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Comment by Mordisquitos | Hacker News Reader

The most vaccine-hesitant group of all when grouped by education level. This may seem nitpicky, but the paper finds much higher vaccine hesitancy in many other groupings by age or ethnicity.

One interesting feature of the data in the paper is that the level of vaccine hesitancy in more educated people seems to have been much flatter over time than that of less educated people [0]. It's as if more educated people were more likely to have made up their minds from the start. Unfortunately, I don't think the paper provides any information on how training in different academic subjects correlates with vaccine hesitancy—a PhD can be in molecular biology just as much as it can be in comparative linguistics.

[0] Page 27: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v...

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> It's as if more educated people were more likely to have made up their minds from the start.

I wonder if it's because a larger portion of the less-educated people were hesitant due to fear, and that was relieved over time (seeing friends and family get it, seeing celebrities get it, etc).

The more-educated people on the other hand may have come to their conclusion after studying the available facts and deciding that a wait-and-see approach would be better. This would therefore suggest that not enough new information/data has be released yet to change their mind (although this might change soon with more countries hitting high vax levels and opening up).

It could be, though as I mentioned in another comment these results don't reflect my own experience in my social circles, where if anything having (or working-towards) a PhD correlates with being more trusting of the vaccine (with the caveat of my sample being skewed towards experimental sciences and biology in particular).

In any case, after reading other comments mentioning that the data is self-reported, I find it much more believable that many vaccine-hesitants have falsely claimed to have a PhD. That would explain why only the purported "PhD" group is disproportionately hesitant. If it was a real effect you would expect at least some increase in hesitancy in people with Master's, who may well be on their way towards a PhD.

I don't think it has to do with facts so much as trust in institutions.

Educated people I suggest are more likely to accept that the CDC's conclusions are reasonable, and then maybe do a quick Google search to confirm that.

My vaxxine hesitant friends are those with no exposure to any kind of professional environment, and they believe all sorts of crazy things about what goes on within these groups.

The problem is institutions made of people are fallible, and sometimes corrupt. But those failures take specific forms: usually a minority of people, possibly corruption over money, possibly over ideology etc..

But generally speaking the CDC is not made up of people who are actively trying to secretly hiding some big studies that show it's dangerous etc. - it'd be impossible as there are 180 nations and 10x that institutions dealing with all of this.

There might be something to an 'elite arrogance' but I think it's more that it takes time for the information to come across to regular people.

I'm highly doubtful that PhD's are more hesitant, but if they are, it would be very interesting to understand why.

> "Unfortunately, I don't think the paper provides any information on how training in different academic subjects correlates with vaccine hesitancy—a PhD can be in molecular biology just as much as it can be in comparative linguistics."

Assuming the survey results valid, this is what I latched onto. The act of getting a PhD may inflate ones sense of intellect and reasoning universally while actual knowledge and valid expertise is very domain dependent, leading to a more self-assured and intransigent decision making regime.

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