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Nov 3·edited Nov 3Liked by Melanie Newfield

Food for thought here, Melanie, as I work on PFAS in drinking water, which causes much more outrage then arsenic or e-coli.

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I do think that are things about PFAS chemicals which make them more frightening, concern about them is relatively new, so they're unfamiliar to the public but also scientists themselves - they just can't answer questions about how harmful many of them are, and their persistence taps into that concern for future generations. We're so much more familiar with arsenic. On the other hand, I'm sure that there must have been a time when it was dreaded, since it was responsible for so many deaths in various ways.

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I agree. PFAS is an excellent validation of your point about outrage not being proportional to risk, but, as you point out, there are good reasons for the outrage. Among others:

these are man-made, not "natural"; the public were lied to; agencies do a poor job of screening chemicals before they go to market; companies and even water utilities are suing the agencies; responses have been widely and unjustly inconsistent. I could go on. It's one of the main issues I work on, as it's a test case for so much that's wrong about how we regulate chemicals.

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Curious how PFAS in drinking water is being handled in NZ?

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I'll have to look at that - I'll get back to you.

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Nov 3Liked by Melanie Newfield

"But we need to have processes which allow constructive, meaningful conversations about risk, and we need to hold our regulators to that." Exactly. Were there meaningful conversations about the relative risk/benefit of the Covid vaccines? No - there was a lot of fear generated (in order to make people comply) and many doctors who attempted to do honest informed consent met with severe reprimands from the medical establishment (my own GP being one of them). Informed consent and risk/benefit analysis were missing from the public discourse. I'm sorry you lumped the Covid vaccinations in with vaccinations in general - they are very different from the 'traditional' vaccines and some would call them gene therapy because of the DNA - affecting component - a very different beast from what has been used for years to stimulate the immune system against disease. These factors are what caused my outrage, plus that, once I had decided that the risk of being vaccinated far outweighed the benefit in my case, I was labelled as anti-vaccination (I'm not) denigrated, isolated and punished for that decision. Other people's outrage towards my decision was palpable - woe betide anyone who does not comply with the official narrative, or stands up for their own beliefs!

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I do think that a lot of people in the health system default to glossing over the details and the kinds of discussions which are needed. I'm sorry the national discussion went in the direction it did and also that people like you ended up in the situation you did. The fact that two of the four most widely used vaccines in western countries were new technology and a third was fairly new meant that there really needed to be space for those conversations. There's something even I find unsettling in descriptions of the way they work.

I'm not sure what you mean about the DNA-affecting component though. I am going to look at gene therapy in detail at some point, but it seems to me a very different process from the way the vaccines work. I'm happy to talk this through with you if you like.

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Great comment PJ. Messenger RNA was NEVER going to be sufficiently easy to explain to put people at ease. I think the challenge of modernity is specialization of all sorts leads to whole bunches of things we do as leaving a large subset of us not quite understanding of the details. Hence, it is easily confusing and anxiety-inducing. I am relieved we never decided to explain to folks that vaccines used to be cultured in egg shells en masse and then we inject live virus into your body...that would have been a hard sell also :)

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I think that NZ authorities had a tricky choice. The messenger RNA vaccine was probably easier to explain than the AstraZeneca viral vector vaccine, especially given the New Zealand policy on genetic modification. The decided not to get the AstraZeneca vaccine, and that turned out to be a good choice, because it had a higher rate of dangerous side effects. They did get the Novovax vaccine as soon as it was available, as an alternative based on more familiar technology.

I have a general impression that we struggle to do good risk communication with a lot of medications as well as vaccines. Doctors are improving, but some haven't adjusted since the days of patients having blind faith.

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I am currently reading "The Gene: An Intimate History". While it is interesting to me I AM SURE that if I were to describe it to people I knew, almost no one would follow up and read it. The conundrum of all of this in a modern world is most everyone opts out, is not interested and reverts to how they get most of their information which is a bad formula. I guess we can blame the author for not being entertaining enough for pop culture. My keener sense is most people check out in 5th grade and aren't that interested. They make themselves targets for misinformation. It is a tough challenge for sure. I think it becomes natural to gravitate to people not necessarily who are like minded but certainly prone to being comfortable with how their current method of learning about the world makes them feel. I am generally cautious talking about books in most circles because I realize that at least half of the people in America have not read a single book this year. This is neither good or bad, it is just how people choose to be in the world.

