It seems plausible to me that the general public distrust of government advice on risk that underlies phenomena like anti-vaccination movements is a direct result of an ongoing pattern of deliberately misleading people about risks.
Best point brought up yet. While to some extent I think that mistrust of authority is indefatigable, increasing the risk of that is probably much more costly.
How do you feel about the specific example I mentioned, where the true risk of transmission of something is 1%, but the media outlet or whatever decides to omit the number and instead say something like “over the course of a week, an individual can spread disease X to over a hundred people”, and while true, that convinces individuals that the specific risk is much higher than 1%?
I personally find it a little irritating when the media omits information that would be necessary to work out actual risk numbers for myself. I don’t object if they communicate the numbers in a way designed to have maximum impact on the typical human mind (it’s been suggested that using frequencies rather than probabilities may help for example) but I do object if they leave out crucial information required to figure out true risk estimates. Of course I don’t generally assume this is some grand conspiracy but rather reflective of the innumeracy of the media in general.
I don’t believe in grand conspiracies because they just require too many contingencies. All this discussion, from my perspective, is about the potential for a tacit agreement between most (not all) of those disseminating information in various ways that the best method of talking about public risks is not necessarily to directly discuss low numbers associated with them.
As I indicated earlier, I think that this agreement effectively already exists regarding influenza, and probably also HIV and other infections as well.
Best point brought up yet. While to some extent I think that mistrust of authority is indefatigable, increasing the risk of that is probably much more costly.
How do you feel about the specific example I mentioned, where the true risk of transmission of something is 1%, but the media outlet or whatever decides to omit the number and instead say something like “over the course of a week, an individual can spread disease X to over a hundred people”, and while true, that convinces individuals that the specific risk is much higher than 1%?
I personally find it a little irritating when the media omits information that would be necessary to work out actual risk numbers for myself. I don’t object if they communicate the numbers in a way designed to have maximum impact on the typical human mind (it’s been suggested that using frequencies rather than probabilities may help for example) but I do object if they leave out crucial information required to figure out true risk estimates. Of course I don’t generally assume this is some grand conspiracy but rather reflective of the innumeracy of the media in general.
I don’t believe in grand conspiracies because they just require too many contingencies. All this discussion, from my perspective, is about the potential for a tacit agreement between most (not all) of those disseminating information in various ways that the best method of talking about public risks is not necessarily to directly discuss low numbers associated with them.
As I indicated earlier, I think that this agreement effectively already exists regarding influenza, and probably also HIV and other infections as well.