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Comment by xboxnolifes | Hacker News Reader

You can just do both. "Here are the reports, here are the numbers simplified, and here is our declared risk analysis.

Yet, whenever I try to look up anything with regards to health/medicine, I find dozens of people/orgs repeating the last bit, and the first bits are hard to come across if you dont already know where to look. Its so avoided that im not surprised some people think its intentionally hidden.

Saying something is safe is a declared risk tolerance, it is not actually communicating the risk. It only works if the people you are talking to already trust your judgement.

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Okay so you're upset that people propagate the easy-to-understand information much more thoroughly than the super technical hard-to-understand information?

Im not upset. My critique is that societal health communicators are doing a poor job at communicating risk, and instead fall back on just making the claim that something is safe and everyone should listen to them.

Taking a complex topic and distilling it into simple, consumable bites that your audience can injest is what communication is. Yet, so much communication takes the easy route of "the public cant possibly understand this, well just say its safe or unsafe".

If you see this as an unavoidable, then I see the breakdown of trust of these institutions to be unavoidable too, as their ability to communicate is too poor.

They literally do not do that though.

They publish information at every level of specificity and detail!

Anyone who is actually curious and not just doing this lazy meta-commentary game could find all the information they need at any level of specificity or technicality they want.

You are being too patient. Reading this, just look at their contradictory behavior, one one hand they thrice called you lazy, curious, and upset (all ad hominems, attacks on motive), meanwhile they outwardly frame themselves as a steward of science institutional literacy/legitimacy and passive-aggressively "shoulding" everyone else, twisting that expressing any critique is just failing to use "information". There's two reasons someone will act this way, either they are afraid of the antivaxxers (certainly, a serious problem) and think a hostile approach works (it does not), or they have vested interests in the current institutional/bureaucratic order -- which goes back to the problem you were trying to point out. It's the 21st century version of scientism.

“Government must inject information directly into my brain at precisely my literacy and curiosity and intelligence level. Failure to do so is THEIR fault, and not an indictment of my literacy, curiosity, or intelligence.”

No, government must not do any such thing. They must back away, as my literacy, curiosity and intelligence is not their business in the slightest. Nobody owes anything to government, especially trust. But if "government" insists on importance of things they communicate, it is absolutely on them to ensure it is calibrated to everyone's profile. And I still am not obliged to trust them. Once a liar always a liar.

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