My problem with how informed consent can be is around issues like we know there are biases where people have a tendency toward a dichotomy: low risk becomes zero risk in their minds.
If the changes in risk are very small, in this case of order one in ten thousand, the ethical consequences of people miscalculating that risk are small. We already know that millions of people were willing to take huge risks (<1/100) for altruistic reasons. Why would we assume these volunteers would desist if they “rationally” evaluated the risk at one in ten thousand instead of approximating it at 1 in a hundred thousand?
So for the set of actions that put others in harms way, you believe that the ethics of said action depends on the percent difference between their perceived risk and the actual risk? That is really really weird and far from the point. Say I volunteer for activity A on the assumption that the risk is 1 in a million, but the actual risk is 10 in a million. Then I volunteer for activity B on the assumtion that the risk is 1 in a hundred, but the actual risk is 1 in ten. In both cases the proportion of risk change is a factor of 10, so you would argue they are equally unethical But the change in absolute risk change in activity B was 9%, which is a huge chance of dying! If I am volunteering I am very interested in the absolute change in risk, who cares about the percentage change, because I’m worried about dying not being wrong.
We don’t have to baby people just because they use heuristics to do good.
This seems self evidently true to me. I struggle to envisage a situation where people see caution that they perceive to be excessive and become more reluctant to take vaccines in the future.
People don’t spend that much time thinking about your particular institution’s paricular norms when they assign a trust value (because there are lots of institutions so they don’t have unlimited time). This is the reason courts are built like they are, so people can actually watch the judge deliberate and explain his reasoning. People do not trust courts because juries are statistically good at identifying guilt or because they know the regulations in their jurisdiction in detail. They judge the courts on big noticable surface characteristics that touch their lives and their communities.
They will remember stuff like “did the vaccine work” “did we get it first” and maybe “did people have negative reactions on facebook”. The choices made in one particular trial will be long long forgotten. The UK’s choice to continue the trial gets them more data faster to release a safe vaccine to the genpop. Those are things that touch people. So the UK might experience higher “trust in vaccine institutions” later than the US. It could go the otherway too, but I think the UK choice is stronger in expectation.
Also, the generation who stopped taking measles had forgotten how bad viruses are. I doubt they’ll repeat that mistake after this.
If the changes in risk are very small, in this case of order one in ten thousand, the ethical consequences of people miscalculating that risk are small. We already know that millions of people were willing to take huge risks (<1/100) for altruistic reasons. Why would we assume these volunteers would desist if they “rationally” evaluated the risk at one in ten thousand instead of approximating it at 1 in a hundred thousand?
So for the set of actions that put others in harms way, you believe that the ethics of said action depends on the percent difference between their perceived risk and the actual risk? That is really really weird and far from the point. Say I volunteer for activity A on the assumption that the risk is 1 in a million, but the actual risk is 10 in a million. Then I volunteer for activity B on the assumtion that the risk is 1 in a hundred, but the actual risk is 1 in ten. In both cases the proportion of risk change is a factor of 10, so you would argue they are equally unethical But the change in absolute risk change in activity B was 9%, which is a huge chance of dying! If I am volunteering I am very interested in the absolute change in risk, who cares about the percentage change, because I’m worried about dying not being wrong.
We don’t have to baby people just because they use heuristics to do good.
People don’t spend that much time thinking about your particular institution’s paricular norms when they assign a trust value (because there are lots of institutions so they don’t have unlimited time). This is the reason courts are built like they are, so people can actually watch the judge deliberate and explain his reasoning. People do not trust courts because juries are statistically good at identifying guilt or because they know the regulations in their jurisdiction in detail. They judge the courts on big noticable surface characteristics that touch their lives and their communities.
They will remember stuff like “did the vaccine work” “did we get it first” and maybe “did people have negative reactions on facebook”. The choices made in one particular trial will be long long forgotten. The UK’s choice to continue the trial gets them more data faster to release a safe vaccine to the genpop. Those are things that touch people. So the UK might experience higher “trust in vaccine institutions” later than the US. It could go the otherway too, but I think the UK choice is stronger in expectation.
Also, the generation who stopped taking measles had forgotten how bad viruses are. I doubt they’ll repeat that mistake after this.