"CAMEL....The Cigarette 9 Out of 10 Doctors Choose!"

I think there was more publically funded science in the past though. I assume more of the fraction of scientists work in private organisations.

Big money are even bigger now, relatively and absolutely, than x decades ago. If you have a revenue of $100 million it might be profitable to influnce some politics, but if you have $22 bn like some large companies such as Pfizer, it's profitable to even gain 5% positive sentiment for a single new product, even if you have to pay $10 m to influence social media such as Reddit, Twitter, and another $100 m to lobby FDA and it's counterparts, especially EU and FDA. It would be profitable for sure, to some extent. If they do it, who knows. Maybe they are ethical and allows us to discuss freely and openly about their products pros and cons, without intercepting. Would you? If you had a button to press, generate $1 bn by influencing social media? If you wouldn't, and you worked at marketing at a large corporation, do you think you would be replaced by someone who would? Interesting thoughts.

Remember that study published in a bunch of higher tier academic journals about chocolate making you lose weight? The guy made up a fake name and put it in just to show it would be published knowing full well it was junk science.

Also the greivance studies. They published mein kempf using feminist speech and that was accepted too. They also published something about a dog park, dildos and toxic masculinity.

I never took social sciences the same.

It's not "just starting to come to light", either. Oil, tobacco, food and pharma companies were well known to have been practicing this in the 90's (I can't speak to before that, because I was a child in the 90s, yet still had a basic level of awareness), well before the Internet was as ubiquitous as it is today. The problem is the industries that practice it generally have a captive audience in one form or another, or the people that purchase their products either don't care or can't be bothered with the politics or ethics of the companies they buy their goods from.

I recommend the book Merchants of Doubt. Really documents the perversion of public scientific information for profit.

Now do pfizer!

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Telfon production

“It’s all ok to dump this byproduct in a major river” np at all - internal documents

It’s in everything and it’s everywhere you can detect it in blood of everyone …np at all ships production over seas see NO PROBLEM AT ALL

Idiocracy was a rosy version of our future

There are only so many hours in the day. Most people have too many other responsibilities to be able to think scientifically about everything.

I'm trained as a scientist and understand the nature of science better than most. I don't use a scientific mindset for everything, because that requires a great deal of thought, data collection, and background investigation.

I'll let experts in economics or geopolitics or computer science dictate my reality in areas of expertise. Not because I can't just figure it out for myself, but because that will take hundreds of hours to even get to a point where I can begin to have an educated opinion.

It’s not only about thinking. It’s also about access to information. A lot of science is behind paywalls. Not everyone is a student or lives close to a campus to get access to papers “for free”. I go to campus biweekly just to download IEEE papers I need. Had I had to buy those at list price, it’d have been hundreds of dollars each month. I graduated almost 2 decades ago.