In the late 19th century and early 20th century public health officials archieved a lot of increase in lifespan by raising awareness about the usefulness of hygine that they understood because of the germ theory of disease.
Hospitals are very expensive. To the extend that you can change behaviors of your population so that they engage in cheap preventive interventions like hand washing there a very high return on investment.
After declaring war on cancer, it made a lot of sense to tell the population about the symptoms that mean that they have cancer so that they can go to the doctor and get treated for cancer.
On the sexual assault front “see something say something” likely does increase the amount of people who step in when they witness sexual assault and make victims classify experience as sexual assault (it wasn’t that long ago that people believed that there’s no such thing as sexual assault in marriage). Laws about what counts as sexual assault get changed as a result of such activism.
One of the problems is that awareness raising leads to measures against sexual assault being adopted that signal taking action about the problem without being based on good research about what interventions are effective. The resulting discussion also usually ignores the tradeoffs that are involved with adopting interventions.
That unfortunately means that you get worse interventions then you would get if you would go for a lower simulacrum level and focus on the empriric evidence that certain interventions will help with the problem. Mid-20th century you had people spending way to much effort on hygine and cleanliness (housewifes spend much more time cleaning then with childcare).
In the late 19th century and early 20th century public health officials archieved a lot of increase in lifespan by raising awareness about the usefulness of hygine that they understood because of the germ theory of disease.
Hospitals are very expensive. To the extend that you can change behaviors of your population so that they engage in cheap preventive interventions like hand washing there a very high return on investment.
After declaring war on cancer, it made a lot of sense to tell the population about the symptoms that mean that they have cancer so that they can go to the doctor and get treated for cancer.
On the sexual assault front “see something say something” likely does increase the amount of people who step in when they witness sexual assault and make victims classify experience as sexual assault (it wasn’t that long ago that people believed that there’s no such thing as sexual assault in marriage). Laws about what counts as sexual assault get changed as a result of such activism.
One of the problems is that awareness raising leads to measures against sexual assault being adopted that signal taking action about the problem without being based on good research about what interventions are effective. The resulting discussion also usually ignores the tradeoffs that are involved with adopting interventions.
That unfortunately means that you get worse interventions then you would get if you would go for a lower simulacrum level and focus on the empriric evidence that certain interventions will help with the problem. Mid-20th century you had people spending way to much effort on hygine and cleanliness (housewifes spend much more time cleaning then with childcare).