11 ms·

A book came out in August 2024 called "Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola," by Susan Greenhalgh. She's a professor (emeritus) at Harvard. The boo

• grecy 2y ago
  And this is exactly the problem we face now in so many aspects of life. If cell phones or microwaves or a hundred other things were harmful we would not find out, because of all the lobbying and armies of scientists paid to find and publish a very narrow version of truth
  • rootusrootus 2y ago
    That would be a good time to remind people that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Being skeptical does not mean embrace the conspiracy theory as probably true but not proven yet.
  • mrandish 2y ago
    > If cell phones or microwaves or a hundred other things were harmful we would not find out While I agree that there may be things which have subtle but cumulatively harmful effects over time, the two specifics that you cited (cell phones and microwaves) are very poor examples because they've been deployed so broadly for so long, the chances there is some significant medical harm still undetected is vanishingly small.
    • CamperBob2 2y ago
      Also, trial lawyers would rapidly become the wealthiest people on Earth if genuine, reproducible evidence of harm from non-ionizing radiation could be found. If you thought the tobacco and silicone breast implant settlements were impressive...
      • genewitch 2y ago
        just jump on the two examples instead of actually considering the point being made, i guess. Think "leaded gasoline" if you need a concrete example
      • creer 2y ago
        > trial lawyers would rapidly become the wealthiest people on Earth if genuine, reproducible evidence of harm from non-ionizing radiation could be found. Probably not, as electronics manufacturers would quikly take that into consideration. Liability comes from both knowing and continuing.
      • mozman 2y ago
        Divorce lawyers are generally the most profitable. $750/hr if you’re good.
    • nataliste 2y ago
      >cell phones Well, as far as direct physical harms, yes, but as far as mental harms that translate to physical harms, the jury's still out: '“Given that the increase in mental health issues was sharpest after 2011, Twenge believes it’s unlikely to be due to genetics or economic woes and more likely to be due to sudden cultural changes, such as shifts in how teens and young adults spend their time outside of work and school.' https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/03/mental-health-adults https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/03/mental-healt...
• sitkack 2y ago
  This is how propaganda works, you don't spread falsities and untruths, but change the mix of what signals get amplified.
  • staunton 2y ago
    This is how propaganda can still work. However, if a propagandist can get away with falsehoods, they will use those just as well. The interesting/newer things start when propagandists have multiple outlets and can distribute a number of mutually incompatible falsehoods to different audiences.
    • dylan604 2y ago
      Enhanced by algos that promote those falsehoods in a way that ensures widest possible spread
    • sitkack 2y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit Disinformation is so much easier when truth is not a dimension you care about.
• lazyeye 2y ago
  I wonder how much of this same kind of manipulation/distortion is going on when we are told to "trust the science" with regard to climate change? The pressure to ignore or minimise inconvenient facts would be overwhelming (career at stake situation).
  • genewitch 2y ago
    what's the bellwether for climate change? Rising temperatures, rising CO2 concentrations? There's strong evidence there actually isn't warming going on. The "warming trend" may be due to the temperature sensor locations. Originally the sensors were put in remote, rural, unpopulated and unused locations (ideally!). As communities grew... you understand that the sensors now are no longer rural, remote, unpopulated areas. What happens to the air in a city? If you're unsure, "urban heat island". This is extremely localized "weather" - the sort of thing that i've been yelled at "IS NOT CLIMATE". I'm only going to link 1 thing here, because doing this sort of thing on my lifelong handle has never done me any favors: > Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 23:105015 (20pp), 2023 October > Challenges in the Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Trends Since 1850 > https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18 https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18
    • lazyeye 2y ago
      Great example of what I was talking about!
