# How anticipatory cover-ups go wrong

**1.**
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Back when COVID vaccines were still a recent thing, I witnessed a debate that looked like something like the following was happening:

*   Some official institution had collected information about the efficacy and reported side-effects of COVID vaccines. They felt that, correctly interpreted, this information was compatible with vaccines being broadly safe, but that someone with an anti-vaccine bias might misunderstand these statistics and misrepresent them as saying that the vaccines were dangerous.
*   Because the authorities had reasonable grounds to suspect that vaccine skeptics would take those statistics out of context, they tried to cover up the information or lie about it.
*   Vaccine skeptics found out that the institution was trying to cover up/lie about the statistics, so they made the reasonable assumption that the statistics *were* damning and that the other side was trying to paint the vaccines as safer than they were. So they took those statistics and interpreted them in exactly the way that the authorities hadn't wanted them to be interpreted, ignoring all protestations to the contrary.
*   The authorities saw their distrust in the other side confirmed - the skeptics took the statistics out of context, just as predicted - and felt like their only mistake had been in not covering up the information well enough.

I’ve lost the link to the original discussion, but searching for cases fitting this pattern afterward brought up several examples:

*   In [February 2022](https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2022/02/22/cdc-data), the CDC released data on booster shot effectiveness but excluded data for adults aged 18 to 49, and a CDC spokesperson specifically mentioned a fear of misinterpretation as the reason.
*   Also in [February 2022](https://www.scotsman.com/health/coronavirus/anti-vaxxer-concerns-force-removal-of-deaths-by-vaccine-status-data-3571856), Public Health Scotland announced that it would stop releasing vaccine status data due to the statistics being overly simplistic and being taken out of context.
*   In [October 2022](https://www.factcheck.org/2022/10/scicheck-posts-distort-misleading-analysis-of-covid-19-vaccine-safety-data/), a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by an anti-vaccine group forced the CDC to release information from an internal safety monitoring system. The group’s analysis of the data claimed that vaccines were causing a huge amount of hospitalizations. Health authorities responded that the data did not establish such a causation, and that proper analyses indicated much lower rates of adverse effects.

What's notable to me is that both sides were acting reasonably, *given* the assumption that the other side is untrustworthy.

If you think your opponent will take statistics out of context, then it makes sense to try to keep those statistics hidden. And if *your* opponent is hiding some statistics, then it makes sense to assume that they're doing it because those statistics contain truths that are inconvenient for them.

By acting on their assumptions, both confirmed the opposing side's existing interpretation of being untrustworthy. They treated the other as a hostile actor and took hostile actions in return, which turned the opponent even more hostile.

**2.**
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Alice is the manager for Bob, who is working on an important presentation for a client. Whenever Alice asks how the presentation is coming along, Bob fails to answer or avoids the question.

Alice starts getting increasingly stressed out about this, but then Bob pulls the presentation together at the last minute. It ends up going well.

Alice can tell that Bob is very anxious and sensitive to negative feedback. She would like to avoid this kind of problem in the future, but she gets the sense that he is already feeling guilty about the way he handled the issue. Alice is concerned that if she were to bring it up, then Bob would feel disproportionately bad about it. He did manage to do the job at the end, after all.

So when she gives him feedback, she holds back and avoids saying anything about how things leading up to the presentation went.

Bob on his part can tell that Alice is holding back something. It’s obvious to him that he handled the work leading up to it poorly, but Alice seems to avoid that topic. That must be because she doesn’t expect that he could handle being told just *how* badly he handled it. So, he reasons, she must think that his performance was completely unacceptable. Probably Alice just wants to avoid an unpleasant confrontation now, but tomorrow security will show up at this desk to let him know that he’s been fired and escort him out.

Alice sees Bob getting more anxious after their discussion, and worries that maybe she accidentally let slip something critical-sounding about the lateness after all. She concludes that she needs to be even more careful to only stick to positive feedback in the future.

Because they never talk about Bob’s lateness and what he might do differently in the future, his pattern of only completing important presentations at the last minute continues.

**3.**
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A small group (subculture, religious sect, police force, etc.) within broader society sees one of their own doing something bad, such as engaging in abuse.

