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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NotAYakk" data-source="post: 8459685" data-attributes="member: 72555">Imagine not understanding the world.  And not understanding why you don't understand it.You don't understand airplanes.  And when someone tries to explain it to you, it comes out as nonsense.  Complicated nonsense.You do understand your lived experience.  You get on a plane and end up somewhere else.  You don't grasp aerodynamics, and you only trust that planes work because you know people who flew on planes, and most of them aren't dead.  You are still more than a bit terrified of them, because the news keeps on talking about crashes.You don't understand taxes.  You are annoyed by the numbers on your paycheck.  You do things your boss tells you to do, because they have social power over you, and you have learned that direct defiance against people with social power over you ends poorly.  Sometimes you can't resist.  But often you sublimate it into using social power on those weaker than you.You have learned that when your bank account goes too low, bad things happen.  So when you see it going down, you cut back on spending.  And when it goes up, you are told to do some savings.  But you also like spending it on cool naughty word.  And leases are awesome, because you can get stuff without having numbers in your bank account.Maybe you have gone to school, and picked up an area of expertise.  In that area, you have learned best practices.  You have memorized enough domain-specific math to be competent in that domain.  Maybe you know the basics of amortization as it applies to real estate or business good purchases.  Maybe you are even an engineer, and know how to do differential equations and component analysis to determine stress on load bearing members.  You sometimes apply these techniques elsewhere.  But in areas you aren't an expert, you assume you are either equally qualified, or the other people are spewing naughty word.And now we have this pandemic.You can't see it.  People using science you don't understand are telling you to do annoying things that seem to have no effect.  People who act like you are saying it is naughty word.Societies reaction to the pandemic was informed by the nature of exponential curves and forecasts by experts.  We didn't do a lockdown in California (or whatever) because of what was happening there, but because of Italy and NYC and a prediction of what would happen in California if we didn't.Even today, the "sensible" responses are based off of abstract reasoning and trust in the models of experts and the assumption that what goes wrong elsewhere would go wrong here.  They aren't direct responses to concrete local events.Opposing that is "common sense" (concrete, local, personal experience based), and as you repeat your "common sense" position it becomes a matter of opposing it because you are on the other side of the argument.This is why messaging and preparation is key to getting a high uptake of something like vaccines to work.  "It actually works" only convinces a certain percentage of the population.Parents get kids vaccinated more out of "common sense", it is the way things work, not out of an understanding of the arguments about why vaccination is a good idea.</blockquote>

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