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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Pull over. License and registration please.

We have to stop this narrative that we aren't going to listen to people until they are infallible. That's not how crisis management works. Or war, football, basketball, card games...

Hedging your bets is the act of wasting resources constructively, so that if your worst case scenario happens, you aren't doomed. Faulting people for hedging their bets is going to get us all killed.

It's been happening to scientists (first climate, now everybody) for years, and 'getting us all killed' was more figurative. Now we're doing it to doctors, and people are in fact dying. Of Covid (655k so far). Of measles (140k in 2018).

Do you want a dark age? Because this is how you get a dark age.

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I don't agree with your statement. The matter has become so polarized that both sides are actually lying about the data.

Just a few weeks ago, the Guardian quoted a study on Nature saying that asymptomatics were more infectious than symptomatic people. Except that the paper did not state anything like that, and even warned against using the results for policy reasons.

On the same camp, a Wired article saying that "the press must watch on science" to avoid pushing untested vaccines on the population, yet omitting the fact that some side effects of the Moderna vaccine were on a dose no longer used for trials.

And on the other side, we have conspiracy theorists and "skeptics" which only quote part of the studies which benefit their agenda, such as reporting only the more optimistic bound for the infection fatality rate. Or those who only quote negative bits about vaccines.

And scientists (I'm one of them) are to blame, too. A lot of those reporting to the media gave predictions, talked in absolutes (at least speaking for my country). Few actually said "we don't know". I'm not aware of anyone saying "we got something wrong".

So what's your solution?

Admitting there's bias leads to where, exactly? Slowing down and taking stock? That's right out of the playbook of the Other Side. It's called Teaching the Controversy, they are winning, oceans are rising and people are dying.

You cannot bring openness and flexibility to a conversation with manipulative people. To them, it's just a weakness they can exploit. Perhaps we have forgotten why scientists had 'safe spaces' before and we are learning very slowly why that was.

> So what's your solution?

Telling things how they are, for a start, at least for the mainstream press. No matter if they go against one's narrative. We're not talking about politics or differing views, we're talking about scientific findings.

> You cannot bring openness and flexibility to a conversation with manipulative people.

That's how science is: open discourse. If you go for absolutes, eventually there are going to be contradictions, which will likely hamper getting important messages across. In my country, due to this, trust in scientific people is actually lowering, according to polls.

> That's how science is: open discourse.

It really isn't. And hasn't been. You can get burned at the stake or put under house arrest if you go back far enough.

I don't think it's an accident at all that science uses its own thick jargon instead of a simple approachable vocabulary. It filters out some of the people who will willfully misinterpret the results. Only later when things are pretty set did someone come along and explain it in layspeak.

I fear that a lot of the policy failings of late are caused in part by our attempts to democratize science.

> I don't think it's an accident at all that science uses its own thick jargon instead of a simple approachable vocabulary.

At least in my field of research, such views are held by few, if any. This is, IMO, an extremely bad faith argument. I think many in the field would love if the right information got out - even if incomplete, or with many unknowns.

At least that would spare us by the media getting things totally wrong and pushing disinformation on people (and that's a bipartisan problem).

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