    • czzr 2y ago
      I looked at the paper you referenced. Interestingly, it does not say that the warming trend is not happening, rather they argue that the evidence is insufficient to say for sure if the warming is caused by human-driven causes or natural ones (e.g. volcanic activity or solar changes). They mention the heat island effect as one of the issues that may complicate the attribution of the contribution of different factors to the warming trend. To quote from the paper: “To summarize, by varying ST and/or TSI choice and/or the attribution approach used, it is possible to conclude anything from the long-term warming being "mostly natural" to "mostly anthropogenic" or anything in between. While each of us has our own scientific opinions on which of these choices are most realistic, we are concerned by the wide range of scientifically plausible, yet mutually contradictory, conclusions that can still be drawn from the data.”
• hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  There are few slogans I hate more than "trust the science", primarily because it aligns scientific results with faith, which is exactly what science is not about. Science is fundamentally about skepticism, not trust. Now, obviously that skepticism can be misused by some rando with no qualifications or even time spent researching telling you to be "skeptical" of people who have spent decades trying to figure shit out. What I really believe we should be teaching people is "what are the incentives?". That is, it's become very clear that many people are susceptible to provably false information, so we should train people to try to examine what incentives someone has for speaking out in the first place (and that includes scientists, too). This is why I hate most conspiracy theories - even if you take everything the conspiracy supposes at face value, conspiracists don't explain how their conspiracy is somehow kept so secret when tons of people involved would have extremely strong incentives to expose it.
  • tokinonagare 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • pclmulqdq 2y ago
      Lots of individuals denounced the system, but you didn't hear from them because they didn't meet the demands of the entirely-manufactured scientific "consensus" on the wet market theory. As it turns out, that "consensus" was almost entirely driven by Anthony Fauci's camp of virologists (it's not just him, but a relatively small group of people who have a monetary/career interest in continuing the type of research that happens at the Wuhan Institute) who saw the "lab leak" theory as a fundamental threat to their ability to continue doing research that many saw as unethical and bordering on bio-weapon development. In response, they essentially took control of the COVID response and the official COVID narrative. That is why the director of the NIAID, which is a research organization and not a public health agency at all, took charge of the century's biggest public health situation over the head of the (sadly impotent) CDC, which should have been in charge of coordinating the US's response. The scientific consensus that you were sold was never really a consensus. It was a power play. By contrast, there's a strong consensus on climate change, for example, that involves a very large number of scientists who should know and who are not incentivized to believe it.
• treflop 2y ago
  I think this related to the “critical thinking” skill that all my teachers always stressed about growing up. But I still don’t know how to put in useful words what “critical thinking” is because it’s not one thing. It requires synthesizing a lot of information together in very specific and meticulous ways. And through feedback, collecting your previous thoughts and keeping track of how often you are correct or incorrect. You can explain critical thinking in many ways but none of it will teach someone critical thinking.
  • UltraSane 2y ago
    I think of Critical Thinking as a closed loop process that aligns a person's mental model of the world with reality. It is just using the scientific method to analyze information in daily life. When done correctly and consistently it is like a really good spam filter against lies and bullshit.
  • narag 2y ago
    The real trick is that critical thinking is almost always being critical with someone that's trying to mislead you. Many people try to do it with many different methods. So you're right it's not one thing. Also nobody will teach you all the techniques because they're keeping theirs secret. Everybody lies.
    • alsetmusic 2y ago
      > Also nobody will teach you all the techniques because they're keeping theirs secret. Sounds more like people who like to use propaganda who keep their methods in shadows (not always, though). I try to teach critical thinking all the time. I bet you do too. Do you not try to inform loved ones how detect spam or scams? How to evaluate what's true in their inbox or on a webpage? Do you have anything to withhold in such a scenario?
  • regpertom 2y ago
    I go with critical thinking being thinking about thinking, or meta thinking. Which is to say have a thought, doesn’t really matter what, and then analyse it. Example is throw a dart at the board and then evaluate it compared to your expectations and desires. Feel free to throw a bullseye right away but that’s a different thing. Which is to say, imo, that critical thinking isn’t about being perfect all the time.
