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Comment by tstrimple | Hacker News Reader

> I see the root cause of all this debate as a failure in scientific communication.

How can you have scientific communication without nuance? We know nuanced discussions can't happen at scale. Is this even solvable?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30128061

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You can't, discuss a nuanced topic without detail, but It is solvable with parallel mediums. Not every debate fits in a tweet so you issue long form communication in parallel. This is common practice for many topics. You wouldn't expect a nuclear power plant or rocket company to conduct all their internal business in self contained tweets. You expand the medium used to provide the bandwidth nessicary. You might have a power point with a single slide summary, several dozen supporting slides, and then a pdf going deeper.

I would dispute the idea that nuanced /messaging/ can't happen at scale (discussions are a different thing altogether). While I understand that everyone is up in arms about COVID-19 communications these days there are lots of instances around the world of effective communication that in the end had to be fairly nuanced.. most populations understand that vaccines are useful and effective but not perfect, most populations do understand that their particular risk is low but population-level risk is quite high.

I guess we can quibble about the definition of "nuance" but the idea that vaccine science and hospital capacity management is very direct doesn't hold much water with me, maybe others disagree, IDK?

>I guess we can quibble about the definition of "nuance" but the idea that vaccine science and hospital capacity management is very direct doesn't hold much water with me, maybe others disagree, IDK?

This is what I am getting at. If we claim these decisions are science based, communicate the science! e.g. if X% more people are vaccinated, we will have Y more hospital beds, and Z more elected procedures. make an honest calculation, show the work, and stand behind it.

> if X% more people are vaccinated, we will have Y more hospital beds, and Z more elected procedures..

But the problem there is you are not asking for nuance, you are asking for.. lies? The answer is that more vaccination means more hospital beds and elective procedures but no one could credibly argue any specific numbers - it was just not possible to make that calculation without enormous error bars, you can only make the nuanced argument that vaccination produces reduced case counts and hospitalization, and that the public has to understand that this will allow for better services against an unvaccinated baseline. The good news is that a huge majority of people do understand that!

Then give an estimate with error bars.

Alternatively, if you haven't done the math, or it doesn't actually support a robust position, say :"This is not a scientific argument, be we are really hoping this helps. no promises"

Speaking for Ontario, one province over from me, models with error bars is pretty much what the public was presented with every time they imposed new restrictions.

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