Top all-time · #15747
Peter Sandman
Personal blog · psandman.com/colhealthwriting
Peter Sandman writes Peter M. Sandman, a personal blog at psandman.com about health and writing. Since 2014, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 5 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Peter Sandman's essays on risk and crisis communication, such as his 2005 piece on adjustment reactions as a teachable moment. Commenters bring them up when discussing how to convey threat levels to the public.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
You might find this article on "Adjustment Reactions: The Teachable Moment in Crisis Communication" [0] (1/17/05) interesting. I found out about it through the peak prosperity daily COVID-19 updates [1] back in mid-March. [0] https://www.psandman.com/col/teachable.htm [1] https://youtu.be/ogf6Hru2trE?list=PLRgTUN1zz_oeQpnJxpeaEkFim... (queued up to when he talks about this article)
Comment linking /col/teachable.htm
on “There is one, and only one strain of SARS-CoV-2”Submitted Fear Is Spreading Faster Than SARS: and So It Should (2003) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHere, I would recommend that mortality rates are not bad. The goal in risk communication is to instill a level of concern equal to the current threat. It's all about context. If you show infection, death and recovery rates, you have to provide context and help people understand what a thing means. 1-10 scales can make parsing difficult (3 and 4 have the same description right now, for example). Governments, militari…
Comment linking /
on “Covid-19 Open Research Dataset”Submitted Containment as Signal: Swine Flu Risk Miscommunication (2009) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Ebola: Failures of Imagination as a story · 1 points
HN discussion