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A review by mburnamfink
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway
5.0
Merchants of Doubt reads like a case presented by the prosecution. Oreskes and Conway look at several late 20th century scientific controversies: the link between cigarettes and cancer; the risks of nuclear weapon, the damage done by acid rain, CFCs and the ozone layer, and above all climate change, to find that these controversies extend far beyond the limits of reasonable doubt. This is no accident, but rather the result of a deliberate public relations strategy formulated by a small group of Cold War physics, propagated by a network of conservative think tanks, and funded by companies with a business model that creates threats to human life.
The scientists are Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow, and William Nierenberg. All of them parleyed real scientific work around the Manhattan Project and the early Cold War into political positions connected with the Republican party. In the mid 60s, as the dangers of smoking became apparent, the tobacco industry began supporting scientific research to create a bench of trial experts to cast doubt on the link between cigarettes and cancer. Seitz, Nierenberg, and Jastrow founded the staunchly freemarket George C. Marshall Institute in 1984 to provide structure for for their work. Singer was loosely affiliated with the network. The charges are serious enough, and timeline involved complex enough, that I'll leave the details to the book. Whatever the nature of the debate and the connection between science and policy, the goal was always to inhibit regulatory action by the government, and the playbook almost identical.
The Merchants of Doubt playbook is not laid out in the text, so I'll do it here:
Step 1 is Developing the Controversy: This begins innocently enough with emerging scientific issue of regulatory significant and locating legitimate uncertainties. Science is always incomplete, and particularly in early stages models may be crude approximations with unclear causal mechanisms. But rather than contributing actual work, (the scientific CVs of the merchants are notably thin post-1970) criticize the science for lack of realism and certainty, without offering testable hypotheses of your own. Extend personal uncertainty to willful density. Hold up official government reports through bureaucratic delays and denying consensus.
Step 2 is to Launder the Controversy: Demand equal time for "your side" to a news media that lacks the time or expertise to check the validity of both sides, and knows that a story headlined "scientists argue" is more interesting than "scientists say". Launder your own credentials in an unrelated field to present yourself as an expert on whatever is required beyond all standards of professionalism. A scientist might master two fields, but cannot master the details of physics, atmospheric modeling, epidemiology, forest ecology, and so on. Develop press materials which mimic scientific articles in style and format, but have not passed review. Present glowing assessments of your position in friendly media like The Wall Street Journal.
Step 3 is to Amplify the Controversy: Make sure everybody, not just friendly venues, sees the conflict. Get politicians and media figures to present your views as fact. Accuse your opponents of politicizing science and scientific misconduct. Attack, slander, and when necessary, lie. Cast attacks on your own evidence and backing as censorship akin to that suffered by Galileo. The end goal is to make the controversy the story, leaving doubt in the public mind long after the science has settled.
I believe that Oreskes and Conway's case, as presented, is bulletproof. The titular merchants of doubt systematically violated scientific norms out of an ideological commitment that any sin was valid in pursuit of their political goal. They accused the scientific community of tampering with evidence and ideological bias, two acts which they were consistently and shamelessly guilty of.
The end of this book, where Oreskes lays out the motives of these scientific antagonists, is not as strong. She describe an ideological journey, where Cold War anti-communists came to believe that anything was permissible in defense of American liberty. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, they made the errors of identifying Free Market Fundamentalism as the only economic system compatible with American democracy, and environmentalist sentiment of all sorts as the new communism. Rather than a blind faith in the efficiency, justice, and wisdom of markets, environmentalism recognizes many market failures of externalities, imperfect information, and various kinds of monopolies and technological lock-in. The ultimate logic of environmentalism is simple: The freedom to pollute cannot indefinitely stand above ecosystem integrity and human life. It's opponents would rather commit mass suicide than stop believing this.
Merchants of Doubt is not a scholarly book, despite exhaustive research and footnotes. The authors include a chapter on Rachel Carson and the posthumous attack on Silent Spring because I believe Oreskes sees Carson as role model. Silence Spring wasn't strictly science either; it was a case prepared for public opinion, and one the launched the modern environmental movement.
The point of both Silent Spring and Merchants of Doubt was to launch a movement. As I write this review, on the day of the first March for Science, that movement is ever more necessary. We live in a world trending towards Step 4, a nihilistic universal skepticism that expertise is even possible, that's there's anything other hidden motives and a desire for power in claims of scientific authority. Oreskes and Conway argue that we can't do our own science, that at a certain point there must be faith in the integrity of what's presented, because no-one can understand the full extent of the network that is activated in making a scientific claim. This may be correct, but it's also unsatisfying.