The people within the group think, "This was an isolated exception, most of us would never do anything like this. But if the rest of society hears about this, they will think that all of us are bad. So we need to deal with this internally and not reveal it to outsiders."

The attempt to keep it internal fails and outsiders find out about the case. They think that the group is all bad, since it was trying to cover up abuse.

Alternatively: the group actually *does* have a systemic problem, this isn't just an isolated incident. The cover-up succeeds for now, even from most other members of the group. Because most of the group is kept in the dark, the next time something like this happens, the people who find out about it go "This has never happened before, we need to cover this up so this isolated incident doesn't ruin our reputation".

As a result, more people get harmed because most people in the group don’t realize that there’s a problem they should do something about. The original perpetrators might even be [allowed to stay in the group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair). When things finally blow up, the group is rocked not only by one scandal, but a series of them.

**4.**
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There was a time when my relationship with a particular friend had turned very adversarial.

From my perspective, she sometimes had good insights into my behavior. At the same time, she also had a strong need to have me do things that she wanted, and an inability to understand why I didn't want to do them. As a result, she would often take her correct insights about me to argue that she understood me better than I understood myself and that it would be good for me to do what she wanted.

I’ve forgotten the exact details and don’t particularly want to go digging for them, but the rough shape of the examples was something like this. She might notice that I was repeating a particular pattern in my romantic relationships that I was reluctant to acknowledge. Later, she might argue that I was irrational and self-deluded when I thought that the two of us shouldn’t be housemates, or when I didn’t want to engage in a co-writing project together with her. As a part of her argument, she would reference the pattern that she’d noticed earlier as evidence of my general irrationality.

This led to a dynamic where I became reluctant to acknowledge her having *any* correct insights into me that I had initially disagreed with. This was the case even when it was clear to me that she had been correct. I felt that if I acknowledged any single insight, she would weaponize it to hold that she was *always* correct about what I should do whenever we disagreed.

(We’re no longer friends.)

From her perspective, the situation was simpler. To her, it must have looked like she had good insights into my behavior, which let her see how irrationally and self-destructively I was behaving when I didn't listen to her and do what she told me to do. Even when it became clear that she’d been right about something, I continued to obviously self-deceive and rationalize reasons not to accept her insights!

Therefore, I was too irrational to understand my own behavior, proving that she did know better than me what I needed.

**5.**
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You could call this an *anticipatory cover-up*:

*   One party anticipates that another will misuse or misinterpret some piece of information.
*   Because of this expectation, they try to withhold or cover up the information.

It’s easy for it to go poorly:

*   The other party sees the cover-up and interprets it as confirming their negative expectations.
*   There's a resulting spiral of mistrust that makes everything worse.
*   Important information being left unshared might also have other negative consequences, such as problematic behaviors continuing or other experts being unable to fully evaluate the effectiveness of vaccines.

In some cases, this is relatively benign and could be cleared up with further discussion. Bob would probably be relieved to hear the true reasons for Alice's actions. In other cases, the cover-up actively makes each party model the other as an adversarial actor. This makes them unlikely to trust even truthful explanations of the other party's actions afterward.

Sometimes, the party covering up the information might say something like “I’ve got good reasons to hide this information, trust me”. Unfortunately, it is hard to trust someone when they clearly don’t trust you. It could be that they have a good reason to cover up the information, but it could just as well be that the information is genuinely damning. Why *should* you trust them when they are clearly trying to control your actions by restricting the information that you get?

On the other hand, sometimes people *will* misinterpret or misuse information that they get. Just including an explicit warning against possible misinterpretations won’t help if the other party has a motive (justified or not) to ignore those warnings. There may also be legal reasons for why some information cannot be released, such as the possibility of a libel suit that may be expensive and effortful to fight even if the information is true.

It would be nice to end this post with a recommendation of how to avoid these problems. Unfortunately, I don’t really have one, other than “if you are withholding information because of how you expect the other party to react, be aware that this might just make everything worse”.

*This article was first published as a paid piece* [*on my Substack*](https://kajsotala.substack.com/) *one week ago. Most of my content becomes free eventually, but if you'd like me to write more often and to see my writing earlier, consider getting a subscription! If I get enough subscribers, I may be able to write much more regularly than I've done before.*