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Comment by janto | Hacker News Reader

If you keep the fine technical points from the general public, everyone will remain uninformed and will correctly suspect a conspiracy to suppress information. Having contempt for them (calling everyone who disagrees an "anti-vaxers") is not doing your position any good.

In a few years the other political party will be elected and make decisions on your behalf. Will you be as keen on their mission to fight misinformation from this perspective of "people are sheep"?

I'm personally delighted whenever "the general public" is interested in participating in my field of expertise. I love describing how we scientifically approach the unknown with models and attempts at falsification. And how we make engineering decisions and for what reasons. You've never talked with non-technical people about browser standards and programming language design? If you can't present good counterpoints to uninformed statements then you don't understand your own field.

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In the fall and early winter of 2020, all of the news reporting I saw claimed 80-90+% effectiveness for the COVID vaccines against the initial strain of the virus (and all pointed out that that was quite good for a vaccine). And yet, today, you have people like the author of the original article and several commenters here on HN complaining about how the vaccines don't provide "perfect protection" and claiming that they are useless if they don't that, even though that is physically impossible.

I've talked to non-technical people about technical subjects, to some success. But presenting good counterpoints to people who have no intention of playing the game honestly is wasting your breath.

I agree. The vaccine was not about perfect protection. The risks were minimal for what it did provide. It was a reasonable decision. Being able to deploy a vaccine efficiently is what we want.

Both sides seem to be engaging dishonestly though. For example, there is no scientific basis for vaccinating children 12-18. They are not at risk. You don't even need to be vaccinating healthy people under 30 for that matter.

Children also do not need to be wearing masks at school or social distancing in the cafeteria. We are harming our children by robbing them of a proper education and the experiences of childhood. And yet good luck trying to convince a covid alarmist of any of this.

Covid alarmists seem to be on some kind of vaccine vendetta.

They took the vaccine, so must everyone else, science be damned, seems to be their logic.

Some even post their vaccination cards, as if it’s some kind of scientific evidence. Absolutely crazy.

I think educating the public is fine. Teaching is fine. But that is a different context. Maybe you can encourage someone to learn more and eventually that ends up with them contributing something useful. That is not what is happening here.

There also comes a point when you have explained something well enough, and then people are just deliberately “asking questions” not because they are being honest, but because there is an agenda. I see that attitude on HN all the time. It’s disguising honest enquiry.

And then there are people that will just ignore what you have done and still want to put their 2bits in.

The conversation should be one way. By all means, experts should inform the general public but for pete sake don’t listen to them! I’m not going to put my API design to a vote among people who have no idea what an API is. That doesn’t mean that I have contempt for people who don’t know what an API is, just that they don’t have any meaningful input to give.

If it's an API that you plan to force on me then you better believe you will hear from me.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you can't create a simple enough explanation for people with no frame of reference to understand what's happening. Medicine is not a good place to let groupthink decide anything.

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