Doubt Is Our Product

"Doubt is our product" is a line taken from the millions of pages of leaked and published internal documents from the tobacco industry. When their product was proven to be unhealthy, to put it mildly, they started a campaign that was so successful, it has been used over and over again by many other industries.

Up until the 1950s tobacco products enjoyed the image of a harmless stimulant. This changed after it was discovered that it increased the chances of contracting lung cancer. In fact, it put the tobacco industry in a tough spot, compelling them to take action in order to prevent sales figures to plunge. Since the truth about tobacco's cancer-inducing characteristics couldn't be disputed outright, it was backed by scientific evidence after all, they had to find another method than simply denying the scientific data. So instead of saying that the science was wrong, they started casting doubt, and said that we can't know for sure that smoking tobacco is the cause for lung cancer. The leaders of all the major cigarette producers, collectively known as "Big Tobacco," got together in New York city and decided to fund a wide variety of scientific research with the goal of finding other possible causes for lung cancer.

This was a brilliant strategy, one that amounted to using science against established science. You see, science, even established science, is never truly "settled," and "doubt" is one of its main driving forces. This is why the highest degree of certainty achievable in science, is that of a "theory." When "Young Earth Creationists" use the fact that "evolution is nothing more than a theory" as evidence that their theory is just as valid, they only show how poorly they understand the scientific method; everything is a theory in science and everything is open to change in the face of new evidence. In this age, the use of doubt has become common practice among those who benefit from arguing against scientific consensus. And powerful industries will spare no expense in funding scientific research with the sole aim to cast doubt over scientific consensus. We've seen this happen countless times now; acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, anthropogenic climate change, and most recently the origin of and the fight against a deadly virus, have all been subject to bad actors using science against itself.

The complete quote from the leaked internal documents from "Big Tobacco," as portrayed in the below linked video, goes like this: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy." All of this puts us in a tough spot, because it is always good to question existing explanations, it's good to doubt, to be curious and to wonder if there might be an alternative explanation, cause or reason. All we, as non-scientists, can do is be careful in selecting the sources we trust, and keep in mind that "established science" or scientific consensus needs extremely compelling counter-evidence to be discarded; extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. So it's simply not enough to discard the word of science in favor of the word of some random vlogger, especially if he or she is QAnonimous...

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