Virtuous manipulation in public health
Snapshots of virtuous manipulation in my field (public health):
We don't want people to panic, so we'll tell them the virus is under control and that the flu and xenophobia are bigger health risks.
We don't want people to buy up scarce N95s, so we'll tell them masks won't help and may even raise their risk of infection.
We don't want the wrong people to be able to protest the wrong things but we do want the right people to be able to protest the right things, so we'll pretend the political content of protest affects the public health advisability of protesting in a pandemic.
We don't want to risk giving the slightest fuel to a horrible president (and he was horrible!) so we'll write off a possible lab leak as an insane right-wing conspiracy rather than a plausible pathway worth investigating.
We want people to get vaccinated, so we'll say if you're vaccinated you can take off your mask indoors and resume your regular life, but with no easy way to verify vaccination status, letting the virus spread unchecked as new variants hit. And we won’t track infections among vaccinated people unless those infections result in hospitalization or death, so we’re walking blind.
When will we learn in public health that virtuous manipulation shreds public trust? Say what you know. Say what you don't know. Say what you think people should do based on what we know and don't know and why. It's not that hard.
Don't work backwards from what you want people to do to decide what it would be convenient to tell people. Work forwards from what you know and don't know.
We see this in the gender mess all the time. If everybody just believed transwomen are women, there would be no issues with transwomen in women's sports, prisons, taking over women's language and organizations, etc. Therefore, transwomen MUST be women. Anyone who dissents becomes the problem. Rather than working forward from the facts: Male and female people differ in ways that really matter in some settings, so recognizing that, what can we do to accommodate people who feel uncomfortable with their sex?
No matter the subject, this needs to be a two-step process: Here's our best grasp of what's going on. Here's what we should do about it and why. Merging these two steps into one step muddies the facts: the mutually recognizable facts that liberal societies depend upon to function.
It pains me to see public health again and again trade "Here's what we know and here's what we should do about it and why" for "Since we want people to do X, we need to tell them Y." We’re breaking trust.
Originally posted July 20, 2021 on Twitter.