Comment by junipertea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by junipertea | Hacker News Reader

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To be fair, some random persons datapoint wrangling can (and usually does) have large number of eyeballs than a life long trained professional with a PhD. While the data should be public and object to scrutiny (ideally by other experts in scientific community), how much insight would untrained people actually get? Apart from alternative facts and "just a flu". Many popular blog posts and opinions were proven to be flat out wrong.

If we don't trust the people dedicated to handle that kind of situations, who can we trust? I totally agree there has not been enough transparency (what panic would it cause if the scientists say "We don't know at this point. We think X Y Z, it might change completely in a month) about what we know, but I still would rather trust WHO/CDC (who have been proven incorrect multiple times) than some random forum with no credentials.

What politicians do based on these observations is a very different thing.

I still would rather trust WHO/CDC (who have been proven incorrect multiple times)

The problem is that when you use your authority to push something, and that something turns out to have been wrong or even a patronizing lie (e.g. masks, percentage of population required for herd immunity, predicted length of the pandemic), you lose all respect for your authority. See also "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

>> what panic would it cause if the scientists say "We don't know at this point <<

this is the crux of message management; panicing people are desparate for return of predictability, anyone who provides that will have happy customers for a while.

the idea that the information in raw form that the professionals use is somehow not of public utility needs to go away. this is part one of a double punch the next being the discovery that while data was sequestered, the general populus was lied to about it. Not that that IS what is happening here, but getting caught out doing that is beyond discrediting.

its not good policy to build an abberant world view among your population that will culminate in being crushed by reality, this is why people panic in the first place, and the solution seems to be keep cycling that way so that panic is assauged by building another alternate belief that looks comfortable. its like the trope where someone is hiding/slash disposing of the body while having a conversation accross the house designed to prevent someone walking in before its all hidden away.

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