I came across a nice graduate thesis on the disconnect between scientific reality vs. dangerous...

[NNadir]

...public perception. It talks about appealing to egalitarian values.

This thesis explores the contradiction by asking why some members of the public refuse to accept the opinion of experts that nuclear technology is low-risk. One explanation asserts that, unlike experts, members of the public have poor science comprehension and are prone to perceiving risk in ways marred by cognitive bias. An alternative explanation contends that preexisting worldviews motivate members of the public to perceive risk in ways that do not necessarily align with the goal of accurate risk estimates. To understand why members of the public sometimes amplify nuclear energy risk, these two competing explanations were turned into testable hypotheses and empirically tested among 575 Canadians.

The present study found evidence which suggests those who strongly agree with egalitarians values are likely to hold amplified nuclear energy risk perceptions, and those who have greater knowledge of basic facts about nuclear energy tend to have reduced risk perceptions towards nuclear energy. Such results affirm the idea that education is an effective policy tool for reducing nuclear energy fears. However, egalitarian values may interfere with educational efforts to transmit facts, which is why educational efforts can prove more effective if nuclear energy facts are framed in a way that appeals to egalitarian values.

Kobel Thesis: Public Risk Perceptions Toward Socially Contentious Technology: How Cultural Values and Basic Knowledge Affect Nuclear Energy Risk Assessments

In this case, it refers to my personal bete noire, anti-nuke ignorance, which is of course, responsible to a large degree for the seven million people who die each year from air pollution. Anti-nuke ignorance is popular on our side of the political spectrum regrettably, although those of us on the left who know better can and should fight it with the same passion we fight creationism on the right. (Creationism is unlikely as responsible for the same number of deaths as anti-nukism, 70 million per decade, but it certainly is in no way harmless.)

Still I think this thesis may have something to say about other far more toxic anti-science views that are widely held, the most toxic surely being climate change denial, another awful fantasy which, like white supremacy, is endangering the future of our country, and more importantly, the world.

[Igel]

1. Lots of things are subject to biases.

We do stats very badly. We have poor intuition, and often can't properly evaluate things like present net worth of something postponed or future worth of something we now have.

Some is fear or empathy. We see somebody struggling, and surely the right policy is to help them. Even if present help means future hurt. We see a non-random sample and assume it's random, or an exhaustive sample and assume it's a small fraction of incidents. Even worse are low-incidence events that have a really large downside. Plane crashes are rare, but if you're in one it seldom goes survivably well.