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Comment by ifyoubuildit | Hacker News Reader

> In fact, that’s exactly why the mandates may be working so well. If all the unvaccinated truly believed that vaccines were that dangerous, more of them would have quit. These mandates may be making it possible for those people previously frozen in fear to cross the line, but in a face-saving manner.

I wonder if the author is aware how many families can't afford to miss a paycheck without facing severe consequences (hell, nyt has covered this itself). With that context, the above quote seems more than a little silly.

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I'm not sure silly is the right word for "We can make you do it, therefore you must really believe it's safe!"

If they're truly convinced that vaccine = death, then would they really choose death in combination with the paycheck?

I guess in this case the threat of those severe consequences is good enough to make them reevaluate, maybe they'll see that maybe a billion people have been vaccinated with the mRNA vaccines and there hasn't been a mass die-out and in their mind this is how they convince themselves it'll be ok...

Some other anti-vaxxers believe in vaccine timebombs (I've seen someone write on FB "Just wait until April 2022 and all the vaccinated will drop dead", just as convinced like the people who believed the world was going to end in December 2012), and I've also read that such timebomb is very unlikely, but hey, if there is such a timebomb, that last paragraph of mine will be very ironic indeed.

> If they're truly convinced that vaccine = death, then would they really choose death in combination with the paycheck?

I think the title of the article applies here. What proportion of the unvaccinated do you think equate the shot with death? If they're worried about potential long term effects (just for one example, whether you believe they're possible or not), it'd be hard to prioritize that over feeding their kids next week.

This may be controversial, but the term "antivaxer" really deserves to be deprecated. It means too many different things to different people. It's a sloppy caricature that leads to sloppy thinking, but we see it being used all over the place.

It feels like you’re arguing their point from the other direction: people hate admitting being wrong, especially if they’re in a community where most of their friends were also wrong, so it’s hard to say “that stuff my uncle shared about vaccines was rubbish, I should have done this 6 months ago” — it’s much easier to save face in that group to say “I wasn’t going to, but I can’t afford to lose my job”.

Sure, some people hate admitting when they're wrong. But I have to imagine that pales in comparison to how much they hate being evicted, risking having their families split up, not being able to afford food or medical care, etc.

It just seems oblivious for the author to say that people complied because deep down they knew it was right, when that author's colleagues have written about the actual dangers these people would face if they lost their income.

This sounds like a misunderstanding: the point is that people knew getting vaccinated was right all along but rather than at some point they probably started to accept that their concerns had been overblown — likely supported by seeing so many people around them get vaccinated with no issues — but having taken a strong position earlier increased the psychological weight of formally reversing it. Here's a sentence right before the quote up-thread:

> They’ve made bad decisions earlier and now may be frozen, part in fear, and unable to admit their initial hesitancy wasn’t a good idea, so they may come back with a version of how they are just doing “more research.”

This kind of decision paralysis can last for ages unless something forces it. Nobody seems to be saying that the consequences of ignoring vaccine mandates aren't real, it's rather quite the opposite: you can come up with hypothetical concerns about any low-probability event but being faced with actually losing something you care about forces that to be put into perspective. It's similar to how a fair number of people worry about air travel but hop on a plane when the alternative is a cross-country drive — rationally looking at crash statistics isn't as effective for those people as the misery factor of a long drive.

So this may just be something that we have differing opinions on. If we say (number of compliers) = (people who wanted to save face and needed an out) + (people who are living paycheck to paycheck) + (whatever other reason), my guess is that the last two components would dominate the equation, but that's just my gut.

The excerpt you quoted also kind of bothered me because it presupposes that getting vaccinated immediately was the right idea. Just because someone slapped the label "vaccine" on something doesn't mean you should jump to receive it as early as possible. Not everyone wants to be an early adopter, and there's good reason for that.

I would characterize the last part a bit differently: many people understandably were hesitant to be the earliest adopters, especially those who had relatively low-risk lifestyles (plenty of 80 year olds were jumping after losing friends), but I think there's a difference between someone who is planning to get it in a few months and someone who takes a public position opposing it. In the latter case, your credibility is on the line and it's very easy to surround yourself with a self-reinforcing bubble of people saying the same things. That acts like a ratchet where at each point it's easier to continue down the path rather than say that was totally overblown.

Yeah, I think we're imagining different people when we read the article. I'm thinking of people who are just quietly going about their lives. It seems like you may be thinking more of people who are vocal about this kind of thing, the crazy uncles on fb, who I tend to think are the minority (just based on what I've seen around me).

What I’m thinking more of are the people I knew who got into a religion/philosophy, even a diet, etc. where they read a bit & trusted some of the people they met who sounded like they knew a lot more. Some of what they said they believed in a lot, some of it was just going along with their group identity.

If you directly confronted them about an inconsistency or them not personally following one of those rules they’d get defensive since at some point they’d staked that out as something they believed but if there was a way to say something had changed or their hand had been forced, they’d take it and move on.

> people hate admitting being wrong

This is projection. There are multiple modes of approaching communication and not everyone uses the mode where communication is an exercise in one-upmanship.

Can you explain why you think that's projection, or one-upmanship? The point wasn't even about communication but how people rationalize the decisions they make — offering people ways to change without admitting fault is a pretty common strategy in many contexts.

It's projection because you may hate being wrong, but some people like learning the truth no matter what they believed before.

I guess you can continue to deny this kind of person exists; but it doesn't really matter what you think.

Note that I said “admitting” — I personally do prefer becoming more correct over time but it's hardly a novel suggestion that most people do not enjoy having to retract a previous public position. This is everywhere in society from casual use of terms like “saving face” to work by psychologists, economists, etc. on how to support people making better choices rather than being ruled by the sunk cost of past decisions. This is why public retractions have such weight: even people who like being right don't enjoy that part of the process.

This isn't about treating communication as a contest with only one winner but rather about the subjective feeling of the person making these decisions. Having built it up into a big deal increased the costs of reversal but the mandate changes the dynamic and gives them the option of saying the choice was no longer theirs — if they get vaccinated, that's a better outcome for everyone even if they never admit the bad call.

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