• tombert 2y ago
  This is kind of why I get annoyed at the "facts don't care about your feelings!!!" crowd. Sure, the raw facts don't care about your feelings, but the way that these facts are interpreted and presented absolutely do care. Two people can look at the exact same data and draw widely different but comparably accurate conclusions out of it. Using your Coke example, the raw fact that "exercise is good for reducing obesity" is broadly true and not really disputed by anyone as far as I'm aware, but the interpretation of "exercise alone can be a solution to obesity" or "how much exercise vs how much diet restriction is a solution to obesity" is subject to interpretation and biases.
  • teekert 2y ago
    Perhaps not disputed, but exercise’s effect is probably overestimated, and thus, damage was done. https://youtu.be/vSSkDos2hzo?si=3U2UxQOa_ZgdmT37 https://youtu.be/vSSkDos2hzo?si=3U2UxQOa_ZgdmT37
    • randcraw 2y ago
      Exactly. If your objective is to control your weight, changing your diet has probably 5x to 10x more impact than changing your physical activity.
  • complianceowl 2y ago
    Why is it that people can't wrap their head around the "Facts don't care about your feelings." slogan? I don't agree with everything that movement says, but that slogan means exactly what it's saying; the problem is what everyone like yourself adds to it. What you are adding has originated and lives in your mind, and you project it onto something that has nothing to do with your thought that you are projecting. The slogan is directed at fragile liberals who would rather yell like a toddler at a town hall meeting than have an informed discussion centered around facts. You can try and broaden that statement all you want to pull in other topics, but that slogan says nothing about having a disregard for how facts are interpreted OR presented. It goes without saying that facts can be subject to multiple interpretations. I think people need to be more honest about what you're really saying: you don't like conservatives and you distorted a basic phrase as you gaslit a group of people and accused that group of doing what you yourself just did.
• ristos 2y ago
  Intentionally leaving out important or key information is still lying and deception, and is harmful, and can be really harmful if it's a big thing, even in cases when it's done with good intentions.
• washadjeffmad 2y ago
  "Trust the science" was also a propaganda campaign. What they meant was "Don't question our data or our decisions". Science isn't trusted, it's understood and practiced. Not everyone has enough scientific literacy to understand the difference between being data driven and hypothesis driven, even if they intuit parts of it on a daily basis. We can easily be misled by data, but when we make decisions by evaluating the probability that any hypothesis is true conditioned on evidence supported by openly collected and evaluated data, we're much closer to doing science.
  • moralestapia 2y ago
    Glad that this can be openly said nowadays. The tide seems to be turning, indeed.
• mapt 2y ago
  If you run 200 studies trying to show nonsense that protects your industry, and you set a statistical significance level of p>0.05 in seeking statistical correlation, you will find 10 studies that achieve statistical significance without fudging any numbers. Then you will announce that an exhaustive meta-analysis of ten studies supports your contentions about your profitable activity. You cannot entirely separate intention from the merit of the science. Those 200 studies are an elaborate propaganda campaign, and they always were, each and every one of them, regardless of the fact that they had an internal logic. Scientists should react with violent disgust and ostracism at clear attempts to attain a specific result without a lot of very explicit framing (eg: pre-announcing, announcing the other 190 studies, having a third party independently replicate the 10, etc), but they can't, because this sort of industrial campaign is funding such a huge percent of scientific research. The NSF is doling out 9 billion dollars a year to run at least semi-objective science, and if this was 90 billion or 900 billion, things would be quite a bit different, and motivated "research" would not have the same place. We are dramatically over-supplied on researchers, to the point that a lot of them are making sub-minimum wage working as adjuncts, postdocs, "grad students", baristas. We built a system of university research that is the envy of the world, that exports knowledge and culture en masse, and we're not using it for more than 0.03% of GDP because some Congressperson has a poster of researchers "Spent $1.5M studying the mating habits of fruit flies, like some kind of pervert", and because Reagan hated government and wanted Coca-Cola to do our science for us.