In the 1960s tobacco, for example, companies mounted a campaign to create public uncertainty about the scientific evidence that smoking causes cancer. The sugar industry funded research at Harvard University for decades to create uncertainty about sugar’s role in heart disease while promoting fat as the real culprit. The chemical industry vilified Rachel Carson to create uncertainty about the environmental problems caused by pesticides. The construction and resource extraction industries paid consultants to help them create uncertainty about the health risks of asbestos, silica and lead. More recently the National Football League used incomplete data and league-affiliated doctors to create uncertainty about the relationship between head trauma and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The central message is always: because we can’t be 100 percent certain, we should do nothing.


kleinbl00:

    Such confirmation bias has been enabled by a generation of university academics who have taught a corrosive brand of postmodernist identity politics that argues truth is relative, and that science is a “meta-narrative”—a story concocted by the ruling white male elite in order to retain power—and therefore suspect.

So sweepingly simplistic that it throws the rest of the essay into question.

So what's the plan? 2500 words into a 2800-word article:

    There are solutions, however. Sciencedebate.org is certainly a start.

"Check out my website."

This is why scientific american hasn't gotten my money since they fired James Burke.


posted 2750 days ago