- 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.
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: "Check out my website." This is why scientific american hasn't gotten my money since they fired James Burke.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.
There are solutions, however. Sciencedebate.org is certainly a start.
His use of the phrase "postmodernist identity politics" tells me he doesn't really know what he's talking about, but Bruno Latour made a similar argument and he does know what he's talking about.So sweepingly simplistic that it throws the rest of the essay into question.
And he follows it up with: without providing one small bit of "evidence". Kinda funny that it's said without any apparent irony. I think the available evidence (which in the spirit of, I will also not provide) says that people don't give a fuck, and they just want to live as easily as possible while being able to feed their families. If you meet someone who's skeptical about a conclusion that's overwhelmingly supported by evidence (e.g. global warming), the chances are good they've heard all the facts and rejected them. You can't fight denial with facts; you can only fight it with vision. People in coal country probably wouldn't give a shit if the coal mines closed if you could offer them something better.Evidence shows the public is hungry for such discussion of science-driven issues—which affect voters at least as much as the economics, foreign policy, and faith and values issues candidates traditionally discuss—that afford an opportunity to hold candidates to account on the evidence.