A large portion humanity seem incapable of embracing uncertainty and nuance and are over eager to embrace whoever is willing to peddle certainty and simplicity.
As long as that is true it seem naive to believe that nuanced institutions can exist as dominant entities in human societies.
This is true, but it is also true that "official" communication often tends to project level of certainty that just does not correspond to the actual level of knowledge, and Covid was pretty bad in this regard, because in absence of actual knowledge, hard recommendations were being issued to people.
Saying sincerely "we are not yet sure if Covid spreads by touching surfaces" etc. would have gone a long way.
I am not even touching the dirty topic of "practise societal distancing unless you go to an anti-racist demonstration, because racism is worse than Covid". That alone probably sunk the levels of trust for a generation in the US, especially among people right of the center. Politicizing science is suicidal.
Back to normal uncertainty. It was the same with various dietary recommendations. Older people remember several major overhauls thereof (are eggs fine or not, and in which amount?), and again, these were presented with a level of certainty that does not correspond to the actual - somewhat fuzzy - state of nutritional science.
You can only do this so long before unleashing an epidemics of distrust.
> This is true, but it is also true that "official" communication often tends to project level of certainty that just does not correspond to the actual level of knowledge, and Covid was pretty bad in this regard
After my SO got her first COVID vaccine she lost her period. It had been rock steady for many, many years and suddenly gone and hadn't come back for a few months. She had a GP appointment, and I accompanied her as I often do as my SO struggles with recalling important details.
My SO told the GP about her missing period, and the GP quickly tried to reassure her it wasn't something to worry about and it would come back soon enough.
Well, I had just read published studies about this and knew the medical establishment had no idea why the vaccine caused a lot of women to lose their period.
So I challenged the GP and asked if she knew what the mechanism was that caused my SO to no longer have her period, and of course she didn't know.
"Well, if you don't know the mechanism, how can you say it's fine this time?", I asked sincerely.
She admitted she was just going off what usually happens when women lose their periods, which can happen due to various kinds of stress. I wondered why it was so difficult to lead with that, instead of confidently stating it would be fine.
My SO did eventually get her period back, but to this day, almost 5 years later, it's still highly unregular.
> it is also true that "official" communication often tends to project level of certainty that just does not correspond to the actual level of knowledge
IMHO, "short term uncertainty" > "long term distrust".
I don't like the "common people are too stupid to be told the truth" attitude (which includes uncertainities).
It is both too smug to work, and unworkable in today's networked world, where those same people will notice really fast that someone is treating them like idiots, and react with resentment and loss of trust.
Absolutely agree. I think of children as "people who don't know a lot right now". But really, we're all children to some extent. Children are always honed to look for inconsistencies, and if those inconsistencies aren't addressed, distrust builds up. "You said I can't be on my phone too long, so how come you're doing it?" Distrust leads to irrational judgements, often in a broad-brush pendulum swing towards the opposite position. Trust is built up painstakingly and organically. Distrust tears it all down instantly. As long as "the masses" (to which all of us, to some extent, belong) exhibit this asymmetry between trust and distrust, for the people who want to speak truly, the key is consistency. Never be (perceived as) the boy who cried wolf.
The common person can be told the truth. The common people, plural, cannot.
That’s what most authorities believe and there is good reason to believe it.
People in groups are irrational and tribal in ways people are not if you speak to them one on one. We don’t scale well, cognitively speaking. A whole bunch of “game of telephone” distortions happen and a bunch of legacy instincts from when we were little squirrel looking things take over.
If you look at how militaries operate it’s basically a giant set of procedures and customs designed to suppress all that shit and allow people in groups to behave somewhat more rationally. At least for a while, or in a limited domain. It kind of works. But we don’t want all of society to operate like that because it also suppresses art, invention, experience, play, etc.
The tribal parts of our nature can also be soothed by having trust in a good clan chief who is handling things. Those people can say things like "we dont know but we're working on it" because people trust them (requires integrity). Since that is almost non-existant (certainly during covid) we only get the worst parts.
I believe we can do fairly well in addressing people in groups. People are irrational, but the probability distribution of "things we say" against "what people will think and do" can be modulated for the better. The bigger issue, I think, is that the authorities can't be trusted. In what world will you find even 100 people who will agree to hold truth, justice, blah blah in high regard, and actually execute on those words? Corruption in the leaders exacerbates the illness of irrationality in the people.
> It wouldn't have, uncertainty creates general panic as well, that soon turns into disarray of chaotic recommendations among the masses.
A disarray of chaotic recommendations from on high is preferable, I guess?
I especially enjoyed viewing the early covid health department stickers later on. While masks were mandatory, there were health department stickers everywhere from a couple months earlier telling us that they were unhelpful.
I know nuance is hard, but it is entirely understandable that many people have distrust in authority when the message seemed to be high confidence do A(t) and A(t) was often contradictory to A(t-1). At that point, people pick the A(t) that had the advice they like.
When there were things like tell people masks are ineffective because they actually are effective but in limited supply, that also breeds distrust. I don't know how you solve that one, other than having a functional pandemic response logistics chain, and I don't think we ever had that; we did some supply warehousing after SARS but without a process to refresh the stock, it was not effective for COVID. I suspect there's no effort to build that up again, but I'd love to be wrong; my impressions are that the US healthcare and disease control ecosystem has not learned anything from COVID, again, I hope I'm wrong. Maybe acceptance of mRNA based vaccination and some amount of deployment of genetic identification of infection from patients.
"It would create panic" is a crutch that causes more destruction than it purportedly prevents. If you treat people like children, they behave like children.
It’s why leaders often speak in certainties. X is bad, Y is good type messaging.
It’s also why some people gravitate towards overly-confident narcissists. They feel a sense of comfort when someone seems to have all the answers, even if they don’t.
A large portion of people use "nuance" as a self-serving euphemism for their own lies or corruption, and explicitly call for no nuance when demanding conformity.
"Nuance" is an elite get out of jail free card: You're just too dense to understand how I was fundamentally right about everything when I was wrong in exactly the way you said I was wrong. The fact that I agree with you now is because there's finally enough evidence. Actually, it's a sign of your stupidity that you were "right" before. You should actually be grateful that I've come to agree with you; it shows how flexible and open to new information I am, and how lucky you were.
As long as that is true it seem naive to believe that nuanced institutions can exist as dominant entities in human societies.