On one hand: yes, more data will inform future technical approaches and procedures.
On the other hand: no, people are technically ignorant, xenophobic, and more willing to scapegoat and project anger than reflect on their own behavior.
I don't like being lied or condescended to, just because most people can't handle the information. Also, it often backfires.
Like, in early 2020, when the CDC said masks were unnecessary, then that N95s were unnecessary, it was glaringly obvious that this was propaganda to keep the public from panic-buying PPE and causing shortages.
Some people believed them, took inadequate protections, got sick or died. It led to ineffective safety policies. It torched the CDC's credibility right out of the gate. They got called out later for flip-flopping. It led to "trust the science" being so ridiculed. Mostly, I got mad that it was such an obvious lie.
This. The many little white lies killed trust in institutions.
People knew things were not adding up. The mistrust drive them to search and search for answers, and if you search long enough on internet, something will turn up because search engine don't have discernment.
That created the breeding ground for conspiracy theorist to gain unprecedented audience.
It's ridiculed because trust was immediately violated, and trust is not what science is built on. However just being an everything skeptic without any scientific education is not good either.
The problem was the politicization, the dishonesty, the corruption.
Both camps were wrong plenty of times, none would admit to it, and public discourse suffered because neither side was willing to cede ground to actual science.
> The problem was the politicization, the dishonesty, the corruption.
This one part is correct. For example, when they admitted to being wrong about masks after they had better information, lunatics claimed they were lying and corrupt. And they have been spreading wild-eyed propaganda to this day.
It wasn't just about waiting for better information, though. The restaurant infection in Washington, where the spread of the virus matched convection currents from the air conditioning, along with the super spreader events from singing, etc. should have immediately made them suspect aerosol transmission. There were numerous, obvious clues about it from the beginning, but it took until late 2020 for them to acknowledge - far after independent virologists had raised alarms.
The argument, as far as I can tell, was just that the effect of different kinds of masks on covid transmission hadn't yet been studied. Which means that data was a priority, sure, but recommending masks as an initial precaution against an extremely contagious novel respiratory virus just seems sensible.
I've lived in many US states, including in the south, and I have not met very many of these ignorant, xenophopic, scapegoat-seeking people that everyone claims to be worried about. Seems like those people, if they exist in any significant numbers, are just an excuse to lie to the public "for their own good".
If you didn't meet those people, then either you're ignorant yourself -(with all due respect), or you are not looking closely.
I'm from the south. I went to high school there, I got my college degree from there. I live there from the time I was born until my mid-20s. The south is full of racist, horrible people, it was common in my youth to hear people talk badly about Jewish people, people dropped the n word. I heard people talking about non-Christians shouldn't get to vote. I heard plenty of sexist words about women for men. It just beggars belief that you would never hear this kind of speech.
I just don't commonly hear this on the west coast in the US like I did in my years in the south. And unfortunately I still hear it when I go to visit.
Not everyone is like that! But enough people are that, so that you're going to encounter it over and over again.
As someone living in the South, I would really appreciate it if you stopped tarring everyone who lives in a Southern state as a "racist horrible person". There are many millions of people who live in the South.
Some of them are racist, millions of them are not.
When I was a kid in the south my barber constantly talked about the problems of black people and that he saw crosses being burned and that he didn't want his daughter to like black boys. I'm not making this up! They literally burned crosses in the town I grew up in.
In my very first comment I said that not all people are like that. Yet sadly, to this day, I constantly do meet people making casual racist comments when I go to the south. And when I say the south, I include the state where I was born which is one of the states that fought against the US government in the civil war.
Not all people are like that but there is an issue that a lot of people are like that.
Alabama had a ban on interracial marriage in its state constitution. Struck down in the 60s by SCOTUS but still on the books after that. When they put it to a referendum to repeal it from the text of the law - the vote was surprisingly close:
> The amendment was approved with 59.5% voting yes, a 19 percentage point margin, though 25 of Alabama's 67 counties voted against it.
And Oregon didn't repeal its black exclusion laws until 2002.
And just over 20 years before that there were riots in Boston over desegregation of schools.
It's so funny, this romantic notion that many from the north have of how supposedly enlightened they are, while the south is a bunch of backwater hicks. I know, I used to have it too, as did my wife then, who was Canadian. People thought we were crazy when we moved to Texas.
I really had my eyes opened. I encountered far more tolerance in Texas than anything I'd ever experienced up north.
Try being black in some communities in Vermont. See how well you do. Compare it with New Orleans.
Of course you can find racism and racist enclaves anywhere, but this asinine idea that "the south" is some sort of backwater racist hole while the north is a pristine liberal utopia is nonsense.
Also, I hate to disabuse you further, but I should also point out that the population of the capital of Alabama, Montgomery, is 60% black and 30% white. Whites are firmly a minority in the capital.
As a Canadian I was tempted to use my own experiences of people spouting stuff that made me think I had fallen in a time warp to the 1950s. But that's subjective. And the above thread was about the southern USA.
I was not trying to pile on the south bashing so much as to simply point out that pockets most people would consider remarkably regressive persist, not specifically in the south per se, as just in North America at all. I was particularly interested in the last bit: 60% majority in favour, yet 25 counties majority against. Localized, varies by community. It's like that in Ontario too.
As someone who's lived all over, the primary difference in the south is that there are large African American populations.
Try being black in South Dakota or Maine.
Racism and othering exists everywhere, but physical proximity and interaction with the class in question moderates it heavily. It's harder to hate someone you know personally: that's why segregationists were such staunch opponents of any social integration.
> On the other hand: no, people are technically ignorant, xenophobic, and more willing to scapegoat and project anger than reflect on their own behavior.
Doesn't matter. Truth should be prioritized first. There are mechanisms to deal with Xenophobia and hate and those should be strengthened.
On one hand: yes, more data will inform future technical approaches and procedures.
On the other hand: no, people are technically ignorant, xenophobic, and more willing to scapegoat and project anger than reflect on their own behavior.