Comment by undoware | Hacker News Reader

Comment by undoware | Hacker News Reader

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impressive public-health comms technique, but again, will still 'show jet black' even if:

- you're wearing a sunscreen which is itself carcinogenic, and are being affected by this

- your sunscreen is destroying coral reefs

- your sunscreen washes off easily

- your suncreen is unpleasant to wear (making you unlikely to wear it)

- your body actually needed some sunlight anyway: https://www.outsideonline.com/health/wellness/sunscreen-sun-...

This is why public-health comms, a thing I have previously done in this tapas of careers, is very difficult to do in a way that does not itself cause some harm.

In this case, the visceral visualization of the effects of UV light overlooks the possibility (EDIT: leads the participant to overlook the possibility) that we were simply wrong about the 1:1 correlation between UV exposure and cancer.

Science is always changing, and deep-seated emotional reactions tend not to. One oft-overlooked goal of public health comms is to try not to generate so many of the latter that people can no longer accept the former.

'show jet black' is not the strategy of researching whole impact of sunscreen.

However once the impact of sunscreen is researched and it comes out positive you still need to convince people that applying sunscreen is a good idea. Just telling the information doesn't work that well. Demonstration like the one mentioned is better.

Yes, it works rather too well, in fact. So much so, that people subject to it will likely be slathering up, no matter what science finds out.

Again: Science changes; emotions do not; the job of public health comms is to generate emotions that roughly match science; but then science changes again, but the emotions do not.

The net result is that everyone's fear-compass is randomly pointing to findings from fifty years ago, which, incidentally, is why my last roommate couldn't cook.

The 31yo rock climber was terrified of salt. Why? His father had had a heart condition --- in nineties.

There are few things that could have brought the poor man more joy than ruining his dinner every night, which likely had the opposite effect than intended.

It's easy to spam links on this topic -- I went searching for this excellent summary:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/we-only-th...

And found these two as well; I'm sure you can dig up plenty more

https://archive.nytimes.com/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/2...

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/health/research/04salt.ht...

And I'll quickly duck back in to say that while there is an abundance of recent examples, including the early 2020 attempts to limit public use of n95 masks(!), there isn't a solution to the health-comms predicament per-se.

You still have to communicate what you're assigned and, yes, the better you do your job, the worse the next person will have it, when (not if) the science changes.

Such is life.

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