Dave Rahardja on Nostr: Someone posted this old ad for Chesterfield #cigarettes on Facebook, touting ...
Someone posted this old ad for Chesterfield #cigarettes on Facebook, touting “scientific evidence” that shows that their cigarettes didn’t affect the nose, throat, or sinuses (never mind the lungs!) even after a decade of smoking.
Some commenters, which I assume are horse dewormer eaters, predictably replied with “lol “trust the science”” and similar posts, mocking scientists as untrustworthy liars.
But sometimes I wonder, can you blame them? As shown here, scientists *do* lie sometimes. The conspiracy of Big Tobacco was real; is it so hard to believe that conspiracies exist today?
The answer of course lies in subtlety. “Scientists” is not a monolithic group of people; people learn, people make mistakes, and people can be bought; the point of the scientific process is to counteract those tendencies so we have a framework for approaching the truth. But how do we explain this to someone who’s convinced that they’re being lied to, when their education has failed to teach them so?
#science
Published at
2024-12-03 09:41:13Event JSON
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