[Natsu]

I never said it was inaccurate, I said it was terrible. You can't look down your nose at people--even accurately--and expect them to trust you with their health decisions.

I explained it in a comment up thread, but the techniques to push things on people via social proof and whatnot smack of manipulation and people are rightfully suspect of that. Right now, half the anti-vaxxers or otherwise hesitant spend their time pointing out all the people encouraging them to vaxx as they're suspect of their motives.

You can certainly get some of the people some of the time, but I don't think this is a stable foundation. It doesn't help that accuracy hasn't always been the first goal. I don't think you can fully hide or sideline the confusion and when it comes out, it just create mistrust.

So you're right that this is about trust, but... manipulation doesn't lead to long term trust. If you read How to Win Friends and Influence People nowadays, you can see the stereotype of a smarmy old-timey salesman in it. A lot of the techniques there are burnt out and the very first chapter is basically a long-winded attempt to use social proof on you the reader that this book is awesome.

Now it is a very insightful book, I won't say otherwise, but you can also see that some of this stuff doesn't hold up over time, especially when it's getting misused.

[jollybean]

1) Communicating in terms that people understand is not manipulative.

Developing Social Consensus through Medical Propaganda, you could argue is manipulative, yes, but it's an inherent artifact of fighting off an existential threat to the wellbeing of the community.

You must herd most of the cats into the pen to get vaccinated or they will die.

2) Get away from the idea that there's something wrong or immoral with identifying that some people are smarter than others, more conscientious, lazier, inept, disagreeable.

In a crisis (and otherwise) we need to deal with actual reality.

3) You need to communicate with people at their level.

There are plenty of people smarter than you and I who might want to be communicated with in different terms than you and I might expect - the same goes for less literate.

Children obviously are not developed, and talking about facts is pointless. So you get Superman to tell them.

Oprah has more credibility to 1/2 the population that the media. So you get her to say it in the way she thinks will work best.

...

The Scientific Literature is public information, it's openly available, and frankly, the national health advisers are on TV 10x more than they even need to be, they've 'over explained' everything so 'transparency' for the most part has never been a problem.

It's not like we're telling people giant wartime lies to keep them onside.

If you gave yourself the job of getting everyone vaxxed, and then you realize that 1/2 of people were not showing up, you'd quickly start to alter your plan and arrive at much the same conclusions.

We've been doing this since the dawn of time, often in much worse ways, this is Public Communications.

[Natsu]

As to point (1) that isn't the part I identified as manipulative.

And Covid isn't an existential threat. It's terrible, mind you, but killing 2% of the population is only enough to cause widespread misery, not to wipe out the human race. Inasmuch as people compare it to the flu, that's because the flu is badly underestimated and has killed a large number of people. The 1918 pandemic, for example, killed several of my own family.

For (2) I didn't say it was wrong or immoral, I said it was terrible specifically because it causes mistrust. Someone who does not like you cannot be expected to make good decisions on your behalf.

And what people saw was others prioritizing their own safety and not caring about anyone else. E.G. with the early mask advice the doctors appeared to be prioritizing themselves. There are actually good and rational reasons why doctors should be protected first in such a case, but the notion that they'll stab you in the back does not engender trust.

For (3), I've not argued otherwise, I'm simply pointing out more effective means of it based on actually talking to a lot of people who are skeptical of the medical advice being given and successfully convincing some to get vaccinated.

It's true that I've seen instances of abject quackery, but part of the problem is that they get their veneer of false credibility via comparison to the more visible failures.

> It's not like we're telling people giant wartime lies to keep them onside.

It's mostly the fear that's played up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp3gy_CLXho

But I get it, it's hard to motivate people towards moderation and so much easier to push people towards one extreme or another.

Like, this isn't some existential risk, this is something that's going to make a lot of people miserable when a lot of grandparents die and the hospitals get flooded. This is from people not having any intuitive understanding of exponential equations (or S-curves) and not realizing how quickly this stuff explodes in a population. This is people being selfish and going around sick or not taking precautions because they don't understand asymptomatic spread or how just spreading the virus that's probably (but not necessarily) harmless to them is likely to kill a lot of people.

Sure, the science is open, but the people need someone they can actually trust who cares about them to translate it for them. That too many would trust random quacks talking about how iron ions or some BS are responsible for Covid and the vaccine allegedly makes you magnetic or something (seriously, I don't even understand this nonsense, that's just what they said), as I saw recently, just makes me sad that it's hard to bridge the trust gap here.

I mean, sure, I can point out that no, my arm is not magnetic now. And yes, just for the hell of it, I really did check despite this being an incredibly stupid theory. But that only does so much.

I don't think we're at half the population who are going to avoid vaccines, maybe more like 10%, though they're noisier than average, so it's hard to get a read on it. From other data, hopefully things work out at around 80% vaccinated, so we may be okay as long as we work on bridging the gap in trust by doing our best to get informed consent by talking through people's fears.

I fear this requires more of a one-on-one approach with family/friends/acquaintances discussing this on a personal level rather than mass communication, though, and I'm well aware of how badly that scales.

[jfengel]

the techniques to push things on people via social proof and whatnot smack of manipulation and people are rightfully suspect of that

The problem is that they're not suspect enough. They apply different standards to different sources of manipulation. If they were consistent in their suspicion, we wouldn't be having this problem.

[Natsu]

That's a fair point and you can and should press people for their sources and how they can validate them because that's a good point of comparison when you're able to point out ways that things can be checked and they're not.

For example, some people were nattering on about the vaccine remaining in the blood supply or whatever for years after and worrying that they would somehow acquire a vaccine that way. For that, you can point to the mRNA sequences on Github and tell them about the tests that can be used to detect them.

Meanwhile there's some incoherent nonsense about the vaccine making your arm magnetic and free radicals from someone on 4chan who claims to be posting 2nd hand info with no sources. You can give them a damn magnet and let them see that it doesn't stick to the arm they vaccinated you in.