Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

A book came out in August 2024 called "Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola," by Susan Greenhalgh. She's a professor (emeritus) at Harvard. The book is a history. It shows how the Coca-Cola Company turned to "science" when the company was beset by the obesity crisis of the 1990s and health advocates were calling for, among other things, soda taxes.

Coca-Cola "mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity." It was a successful campaign and did particularly well in the Far East. "In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally."

Point being, the science that Coca-Cola propagated is entirely legitimate. But that science itself does not tell the whole, obvious truth, which is that there is certainly a correlation in a society between obesity rates and overall sugar-soda consumption rates. "Coke’s research isn’t fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim."

"Trust the science" can thus be a dangerous call to arms. Here's the book, if anybody's interested. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo221451...

There are few slogans I hate more than "trust the science", primarily because it aligns scientific results with faith, which is exactly what science is not about. Science is fundamentally about skepticism, not trust.

Now, obviously that skepticism can be misused by some rando with no qualifications or even time spent researching telling you to be "skeptical" of people who have spent decades trying to figure shit out. What I really believe we should be teaching people is "what are the incentives?". That is, it's become very clear that many people are susceptible to provably false information, so we should train people to try to examine what incentives someone has for speaking out in the first place (and that includes scientists, too).

This is why I hate most conspiracy theories - even if you take everything the conspiracy supposes at face value, conspiracists don't explain how their conspiracy is somehow kept so secret when tons of people involved would have extremely strong incentives to expose it.

At the very least it was such an obvious connection that ruling it out should have been an early step; when the PRC clammed up, and stopped letting any data out that should have been seen as the attempt at a cover-up that it likely was.

Maybe it didn't come from the lab. Maybe it didn't come from China at all. But maybe we should have checked that? Maybe we should know if some senior coronavirus researchers at that lab got sick with weird illnesses in the later part of 2019? Maybe we should have confirmed their virus handling procedures were up to snuff, and that a lab leak was unlikely because they were such upstanding and responsible scientists?

The initial cases of covid 19 cluster around the wet market. The lab is in another part of the city.

If it were a lab leak then we’d expect the initial cases to cluster around the lab, and to show up in those who had contact with lab workers.

Nobody considered the lab as a source because the basic epidemiological evidence doesn’t support it.