[psychiatrist24]

It's a good thing if people try to get informed. The pandemic and its handling by the authorities has unfortunately shown that "the authorities" don't always make the right choices and don't always provide the right data.

If the vaccines are safe, it should be easy for the authorities to provide data that shows they are safe.

Of course trusting the authorities is a valid life choice, to each their own.

[m-p-3]

> If the vaccines are safe, it should be easy for the authorities to provide data that shows they are safe.

A portion of that crowd refuse to acknowledge their safety without more data about their possible long term side-effects, which inevitably takes time that we don't really have.

[psychiatrist24]

Then that portion of the crowd have to make their own decisions. As I said, uncertainty should also be communicated. How exactly do the authorities handle the issue of long term side effects? Presumably they base their decision on some kind of reasoning?

[luckylion]

> It's a good thing if people try to get informed.

Do they get informed though? It seems they mostly get articles written by journalists who don't really understand the issue either, sprinkled with a few quotes from professionals that often get taken out of context.

I don't think we're turning the population into experts. They're not able to judge the effectiveness, risk and side-effects of any measure. I'm not sure "a little bit of knowledge, some fear and a lot of opinion" is a benefit.

[psychiatrist24]

It is the responsibility of the authorities to provide appropriate information. If they fail to do that - maybe something is wrong with the authorities. I don't think they can simply blame "journalists". In my European country, for example, there is even a "public TV" system that gets funding of several billion dollars every year. If they can not find some good journalists for that money, what can they even be trusted with?

I mean they DO have the information, right? We assume they are making "informed" decisions, so the information should be available (including uncertainty, which would also be information - the degree of uncertainty, that is).

[luckylion]

> It is the responsibility of the authorities to provide appropriate information.

What good is information without knowledge? What can a random citizen do with a medical study but shrug and say "I guess?"

> If they can not find some good journalists for that money, what can they even be trusted with?

Journalists have increasingly transitioned from understanding themselves as a public watchdog to explaining government policies.

But even if they hadn't, journalists are fundamentally "citizens with typewriters", they are generally not experts on the topics they cover, and I'm sure you've noticed that on topics you know a lot about. Even if you agree with their general description, they'll get a lot of details wrong, and somebody who doesn't know the topic at all won't gain a lot by reading an article written by someone who also doesn't really know the topic. It's like playing Chinese Whispers, where you whisper something into another player's ear, they repeat it to the next person and so on until something totally different makes it back to you.

I sure hope they have some information, but I don't think that politicians are making informed decisions. I believe, they delegate the decision to (who they believe to be the best) experts. It's unreasonable to expect career politicians to e.g. understand how exactly viral infections are spreading, how that will affect some part of the population during some specific seasonal weather that we're expecting with such and such probability etc. What they can do is ask their favorite topic expert who hopefully understands all that and tells them to push this button or that one.

But beyond giving that expert room in a news paper to say what they told the politician, what can be done? Surely they can't just compress 6 years of intense studying of the topic at hand into an article and expect citizens to be "up to speed" and able to make informed decisions?

[psychiatrist24]

"What good is information without knowledge? What can a random citizen do with a medical study but shrug and say "I guess?"

A lot of people have knowledge, they know maths, they may be doctors, they may know doctors. And they can learn the same way doctors or experts learn. What exactly enables experts to understand a thing, and not "random people"?`

Even if you are not a doctor, you can check a study to see if basic aspects check out. For example I saw a study promoting mask use, but it was based on an experiment with hamsters. So personally I would say that is interesting, but not quite enough to force billions of people to wear masks.

You can check if they do randomized trials and so on. You don't need to be an expert to do that. Or you can check who wrote the study (like "Wuhan lab for genetic experiments on viral diseases" that finds it certainly, under no circumstances, originated in a lab), lots of things you can do without being an expert.

Do you trust experts? There is actually research that shows you shouldn't, in general (not just for Covid).

[luckylion]

> What exactly enables experts to understand a thing, and not "random people"?

Mastery of the domain. Yes, any random person (of sufficient intellect) can become an expert in any topic for all intents and purposes. But it takes a lot of time and effort that they'll have to devote to it. I don't think it's reasonably to expect that everyone will be an expert in everything, and it definitely isn't efficient.

With lots of things, you can do general plausibility checks, but you'll miss essentially all of the non-trivial issues if you're not experienced with the methodologies and tools. It's like asking somebody with no programming experience to judge the merits of some architectural choice. They won't be able to make an informed decision and you can't present a complete picture of the intricacies and implications in a 30 minute talk.

From my experience, your average general physician can't tell you a lot about viral infections beyond what you can learn in 30 minutes on Wikipedia. And that's miles away from being able to actually judge vaccines, or the usefulness of masks. What they typically do is rely on experts that write guidelines and recommendations.

[psychiatrist24]

Many people spent much, much more than 30 minutes thinking about Covid by now. Many have been in lockdown for over a year now. Every newspaper article they see, every TV show they see, every discussion people have is about Covid.

Even the experts did not have more than a year to thik about Covid yet.

Also people don't have to understand everything. I don't understand enough about mRNA to give you a medical explanation of the vaccine, but I can perhaps understand statistics of the outcomes of the vaccination.

For vaccines and masks, they should provide statistics that show they are effective. If they don't have them, they should launch studies to provide the data.

And even having independent experts be able to validate the claims by the authorities would be valuable.