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Comment by ceoloide | Hacker News Reader

This is truly a very common sentiment. Independent of the approved status, the common phrase is "how can we know it won't have long term effects that are unknown now?".

Psychological effects of past medical disasters that caused irreversible harm and went under the authority's radar shouldn't be discounted, many people cling to that to justify their fear of the unknown.

So how do we set up a discourse that takes this type of fear into account? What are the tricks or strategies to help people overcome their fears?

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The stickler: attention bias.

The more time you spend thinking about a possible negative outcome, the more likely your intuition will believe that negative outcome to be. This affects everybody, even people who ought to know better, like scientists. It's a shockingly strong effect, too.

If you don't couch your logical discourse inside a procedure that translates its outcome directly into action (like an approval process), attention bias is almost guaranteed to override the outcome, no matter how good your reasoning. Since better reasoning takes more time, this leads to the unfortunate circumstance where better, deeper arguments are less likely to be effective that shorter, weaker arguments.

>the common phrase is "how can we know it won't have long term effects that are unknown now?".

If this was truly the fear, we would see these types of people wearing masks religiously. But we don't, which means it's not a medical fear, it's a political one.

It is certainly a mix. Eg one of the demographic groups least likely to be vaccinated are blacks, who obviously lean democrat.

You are painting people in big strokes. The people I know that fear long term effects wear mask religiously and follow safety procedures.

These are also the same people that won't get a flu vaccine, and resist getting the vaccines for all but the most deadly of diseases.

Another comment in this submission mentioned being bad at evaluating risk, perhaps that's what it is. They fixate on the unknowns of a vaccine, but they aren't able to compare it effectively to the risks of the virus.

>The people I know that fear long term effects wear mask religiously and follow safety procedures.

This is not even remotely the common case. Overall, the overlap between anti-mask and anti-vaccination individuals is massive:

https://biomedicalodyssey.blogs.hopkinsmedicine.org/2020/09/...

The core of both is the same: anti-science and anti-society.

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