I wish that this were required reading for American schoolchildren. 1984 but real life.

A great exploration on how a few have obscured the scientific truth about not just climate change, but tobacco, acid rain, the ozone hole and DDT. I would like to recommend this to a few people in my life who are climate deniers but I think the science might be a bit too complicated for those without a brief scientific background. But I think the overall the message is pretty clear.

I enjoyed the end note that was included 10 years on from the original publication in 2010. It is sad to see that the science is still being rejected by some.

It was interesting to learn about the various issues on how prominent scientists obscured the truth. Each chapter discussed an issue including acid rain, tobacco smoking, pesticides, nuclear war, and the ozone hole. I liked how this book integrated politics and science, about how political agendas can cause certain scientists to lie, destroy other scientists' work and reputation, and push for their own agenda.

This book is filled with facts - it can be dense and slow. However, those facts are the extraordinary evidence required to make the strong case for what is essentially a corporate conspiracy against science. Basically: I found it a slog, but it blew my mind.

A very small number of individuals have been paid to promote doubt, science monger, and generally act against the public interest for their own personal gain. What's most incredible about the book is that demonstrates that just a few people are responsible for this with multiple issues. Fred Singer and Fred Sights, most notably, were responsible for doubt mongering for the tobacco industry (in the face of cancer), for aerosol companies (in the face of the ozone hole), and for oil corporations (in the face of the climate).

This how-they-did-it guide is key to understanding how we prevent this from happening in the future.

Je voudrais une version mise à jour pour savoir qui sont les faiseurs de misinformations aujourd’hui.
C’est assez effrayant de voir qu’une poignée de personnes peuvent suffit à mettre en doute la communauté scientifique si leurs recherches semblent aller contre les intérêts des grandes entreprises.

Prolifically researched book to demonstrate its main thesis that wedging and zooming into inherent and necessary scientific uncertainty is an effective method for making the public confused about the state of scientific knowledge. The book’s source materials include dense research papers, journal articles, speeches, etc. The authors said they reviewed hundreds of thousands of pages to prepare the book and I was impressed.

Among Demon Haunted World, this book is among my favorites to teach science literacy. I think it should be taught in a science literacy class in high schools.

Unfortunately, I think the human brain is evolutionarily wired to be bamboozled by what the “merchants of doubt” are slinging. Knowledge through the scientific method is at a significant disadvantage when compared to knowledge spread by the obfuscators. It is gained in a sequestered/specialized process and it takes practiced and arduous training to understand the levels of certainty in a topic’s conclusions (as well as to understand where to look for credible and peer reviewed source materials!) Also, scientists don’t have the resources/time to publicly disseminate their nuanced understanding because they have sh*t to do in their quest to advance a frontier. This is compared to knowledge promulgated by the obfuscators which takes place in the realm of public/social media. Their arena is open/accessible, requires low barriers to entry, hammers on a consumer’s intuition until they feel like an expert in a topic, allows cherry picked yet inaccurate/unnuanced/unfiltered ideas to be propagated in a Darwinian way (because they are confident, certain, confirm biases, etc), and creates opportunities to stroke our dopamine filled brains which crave a story about people with ulterior/nefarious motives (a desire for prestige, communism, more research funds, etc.) Doubt is effective and I fear that scientific misinformation will only spread faster during the social media age but I hope I'm wrong. Books like this are a tool in preventing/understanding this spread but my conjecture is that people who spread scientific misinformation are unlikely to read it.

One aspect slightly emphasized but not emphasized enough in my opinion is that science is NOT an argument from authority. I often hear doubters cherry pick the statements of a scientist they read briefly about on social media or heard on the radio (maybe even the usual suspects listed in this book.) All the while, they ignore the preponderance of peer reviewed (but of course not completely certain) conclusions which have actually survived a rigorous scientific method. It is the sources that matter in science, not what an authority says. An authority can be helpful in assigning statistical credence to an idea but should not be taken absolutely.

Content A+, writing was a bit dry so kind of hard for me to slog through. Less motivated as well since I had watched the documentary before. I think the documentary does a great job highlighting the key points of this book without the dryness haha.

I had a lot of trouble focusing through much of this. Is it because the writing lacks a little something, or because I needed to increase the audio speed to make it register in my brain properly? I can’t answer that question. You should read it anyway.