“No one in 1954 would have claimed that everything that needed to be known about smoking and cancer was known, and the industry exploited this normal scientific honesty to spin unreasonable doubt.”
Normal scientific honesty.
Reminds me of something I read on Dot Earth the other day about science and news:
“Readers will gain the resolve to act in the face of uncertainty once they absorb that some uncertainty is the norm, not a temporary state that will give way to magical clarity sometime in the future.”
Bummer how little most of us know about the process by which our species learns big things.
(The quote at the top of this post comes from a book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway called Merchants of Doubt. It’s about the handful of scientists that have worked for both Big Tobacco and Big Pollution.)
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