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.