Only two generations ago, people used to get their knowledge on worship day each week. The modern world has captured us by making telling us what to believe by entertaining us -- tough to top this I imagine for most and it is quite difficult to consciously try something different.

It is not clear to me whether a minister / Joe Rogan / TikTok are good ways to be exposed to new information and make an informed choice -- I figure they are are all out to backdoor capture us. That front brain is wonderful and makes us mostly unique -- I figure it is a use or lose proposition and the majority of folks just go down a path and eventually will never know what they are missing :)

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Nov 3Liked by Melanie Newfield

Fantastic discussion thanks.

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Thank you, I appreciate it.

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Interesting post. One of my favorite authors is Michael Lewis. Many of his books have focused on risk. One of his better quotes “human imagination is a poor tool for judging risk. People are really good at responding to the crisis that just happened, as they naturally imagine that whatever just happened is most likely to happen again. They are less good at imagining a crisis before it happens—and taking action to prevent it.”. I guess this is not assigning blame. We are creatures with a primitive impulsive brain in the back wired for fear, anger, the split-second. It is in constant conflict with the cortex which is slow to decide. It is hard to resist the quick instinctual answer. Part of my career was in control system upgrades and replacements in nuclear generating stations. We happen to have a couple of stations in Minnesota. I always enjoy telling people that FAR AND AWAY the largest radiation source in the State of Minnesota is a coal pile at a somewhat nearby powerplant. Most every summer when the conditions are right the wind carries the dust down the Mississippi River in an updraft and sets off all of the area radiation alarms at the nuclear station 20 miles down the river. It serves as a good test that the horns are working I guess. Humans will never be comfortable with things they cannot see or understand (like genes and atoms) -- I think it is just how the human animal is wired.

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Absolutely. Our instinctive ways of assessing risk haven't proven to be good at managing a lot of the modern risks we face. However, with risks like radiation and chemicals, our first response was to underestimate rather than overestimate how dangerous they were. Hence drinking radium water and putting it in beauty products. It's only because we learned from bitter experience that we now fear them.

One of the things that for me sets Peter Sandman apart from most of the researchers who look at risk perception is that frames it differently. Yes, the public are often wrong about how likely something is to kill them. Scientists, while not always correct, are usually closer to the mark. But scientists are not good at predicting how upsetting a risk will be or knowing how to make a risk less upsetting. The public are the experts on outrage.

Also, I like that the way of making a risk less upsetting, as opposed to less likely to kill you, is basically to treat people respectfully.

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While I am SURE I AM WRONG, my sense of all of this is humans are two brains in one. A primitive, sensory system parked in the back to keep us alive, angry, fearful. The one in front the cortex is for consideration. But it is SO DARN SLOW in comparison. Unless we work hard at training ourselves to ponder, be patient and trust the cortex, in almost all cases the back brain comes to the same conclusions most of the time without any fanfare. Scientists probably spend their lives consciously trying to think through things and mind their cortex. It is boring and frustrating I suppose to the many who figure what is the use if the back end comes mostly to the same conclusions in a snap.

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Nov 5Liked by Melanie Newfield

Thanks Melanie - I must check out that Sandman book. I work in the world of long term risk (as an actuary starting to focus on our future climate) and struggling to find ways to communicate the risk of (adverse events occurring due to) climate change to alter people’s behavior. Scientists tend to deal in averages, actuaries focus more on the tail-end of possible outcomes.

I had been considering “fear” though conscious it is impossible to be confident as to consequences. I like the idea of instilling a “dread” of future climate change impact.

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Peter has some interesting things to say about climate change, and it's a complicated area for risk communication. On the one hand, activists often think that they need to get people more upset about climate change to get them to change behaviour. But Peter argues that the problem may more often be that people are overwhelmed and feel hopeless, so they end up doing nothing. Here's a start, but there is lots of good information he has that could help with climate change.

https://www.psandman.com/col/climate.htm

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