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Comment by jhallenworld | Hacker News Reader

EPA famously did the same during 9/11. It would have been better if they instead trusted us and said something along the lines of "the dust is full of dangerous asbestos, but we need heroes this day".

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/10/epa-head-wro...

Instead they prefer messaging to achieve an outcome instead of direct truth.

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This kind of failure happens as a consequence of an intellectual environment: the impossibility of carrying a nuanced message. This perhaps can be solved by "more education", in the broader sense. Until then it's hard to blame individual instances of public officials who try to do their best to distill a complex tradeoff in a public announcement where they either have to talk with an authoritative tone otherwise they'll be criticized for being weak if they don't or they will be criticized for being too paternalistic if they do. They are between a rock and a hard place and various figures are trying to carve their own paths without any rule book, and most of them will spectacularly fail.

> otherwise they'll be criticized for being weak

politicians, sure, but public officials such as the EPA?

Ok. Replace weak with "shifty" and "unclear". In any case a public communication that doesn't reassure will quickly be replaced by one that does, by escalating the issue to the nearest political figure who takes on the job of providing such assurance.

I would think lying would make someone seem more shifty than making the facts known.

> that doesn't reassure will quickly be replaced by one that does

sure, just doesn't need to be the EPA that does it. pre-empting politicians and doing their manipulation for them is not justified - politicians are not a source of truth.

don't get me wrong; I don't think anything of that is justified. I just think there is a selective pressure for this behaviour to emerge. High-profile public officials are politicians for all intents and purposes. They shouldn't be, but they are.

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