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Comment by Mezzie | Hacker News Reader

This is also a problem when experts from different fields disagree.

For example, I have no epidemiological credentials, but I am an expert in information/media literacy as well as digital information dissemination and retrieval. So watching many aspects of the US's COVID response was like watching a train wreck. But in a lot of places, disagreeing with the/a government response meant you were a scientifically illiterate rightoid(TM) anti-vaxxer.

"I respect epidemiologists but most of them are terrible science communicators and our institutions are making tactical and strategic errors because our current information system is not suited to what they're doing," wasn't really seen as a viable opinion. The Overton Window did not allow it. That's less than ideal.

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It was worse than that, just pointing out we didn't know jack about covid got you labelled and attacked online.

Thing is, there's a lot of angst about why people don't trust "experts", but not nearly enough on what these experts are doing to be trustworthy.

"scientist" is the new "priest", and many in that field expect to be treated as such.

I was thinking about this with the news about how poor our Omicron booster response has been where only a few percent of people have taken them. I think a significant part of this reaction can be traced back to a year ago when two top scientists resigned over boosters and the scientific community as a whole seemed negative on them. However, the two scientists were authors of a Lancet article that provided insight into their way of thinking, as it largely focused on vaccine equity and was also concerned about scaring people away who hadn't gotten the initial vaccines. These arguments are temporary and do not focus on the merits of the boosters alone. As I predicted at the time, now that the boosters have gotten better and these arguments are moot, the public still remembers their first impression of boosters as negative and unneeded.

Also, around the same time I remember seeing several people comment about how people like me that used masks were "as bad as antivaxxers" for "not trusting the science" by not removing all precautions other than the vaccine. As someone well versed in reading actual scientific papers, it was painful to read these comments.

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