The tactics developed by the merchants of doubt are a near perfect psuedo-science, carrying all the epistemic markers of scientific validity while containing a deadly poison of social paralysis. In this moment of Trumpian "alternative facts", we need to do more than push back against doubt, we need to make producing it a marker of perfidy, partaking in it a road to self-destruction rather than further prestige. I don't yet know how to do that, but Merchants of Doubt precisely lays out the cause of our present troubles.
The scientists are Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow, and William Nierenberg. All of them parleyed real scientific work around the Manhattan Project and the early Cold War into political positions connected with the Republican party. In the mid 60s, as the dangers of smoking became apparent, the tobacco industry began supporting scientific research to create a bench of trial experts to cast doubt on the link between cigarettes and cancer. Seitz, Nierenberg, and Jastrow founded the staunchly freemarket George C. Marshall Institute in 1984 to provide structure for for their work. Singer was loosely affiliated with the network. The charges are serious enough, and timeline involved complex enough, that I'll leave the details to the book. Whatever the nature of the debate and the connection between science and policy, the goal was always to inhibit regulatory action by the government, and the playbook almost identical.
The Merchants of Doubt playbook is not laid out in the text, so I'll do it here:
Step 1 is Developing the Controversy: This begins innocently enough with emerging scientific issue of regulatory significant and locating legitimate uncertainties. Science is always incomplete, and particularly in early stages models may be crude approximations with unclear causal mechanisms. But rather than contributing actual work, (the scientific CVs of the merchants are notably thin post-1970) criticize the science for lack of realism and certainty, without offering testable hypotheses of your own. Extend personal uncertainty to willful density. Hold up official government reports through bureaucratic delays and denying consensus.
Step 2 is to Launder the Controversy: Demand equal time for "your side" to a news media that lacks the time or expertise to check the validity of both sides, and knows that a story headlined "scientists argue" is more interesting than "scientists say". Launder your own credentials in an unrelated field to present yourself as an expert on whatever is required beyond all standards of professionalism. A scientist might master two fields, but cannot master the details of physics, atmospheric modeling, epidemiology, forest ecology, and so on. Develop press materials which mimic scientific articles in style and format, but have not passed review. Present glowing assessments of your position in friendly media like The Wall Street Journal.
Step 3 is to Amplify the Controversy: Make sure everybody, not just friendly venues, sees the conflict. Get politicians and media figures to present your views as fact. Accuse your opponents of politicizing science and scientific misconduct. Attack, slander, and when necessary, lie. Cast attacks on your own evidence and backing as censorship akin to that suffered by Galileo. The end goal is to make the controversy the story, leaving doubt in the public mind long after the science has settled.
I believe that Oreskes and Conway's case, as presented, is bulletproof. The titular merchants of doubt systematically violated scientific norms out of an ideological commitment that any sin was valid in pursuit of their political goal. They accused the scientific community of tampering with evidence and ideological bias, two acts which they were consistently and shamelessly guilty of.
The end of this book, where Oreskes lays out the motives of these scientific antagonists, is not as strong. She describe an ideological journey, where Cold War anti-communists came to believe that anything was permissible in defense of American liberty. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, they made the errors of identifying Free Market Fundamentalism as the only economic system compatible with American democracy, and environmentalist sentiment of all sorts as the new communism. Rather than a blind faith in the efficiency, justice, and wisdom of markets, environmentalism recognizes many market failures of externalities, imperfect information, and various kinds of monopolies and technological lock-in. The ultimate logic of environmentalism is simple: The freedom to pollute cannot indefinitely stand above ecosystem integrity and human life. It's opponents would rather commit mass suicide than stop believing this.
Merchants of Doubt is not a scholarly book, despite exhaustive research and footnotes. The authors include a chapter on Rachel Carson and the posthumous attack on Silent Spring because I believe Oreskes sees Carson as role model. Silence Spring wasn't strictly science either; it was a case prepared for public opinion, and one the launched the modern environmental movement.
The point of both Silent Spring and Merchants of Doubt was to launch a movement. As I write this review, on the day of the first March for Science, that movement is ever more necessary. We live in a world trending towards Step 4, a nihilistic universal skepticism that expertise is even possible, that's there's anything other hidden motives and a desire for power in claims of scientific authority. Oreskes and Conway argue that we can't do our own science, that at a certain point there must be faith in the integrity of what's presented, because no-one can understand the full extent of the network that is activated in making a scientific claim. This may be correct, but it's also unsatisfying.
The tactics developed by the merchants of doubt are a near perfect psuedo-science, carrying all the epistemic markers of scientific validity while containing a deadly poison of social paralysis. In this moment of Trumpian "alternative facts", we need to do more than push back against doubt, we need to make producing it a marker of perfidy, partaking in it a road to self-destruction rather than further prestige. I don't yet know how to do that, but Merchants of Doubt precisely lays out the cause of our present troubles.