin with. "Preventing infection" is only relevant in the context of the consequences of the infection, and muddying the water with discussions about infection probability when the the vaccine is effective at preventing death and hospitalization is a reckless red herring that confuses people. An equivocation of "you can still get sick with the vaccine" with "the vaccines don't work" is exactly the kind of misinformation crap that should be removed from platforms with any kind of responsible moderation.
    - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
      There are threads over and over here where you still pushing for the mistrusths you were told. I’m not making fun of you. I think you are probably an intelligent person who now is forced to persuade themselves that they weren’t lied to, it was just all messy and complicated. That your authority figures weren’t acting in ignorance or bad faith, most people just didn’t get it. We really are wired for religious tribalism.
      - kube-system 3y ago
        I don't know what lie I'd be persuading myself to ignore, since nobody here has provided evidence of one. New information doesn't make old information a lie. The act of distilling nuanced judgment about a complex topic into a recommendation is not a lie. Outsiders on many topics believe things are a lot more black-and-white than they really are. The reality is the scope of discussion in the public sphere is always much more narrow than the scope of discussion among experts. You could point to any public statement ever, in any field, and the internal discussions would be more nuanced than the public statement. This isn't prima facie evidence of lying or scheming. Public statements are inherently not a brain dump of internal discussion. You know how people on this forum and watch the news about a tech topic, and shake their head at how they oversimplify the topics to the point of misunderstanding? That is exactly how public health experts react to people trying to make a fuss about the CDCs response.

kube-system 3y ago

In the context of making a statement to the general public, or publishing a journal article? Audience matters, because literacy and messaging makes a difference in how people interpret messages and take action. Statements that are actually factual are some of the strongest supporting evidence for false conspiracy theories, when given to audiences that don't fully understand the context of the situation. As a basic example, many people misinterpreted things like "you can still get COVID if you wear a mask or vaccinate" as being equivalent to "masks and vaccines don't work", because they're not intimately familiar with how viruses spread and/or how disease impact may vary in outcome. Most people unfamiliar with a topic will have a more general, black-and-white approximate understanding of something, and this is no different for public health topics. Whether or not a statement should be frowned upon or not really depends not just on the factuality, but also a lot on the context and what it might suggest to the audience. If someone sees someone else smoking a cigarette in a crowded theater, yells "fire!", and then people die in a stampede to the exits, the statement should be frowned upon, regardless of the fact that it was factual. "Being right" is not always enough.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
But we're talking for example about a CDC director talking to concerned public, and she says: > vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data. This does not require you to be scientifically literate to be able to understand what she's saying. It's not a scientific show, they're not using greek symbols and formulas, but "vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick". This means that a vast majority if not all vaccinated people don't carry the virus and don't get sick (as they don't with eg. polio vaccine, mumps vaccine, whooping cough etc. vaccines). If we put a scale from "totally work" to "don't work at all", the vaccines would be closer to "don't work". The cigaretta analogy is bad. This is like seeing dark smoke coming from a long hallway at work, your boss closing of the hallway, saying "we have everythng under control, go back to your office" and your coworker getting arrested for saying "the burning will burn down, run outside".... and then the building burns down.
- kube-system 3y ago
  > If we put a scale from "totally work" to "don't work at all", the vaccines would be closer to "don't work". The vaccines are highly effective at preventing people from dying or becoming seriously ill. Which is the entire reason to be afraid of the virus to begin with. "Preventing infection" is only relevant in the context of the consequences of the infection, and muddying the water with discussions about infection probability when the the vaccine is effective at preventing death and hospitalization is a reckless red herring that confuses people. An equivocation of "you can still get sick with the vaccine" with "the vaccines don't work" is exactly the kind of misinformation crap that should be removed from platforms with any kind of responsible moderation.
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    There are threads over and over here where you still pushing for the mistrusths you were told. I’m not making fun of you. I think you are probably an intelligent person who now is forced to persuade themselves that they weren’t lied to, it was just all messy and complicated. That your authority figures weren’t acting in ignorance or bad faith, most people just didn’t get it. We really are wired for religious tribalism.
    - kube-system 3y ago
      I don't know what lie I'd be persuading myself to ignore, since nobody here has provided evidence of one. New information doesn't make old information a lie. The act of distilling nuanced judgment about a complex topic into a recommendation is not a lie. Outsiders on many topics believe things are a lot more black-and-white than they really are. The reality is the scope of discussion in the public sphere is always much more narrow than the scope of discussion among experts. You could point to any public statement ever, in any field, and the internal discussions would be more nuanced than the public statement. This isn't prima facie evidence of lying or scheming. Public statements are inherently not a brain dump of internal discussion. You know how people on this forum and watch the news about a tech topic, and shake their head at how they oversimplify the topics to the point of misunderstanding? That is exactly how public health experts react to people trying to make a fuss about the CDCs response.