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Personal note: this has been on my mind a lot lately, in the context of thinking back to Bernays and Ivy Lee...early marketers who also shaped US education.  Now, the most valuable resource any marketers has is the ignorance of their audience. Here’s a great overview of the problem:

Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health by David Michaels (Oxford University Press, 359 pages, $27.95)

The sabotage of science is now a routine part of American politics. The same corporate strategy of bombarding the courts and regulatory agencies with a barrage of dubious scientific information has been tried on innumerable occasions—and it has nearly always worked, at least for a time. Tobacco. Asbestos. Lead. Vinyl chloride. Chromium. Formaldehyde. Arsenic. Atrazine. Benzene. Beryllium. Mercury. Vioxx. And on and on. In battles over regulating these and many other dangerous substances, money has bought science, and then science—or, more precisely, artificially exaggerated uncertainty about scientific findings—has greatly delayed action to protect public and worker safety. And in many cases, people have died.

Tobacco companies perfected the ruse, which was later copycatted by other polluting or health-endangering industries. One tobacco executive was even dumb enough to write it down in 1969. “Doubt is our product,” reads the infamous memo, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

In his important new book, David Michaels calls the strategy “manufacturing uncertainty.” A former Clinton administration Energy Department official and now associate chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at George Washington University, Michaels is a comprehensive and thorough chronicler—indeed, almost too thorough a chronicler, at times overwhelming the reader with information.

But there’s a lot to be learned here. Even most of us who have gone swimming in the litigation-generated stew of tobacco documents (you can never get the stink off of you again) don’t have a clue about the extent of the abuses. For the war on science described in Doubt is Their Product is so sweeping and fundamental as to make you question why we ever had the Enlightenment. There aren’t just a few scientists for hire—there are law firms, public-relations firms, think tanks, and entire product-defense companies that specialize in rejiggering epidemiological studies to make findings of endangerment to human health disappear.

For Michaels, these companies are the scientific equivalent of Arthur Andersen. He calls their work “mercenary” science, drawing an implicit analogy with private military firms like Blackwater. If the companies can get the raw data, so much the better, and if they can’t, they’ll find another way to make findings of statistically significant risk go away. Just throw out the animal studies or tinker with the subject groups. Perform a new meta-analysis. Conduct a selective literature review. Think up some potentially confounding variable. And so forth.

They can always get it published somewhere. And if they can’t, they can just start their own peer-reviewed journal, one likely to have an exceedingly low scientific impact but a potentially profound effect on the regulatory process.

All of science is subject to such exploitation because all of science is fundamentally characterized by uncertainty. No study is perfect; each one is subject to criticism both illegitimate and legitimate—and so if you wish, you can make any scientific stance, even the most strongly established, appear weak and dubious. All you have to do is selectively highlight uncertainty, selectively attack the existing studies one by one, and ignore the weight of the evidence. Although Michaels focuses largely on the attempts to whitewash the risks that various chemicals pose to the workplace and public health, the same methods are also used to attack the scientific understanding of evolution and global warming.

And it happens virtually every time the government even dreams of regulating a substance. People know what’s going on, but they respond as if they’re simply shocked, shocked, to find science being tortured. And so the outgunned federal agencies that must consult science to take action—the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, and Food and Drug Administration, among others—repeatedly capitulate to corporations that effectively purchase science on demand.

We used to have a regulatory system—that was the dream, anyway, of the 1960s and 1970s. But in significant part due to the manufacturing-uncertainty strategy, we now have the bureaucratic equivalent of clotted arteries. And mercenary science hasn’t just blinded federal agencies. It has also blinded the courts, where the same tactics apply. Indeed, recent changes to the role of science in the federal regulatory system and the courts have worsened the situation by making corporate sabotage of scientific research easier than ever.

The 1998 Data Access Act (or “Shelby Amendment") and the 2001 Data Quality Act, both originally a glint in Big Tobacco’s eye, enable companies to get the data behind publicly funded studies and help them challenge research that might serve as the basis for regulatory action. Meanwhile, the 1993 Supreme Court decision in the little-known Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals case further facilitates the strategy, unwisely empowering trial court judges to determine what is and what isn’t good science in civil cases. Under Daubert, judges have repeatedly spiked legitimate expert witnesses who were otherwise set to testify about the dangers demonstrated by epidemiological research. Often juries don’t even hear the science any more because the defense can get it thrown out pre-trial.

