Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
Naomi Oreskes
Top 10 Best Quotes
“While the idea of equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two-party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence.”
“The industry had realized you could create the impression of controversy simply by asking questions”
“For the past 150 years, industrial civilization has been dining on the energy stored in fossil fuels, and the bill has come due. Yet, we have sat around the dinner table denying that it is our bill, and doubting the credibility of the man who delivered it.”
“Science is pretty much the same. A conclusion becomes established not when a clever person proposes it, or even a group of people begin to discuss it, but when the jury of peers—the community of researchers—reviews the evidence and concludes that it is sufficient to accept the claim.”
“While the idea of equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two-party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence. It is about claims that can be, and have been, tested through scientific research—experiments, experience, and observation—research that is then subject to critical review by a jury of scientific peers. Claims that have not gone through that process—or have gone through it and failed—are not scientific, and do not deserve equal time in a scientific debate.”
“The problem was that public had no way to know that this “evidence” was part of an industry campaign designed to confuse. It was, in fact, part of a criminal conspiracy to commit fraud.”
“Sensible decision making involves acting on the information we have, even while accepting that it may well be imperfect and our decisions may need to be revisited and revised in light of new information.”
“In the 1950s, the tobacco industry realized that they could protect their product by casting doubt on the science and insisting the dangers of smoking were unproven. In the 1990s, they realized that if you could convince people that science in general was unreliable, then you didn’t have to argue the merits of any particular case, particularly one—like the defense of secondhand smoke—that had no scientific merit. In the demonizing of Rachel Carson, free marketeers realized that if you could convince people that an example of successful government regulation wasn’t, in fact, successful—that it was actually a mistake—you could strengthen the argument against regulation in general.”
“Conventional statistics is set up to be skeptical and avoid type 1 errors. The 95 percent confidence standard means that there is only 1 chance in 20 that you believe something that isn’t true. That is a very high bar. It reflects a scientific worldview in which skepticism is a virtue, credulity is not.90 As one Web site puts it, “A type I error is often considered to be more serious, and therefore more important to avoid, than a type II error.”91 In fact, some statisticians claim that type 2 errors aren’t really errors at all, just missed opportunities.”
“C. P. Snow once argued that foolish faith in authority is the enemy of truth.”
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Book Keywords:
science
