You owe it to yourself to read this report from the Brookings Institution on the horrific degree of misinformation among Americans about COVID-19. As is typical where you stand depends on where you sit but members of neither political party have any real apprehension of the facts. The factors they evaluated included risk by age group, how risky COVID-19 is compared to other risks, risk of severe harm if infected, and so on. A year into the pandemic and very, very few have any real notion of what’s going on.
The authors of the report attribute the gap partly due to partisan differences and partisan sources of information but also to basic innumeracy which they evaluated at 85%. I agree. I think that most people are functionally innumerate. To that I would add that most people are also functionally illiterate. “Functionally illiterate” does not mean that you can’t read or write. It means that you do not receive or communicate information using the written word. Most of the people whom I encounter on a daily basis are functionally illiterate including, amazingly enough, people with college degrees.
The challenge is not just in getting accurate information to people it is in communicating to people in a form that they will understand and believe.
My reaction on seeing the results reported by Brookings was “now do elected officials”. Especially members of Congress.
There are party gaps but from my POV they are all off so much that those are kind of meaningless. They are all way off. I suspect some of this is from innumeracy, but a lot of it is because most people just dont care about the details. Most people dont read detailed reports, they just read the human interest stories or whatever. Or they read something from some celebrity, some politician, some conspiracy nut. In some ways it is kind of weird since you can find the data on the net if you want.
Steve
Yes, the ideologically-based differences are less different from each other than each are different from reality. If only we had businesses whose job it was to convey accurate information to people in a form they could understand and that they could trust! We could use experts like that.
steve, a lot of these things like the virulence among people under age 30 are not details. They’re basic facts.
Dave- I live this so I am immersed in this. You, and other information junkies/curious types are interested in those kind of details. Yes, they are basic facts easily found if you read almost any newspaper or any number of sites on the net, but most people really arent interested enough to fin this out. They would rather read about which celebrity is fighting with or screwing another celebrity. Or go straight to the sports. The people on your kind of blog arent like everyone else.
Steve