Originally posted by Serkevan I am not painting journalists with a broad brush - I am painting
scientists (or experts of any kind). In my experience we, frankly, suck at explaining stuff without making it an unintelligible mess.
Indeed!
The core challenge for scientists is in helping people understand when their intuition, experience, and common sense are simply wrong and will lead to death and disaster.
It's only natural for most people to trust their senses and their experiences in making decisions. They might easily and naturally think: "I feel fine, everyone I know feels fine, the flu isn't so bad, and my great country has a great healthcare system. Ergo there's no need for me to worry or change anything in my life because of some weird foreign virus in a weird foreign land."
The epidemiologist looks at the data from China and other countries, sees how fast the infection is doubling, sees the rate of hospitalization and ICU usage, knows that no one is immune, knows there's no treatment or vaccine (and that such things take lots of time), knows how many millions of vulnerable people their are in their country, knows how few hospital beds/ICUs there are, does a wee bit of math and knows just how bad things can get if the infection isn't slowed ASAP. To the epidemiologist, the results are as predictable (and historically repeatable from past epidemics) as those from jumping off a 100 story building -- things don't see so bad as the jumper passes floor 90, floor 80, floor 70, etc. but......
However, convincing people is hard because they don't have the math or experience to understand how epidemics work. The scientist is asking people to trust math they've never heard of rather than their gut and experiences they've used all their lives. It's a tough sell!