[version_five]

Your approach seems pretty reasonable. Personally I think the scientific part of the debate is a bit of a red herring. People do things and take medicines all the time that they dont fully understand the risks and consequences of. I think a lot of the wariness comes from the obvious doctrinal viewpoint of a lot of vocal advocates of covid measures - making it an ultimatum where you're either fully on board or a "denier", anti-masker, whatever is not a way to win people over.

It's an interesting problem, because in one respect you don't to encourage apathy or laziness, but on the other hand, people are rightly wary of any kind of zealotry or promotion - in most cases I see heavy advertising as an obvious red flag that something isn't what it seems.

So like you say, having an honest discussion seems like the best approach (and respecting people's choices once you've given them the information). But that's probably true of most controversial things.

[Natsu]

Yeah, it's funny, if you read How to Win Friends and Influence People and look only at the techniques mentioned directly without understanding them, you'd end up effectively becoming an old-timey salesman stereotype.

If you look at the techniques being used on you, the reader of that book, and try to understand the principles, it's a much different book.

Those techniques are constantly getting overused and burning out, they're just not a stable foundation to build something like public health communication on.

It's better to do our best to be honest and present all the things we know and don't know and explain when and how new data enters the picture and changes our conclusions. But you have to be aware of that within your own reasoning process first to be able to explain it to someone else, so it's not that easy to communicate.