If someone is asking for more information and is willing to learn the details, it's counter-productive to give them a canned answer like "whichever one is available to you". You're encouraging ignorance, not being "rational" as you put it. Lack of transparency is what sows the distrust in the first place. Acting like an elitist by withholding the information because "you're not smart enough to make this decision" is what makes the approach so infantile.
It's a difficult question. You don't want to infantilize people, and there does seem to be a trend towards manipulating the informational landscape in order to create better outcomes in people.
At the same time, this is a country where 45% of people believe ghosts are real and 35% have been in contact with someone after the've died. You absolutely do not want people at the margin holding out for a longer time to get the vaccine they think is best when they could have been vaccinated a month ago.
You make a valid statement, but it doesn't appear to valid in this case. I don't think the demographics of this platform fall under that umbrella. If someone on here is asking for more information and articulating their reasons for it well, there's no reason to hide it. There's also an equal risk that if people don't know enough about the vaccines, they won't get any of them at all let alone deciding which to get. Seldom is it that I believe withholding information will have a better effect than being adequately transparent; keyword here being adequate because you still need to explain and emphasize strongly in plain English why it would be detrimental to wait it out.
Treating people like idiots yields worse results than making them believe they're intelligent (be it true or not). You can look at our political landscape for evidence of that. That's just my opinion of course.
> I don't think the demographics of this platform fall under that umbrella. If someone on here is asking for more information and articulating their reasons for it well, there's no reason to hide it.
The data is available. No one is hiding it. No one is treating people like idiots. Those with expertise in pandemics may not consider every single internet comment made by every single internet random, but honestly, it would be ridiculous to think every internet random’s comment should have the same weight as those with expertise.
The data is not hidden, we’re all free to analyze it.
>Acting like an elitist by withholding the information because "you're not smart enough to make this decision" is what makes the approach so infantile.
counterpoint: if a person believes themselves to be "smart enough to make this decision", they should also be smart enough to read the research and make that conclusion for themselves which one is better for their specific situation, no?
AFAIK, the research is publically available, so it's not a problem of a lack of information, rather it's a lack of anyone with significant enough credentials willing to speak up and endorse a particular solution over the others.
