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Comment by woofie11 | Hacker News Reader

It's trying to build empathy for a viewpoint. Understanding and empathizing isn't the same as agreeing.

I've had 100% empathy for the opposite side of the political spectrum for a long time now. I talk to people there, and I try to understand their perspective. I also try to understand the Taliban's perspective, China's, and otherwise. I'm sometimes successful, and sometimes not, but I try.

The reason I am vaccinated is because I have a (modest) background in biology, and I understand the science personally. If I didn't, I might be skeptical too.

We need more articles like this one. You can't convince people without understanding them first, and really empathizing. To quote:

“Know yourself and know your enemy. You will be safe in every battle. You may know yourself but not know the enemy. You will then lose one battle for every one you win. You may not know yourself or the enemy. You will then lose every battle.” Art of War 3:6:1–6

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I think there’s a line between empathizing and excusing, though. Understanding why someone feels a certain way doesn’t mean you have to give credit to those reasons, which the above article does.

I think that it’s difficult to consume articles like this, even if the goal is empathy. At best, this is one viewpoint among many, and at worst, it’s a borderline straw man hypothetical. Particularly with the assumptions the article makes (like when it asserts that the reader is white…)

There probably are people whose vaccine hesitancy follow the exact steps laid out in this article, but they are certainly not everyone. The first set of events which the author present as undermining mainstream authority are a lot newer than vaccine hesitancy writ large, which has been steadily increasing through various avenues on the social internet. I try my best to understand, because it’s been clear for a while that yelling doesn’t help, but I don’t think this article does a good job of fostering understanding, it seems more interested in yelling just in the other direction

idk if you even have to exercise a strong degree of empathy per say as opposed to simply engaging differences of culture and action with a degree of anthropological distance rather than allowing yourself to become personally invested in policy outcomes.

I do give credit to those reasons. Those reasons are fine, logical, and rational. My experience is that they more-or-less correspond to why the people I know who don't take vaccines don't take then.

The existence of better reasons to be vaccinated doesn't negate those at all.

The central problem is that the establishment, at some point, began to lie more and more. We've entered a post-truth age. I'm part of the scientific establishment, and I see that a lot.

I personally have enough background in biology that I can evaluate the virtually non-existent risks of vaccines for myself, as well as the significant risks of COVID19. That's why I'm vaccinated.

If I didn't have that scientific background -- and most people don't -- I might be an anti-vaxxer for all the reasons listed in the article.

Until you can acknowledge that the concerns are valid and real, you're not getting anywhere. I convinced one person who was unvaccinated, for precisely those reasons but who trusted me, not by ridiculing their logic, but by explaining how, in this particular case, I'd walked through the evidence and they were safe. She trusts me, and she's now vaccinated.

On a more basic level, if both sides of the political spectrum stopped lying to "win," I don't think we'd have this problem.

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