It’s all about questioning the science to gum up the works. The companies pose as if they are defending open debate and inquiry and are trying to make scientific data available to everyone. In reality, once they get the raw data, they spend the vast resources at their disposal to discredit independent research.

Michaels ends by proposing a series of reforms. He suggests giving citizens more access to the courts (since the regulatory agencies are broken), requiring full disclosure of all conflicts of interest in science submitted to the regulatory process (and discounting conflicted studies), getting rid of rigged reanalysis by promulgating scientific standards that forbid it, and returning to the practice of using the best available evidence to protect public health, rather than waiting for a degree of unassailable certainty that will never arrive.

With his extensive chronicling of just how many times the manufacturing-uncertainty strategy has been used to make our world more dangerous, Michaels has performed a great service. Moreover, because he’s a scientist himself and has seen these abuses up close in government, he can go much further than muckraking journalists who have often sought to expose this kind of malfeasance. (Full disclosure: Michaels cites my own book The Republican War on Science and mentions me in his acknowledgments.) I support Michaels’ regulatory solutions—his “Sarbanes-Oxley for Science” proposal, as he calls it—and would like to see them enacted into law or put into effect by administrative action. But if there’s a problem with Doubt is Their Product, it’s that Michaels is, in a way, too much of a scientist. Let me explain.

Michaels chronicles a long litany of outrageous abuses, nothing less than the undermining of reason itself from within. Yet despite just how vulnerable the book shows science to be, Michaels continues to have faith that the solution lies in science. No matter how many times we have seen the facts lose, he still writes as if he thinks the facts alone will win.

So Michaels slices and dices all the misinformation, as he’s ideally equipped to do. Anyone who grasps the nature of science well enough to follow him will not only be convinced but also deeply angered by what’s happening. But other readers will just feel dizzied by the complex analyses, confused and ready prey for the science sharks whom Michaels has worked so hard to expose. The manufacturing-uncertainty strategy works because it buries you in the facts, loses you in the woods of science. Sometimes, arguing back within that arena only makes it worse.

continued…

And so, while eminently rational critiques of the abuse of science have their place—and Michaels’ is excellent—I worry that the defenders of science sometimes delude themselves into thinking rational criticism is enough. It isn’t, however, because scientifically grounded argument will only persuade those inclined to defend science in the first place. In order to be protected from the kind of assault it now faces, science must do more than convince its own. Science needs the allied power of outrage, political will, and a fundamental commitment to fighting back that, as of now, simply doesn’t exist. So enough of being shocked, shocked. It’s time for the merry, rampaging science-abusers themselves to be shocked as the sleeping giant of American science awakens and finally decides it isn’t going to take it anymore.

And then there’s the factor that if people knew the science that makes something work, the other industries would go out of business. (For example, if waiters aren’t going to serve your meals or give you good customer service make your own meals. If people at department stores won’t sell you clothes or soap make your own.)

The above examples I see have more to do with the effect that rhetoric has on advertising.

But I can think of examples that go beyond the impact of science on rhetoric and advertising when it comes to fast-food or food that is sold at the supermarket. If people want convenience over self-sustenance it’s easier to put food additives in fast-food or packaged foods. Sodium is a good example of added components or food colorings or food flavorings used in packaged foods from the way that they are processed to make them more “addictive”. The sodium makes the food taste sweeter, but it also makes people thirstier and want more of that food and the thirst could be confused easily for hunger. If you eat a burger at McDonald’s you can taste the added sodium in the patty of the meat. If people don’t put up with toxic additives used to get them to eat more of the same foods or drink more of the same soft drinks with unnecessary additives, the advertisers will go out of business.

For example I never drink Dasani water. Coca-cola uses not only added salt to make people thirstier and buy more of the water but it also adds the chemical potassium chloride to make consumers even thirstier. It helps make consumers thirstier, because potassium chloride is one of the chemicals used to dry the fluids out from people on death row in lethal injections. It’s not a myth, but is right there on the ingredients of the packaging if you want to read it. And all to make an abundant, naturally renewable, natural resource (that is actually so abundant to be worthless in terms of monetary value) profitable!

