First: It seems that medical studies and individual doctors are not very good at getting vague and low-level symptoms, syndromes, and chronic symptoms in general. Often these things can be real, without being easily measurable. Maybe it is like taking your mechanic to the car and you cannot get it to make for him that noise it keeps making. So, for people who end up with these types of conditions, it may appear the establishment is out of touch, untrustworthy, perhaps even conspiratorial.
The above doesn’t seem controversial, but I think people who have or know someone who has those symptoms are often more sympathetic to vaccine hesitancy or even great suspicion of modern medical science in general.
Second: The truth is often very nuanced, whereas promoted consensus tends to draw with broad strokes according to what seems salient. A good example is Opioids. We have passed through times of greater or lesser opophbia, and seem to be entering a time when it will be greater. It is very bad that it gets much more regulated, expensive, and difficult to acquire for the people who genuinely need it and cannot or will not resort to illegal solutions. Additionally, this problem will skew poorer and elder, for people who cannot afford the type of or the time of doctors who can advocate for them. Yet, as a public health matter, there are also a lot of addicts.
There just isn’t room for a lot of nuance in the mediated “”“national””” “”“discussion.””” I think it’s a pity when someone is perceptive enough to notice trends along these lines but not in a community where it can be explored with a lot of rationality and good sense. To such people, there may appear to be a ‘conspiracy.’
Third: For various reasons, these factors skew towards certain demographics more than others. I am often surprised how little social sophistication people much below my (G2) class level have. For example, I got a traffic ticket, attended court, and in a room with 500 people who didn’t want the ticket ‘to go on their insurance’ I was the only person who knew to plead guilty to a lesser charge (below Department of Motor Vehicles reporting threshold) and pay the full fine. They mostly plead nolo, which is no help in that case. I just don’t get it, because I have never had that kind of background. However, without familiarity with bureaucracies and social systemic games, people just don’t know what to do or how to do it. I think this contributes to the feeling “the system can’t be trusted.”
To be more explicit, I am making the case that for the people vaccine hesitancy really has a lot of salience, the issues are wide, and if put into the exact same milieu, I assume most of us (even the sharper ones!) might end up with similar beliefs. I don’t think the reasoning errors you point out would fix things for them. As someone else has said, the priors might be too different.
Given this, I think the easiest solution would be to deal with issues of system opacity and bureaucratic walls in general as a means of increasing trust. Obviously that sounds like the hard way. In some sense, I would like to solve the socioeconomic issues and education issues, but most people in Working classes rather than Gentry like myself actually like their education level and socioeconomic markers better than mine, so trying to intervene there seems to be a losing battle.
First: It seems that medical studies and individual doctors are not very good at getting vague and low-level symptoms, syndromes, and chronic symptoms in general. Often these things can be real, without being easily measurable. Maybe it is like taking your mechanic to the car and you cannot get it to make for him that noise it keeps making. So, for people who end up with these types of conditions, it may appear the establishment is out of touch, untrustworthy, perhaps even conspiratorial.
The above doesn’t seem controversial, but I think people who have or know someone who has those symptoms are often more sympathetic to vaccine hesitancy or even great suspicion of modern medical science in general.
Second: The truth is often very nuanced, whereas promoted consensus tends to draw with broad strokes according to what seems salient. A good example is Opioids. We have passed through times of greater or lesser opophbia, and seem to be entering a time when it will be greater. It is very bad that it gets much more regulated, expensive, and difficult to acquire for the people who genuinely need it and cannot or will not resort to illegal solutions. Additionally, this problem will skew poorer and elder, for people who cannot afford the type of or the time of doctors who can advocate for them. Yet, as a public health matter, there are also a lot of addicts.
There just isn’t room for a lot of nuance in the mediated “”“national””” “”“discussion.””” I think it’s a pity when someone is perceptive enough to notice trends along these lines but not in a community where it can be explored with a lot of rationality and good sense. To such people, there may appear to be a ‘conspiracy.’
Third: For various reasons, these factors skew towards certain demographics more than others. I am often surprised how little social sophistication people much below my (G2) class level have. For example, I got a traffic ticket, attended court, and in a room with 500 people who didn’t want the ticket ‘to go on their insurance’ I was the only person who knew to plead guilty to a lesser charge (below Department of Motor Vehicles reporting threshold) and pay the full fine. They mostly plead nolo, which is no help in that case. I just don’t get it, because I have never had that kind of background. However, without familiarity with bureaucracies and social systemic games, people just don’t know what to do or how to do it. I think this contributes to the feeling “the system can’t be trusted.”
To be more explicit, I am making the case that for the people vaccine hesitancy really has a lot of salience, the issues are wide, and if put into the exact same milieu, I assume most of us (even the sharper ones!) might end up with similar beliefs. I don’t think the reasoning errors you point out would fix things for them. As someone else has said, the priors might be too different.
Given this, I think the easiest solution would be to deal with issues of system opacity and bureaucratic walls in general as a means of increasing trust. Obviously that sounds like the hard way. In some sense, I would like to solve the socioeconomic issues and education issues, but most people in Working classes rather than Gentry like myself actually like their education level and socioeconomic markers better than mine, so trying to intervene there seems to be a losing battle.