Y’see, maybe I really don’t belong in the city where everything is convenient, but possibly do belong in the deep country growing corn and eating snake meat- Hell maybe even building a baseball field over a cornfield and hiring people to play dead baseball players for other citizens of a town with a max population of 50 .

Well it should also alert honest scientists to something very important; If you are looking for something you will usually find it. “Do not Lust after Results”. That’s what makes it so hard for me to take either side of the global warming debate seriously. Those getting funding or want to prove it find quite damning information saying the world is going to be a sterile fireball in about 50 years. Those getting funding or want to disprove it have findings that show were fine or even that the world is going into an ice age.

Of course those trying to disprove it are those “manufacturing” doubt in most cases, but does it necessarily make them wrong? Probably yes.

I’ve always doubted FDA, CDC, and other acronym testings, and generated statistical data. Doubt is the first tool your science teacher gives you. Numbers, facts, and figures are too easily manipulated. As Bob would say, what the seeker seeks, the finder finds.

Thanks for putting out all this info thirtyseven. I’ve lurking around your forum for sometime and even longer around your blog. I swore six months ago I’d join in this foray but I’ll be damned if you don’t have some of the best links to the tastiest forbidden fruit.

What Harflimon says about science and global warming is a pretty good reference to how the study of science can be used to persuade. The far-right says that global warming is a creation of the far-left. Then the far-left says that it’s not about politics and that one party is ignoring accountability for their actions on the environment. The bickering goes back and forth until the results are that a two-tiered system keeps up the back and forth enough that people forget about what the science says about global warming and act as if it’s all okay.

And then you also have the ability for people to use big words that they don’t even know what they mean and cause a lot of people to spend money on things that aren’t really that big of a deal. The Y2K bug is an example. Before everybody learned that the one-man crusade was a crock on January 1, 2000 industries like IBM and Apple spent tons of money on Y2K compliance that wasn’t even that necessary. It could’ve caused printing errors but you would not have a disaster like Skynet in the “Terminator” science-fiction franchise where all of the machines believed it was 1900 and the apocalypse would happen due to a rift in the space-time continuum. Honestly if those industries and consumers just waited a few years it wouldn’t make as much of a difference in the course of natural and historical events and would’ve saved money.

You could also just use gore or violence and shock that goes beyond the scientific doctrine to persuade people.

This goes for people rushing to get bomb-shelters after terrorist attacks. Some people had their thoughts in the right place. Yes it would suck if a sleeper cell would drop a dirty atomic bomb on the states and wipe a lot of people out. However terrorists are not after your house unless you are a very special, important person that does a lot already. A lot of lawyers or family-business owners are really not that important but only as important as me and all of the rest of the “ordinary” homebodys that visit this board. It was similar with how the San Diego Symphony upped security after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. That’s almost a way of saying “We suck so much that we’re disguising it with our narcissism.” I’ve known someone who worked for the Symphony and the only reason the terrorists would ever make an attack that retarded would be as a misguided way to save the world from hearing such awful music programming or music performed by some of the less skilled but more charismatic conductors. It was the same with how neighbors called in to claim there was a terrorist attack at the location where Audioslave were filming their first music video. (Remember how Tom Ridge moved on to do some spokesmanship for Home Depot after his post at Homeland Security.)

It’s just like how people are prevented from flying because halfway through some at least semi-rational specs on the dangers associated with flying, images that are chaotic are placed in people’s heads (though treating every passenger like they might want to bomb the airline or be smuggling black-tar heroin, instead of just a few bad apples, helps airlines lose money too). Just use some semi-thought-out scientific specs on what makes driving so dangerous and then after those scientific arguments show a bunch of images from “Red Asphalt” of driver casualties to people with no sense of humor. Then you can keep people from driving (which would sure make the air easier to breathe if you lived in Los Angeles).

paigeadam - 27 December 2008 09:01 AM

damned if you don’t have some of the best links to the tastiest forbidden fruit.

Agreed. 

For those of you who need your tasty fruit pureed, Michaels spoke at Google this summer.... you can listen to him give a summary of his work
here.