From
Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. Trust Us,
We’re Experts! How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future.
The difference between the world of a
child and the world of an adult can largely be described in terms of control,
competence, and responsibility. When you were a child, you had little control
over decisions that affected you. You were expected to eat what you were given,
go to school at the assigned time, go to sleep at a designated bedtime, and so
forth. Adults made the decisions because it was assumed that you lacked the
capacity to decide for yourself. Even the decisions you did make were not necessarily
binding, and it was your parents, not you, who were responsible for the consequences of your mistakes.
As an adult, you are responsible for
all these decisions and more. The responsibilities of adults in fact extend
beyond their actual areas of competence, which explains a lot about the way the
world works. If you want to build an addition to your home, you hire a
contractor. To take care of your health, you hire a physician; for legal
matters, an attorney. You buy shoes from a company with expertise in
manufacturing footwear. In all of these situations, the fact that you yourself
lack expertise is not much of a problem, because you know what you want, and
the expert’s job is simply to fulfill your wishes. In the words of the
philosopher Georg Hegel, “We do not need to be
shoemakers to know if the shoes fit, and just as little have we any need to be
professional to acquire knowledge of matters of universal interest.”
With regard to decisions about public
issues, expertise in terms of skill, knowledge, or experience is often less important
than basic questions of values. Is abortion wrong? Is it moral to deny medical
care to a child whose parents have no health insurance? Should murderers be put
to death? Is it acceptable to perform medical experiments on human beings
without their consent? There are no scientific answers to these questions, or thousands more like them. They can only be
answered by asking ourselves what we believe and what we value. In addressing
these questions, finding knowledgeable experts is actually less important than
finding experts who share our values. This doesn’t mean that knowledge is unimportant.
Knowledge matters, whether you are deciding about abortion or hiring someone to
remodel your kitchen. But the contractors who remodel your kitchen don’t get to
tell you what color to paint the walls or whether you should have wood versus
linoleum floors. Their advice is limited to letting you know how much each
option will cost. In a democracy that s
the kind of deference we should expect from experts on public policy. And a
contractor who spends a lot of time studying ways to minimize your outrage is
probably not someone you really want to hire.
When hiring a
contractor, you can turn to a state licensing board or the Better Business
Bureau to see if someone has valid credentials and a reputation for doing
honest work There is no such system for accrediting
public policy experts. However, if someone makes claims of a scientific nature
you can ask what kind of education licensing and other credentials they possess
in the field for which they are claiming expertise. It is also worth asking how experts rank
among their peers, although you should bear in mind that every profession has
its blind spots and tends to circle the wagons against outside criticisms. To judge from the literature of the American
Medical Association, for example, you would think that malpractice lawsuits are
a bigger problem than actual medical malpractice. As a rule of thumb, you
should assume that specialists in any field are given to underestimating harm
for which their own profession is responsible.
Expertise is justifiably linked in the
public’s mind to talent, skill, education, and experience. There are also a
number of stereotypical attributes that are unjustifiably linked to expertise, and it is important to avoid
relying on them These stereotypes include age, wealth, maleness, whiteness,
self-confidence, credentials, specialization, and techno-elitism. When
evaluating a speaker’s message, it is worth asking yourself if you are giving
him extra points for having gray hair, a deep voice, an impressive- sounding
degree, and a distinguished-looking business suit.
Our society’s esteem for science
actually tends to encourage the very unscientific
notion that science is a source of infallible truths. In fact, all science
is uncertain to some degree. Nature is complex, and research is difficult. The
most that science can tell us about a given question is that there is a strong
probability that such-and-such an answer is true. To understand scientific
information, therefore, it helps to understand something about the statistical
techniques that scientists use to quantify uncertainty. One of the classic
journalistic textbooks on the subject is News
and Numbers: A Guide to Reporting Statistical Claims
and Controversies in Health and Other Fields, by the late Victor Cohn, a
former science editor at the
Scientists live with uncertainty by
measuring probability. An accepted numerical expression is the P value, a statistical calculation of
the probability that a given result could have occurred just by chance. A P value of .05 or Iess
— the conventionally accepted cutoff for “statistical significance” — means
there are probably only five or fewer chances in 100 that a result reported in
a scientific study could have happened by chance alone. When studying health risks, statistical
significance is often impossible to achieve. If something kills one in 1,000
people, you would actually have to study several thousand people in order to
achieve a P value of .05 or less, and
even then the possibility of other confounding factors might call your result
into question. “A condition that affects one person in hundreds of thousands
may never be recognized or associated with a particular cause,” Cohn says. “It
is probable and perhaps inevitable that a large yet scattered number of
environmentally or industrially caused illnesses remain forever undetected as
environmental illnesses, because they remain only a fraction of the vastly
greater normal case load.”6
If you find any of these concepts
difficult to grasp, you can take comfort in the fact that you are not
alone. “Every major study of statistical
presentations in the medical literature has found very high error rates, even
among the best journals,” says Thomas Lang, medical editing manager at the
Cleveland Clinic Foundation and coauthor of How
to Report Statistics in Medicine: Annotated Guidelines for Authors, Editors,
and Reviewers. “Many of those errors
were serious enough to call the authors’ findings into question.”
There are some specific guidelines to
consider when evaluating scientific information. Cohn recommends that when
someone tells you they’ve done a study you should ask, “What kind? How
confident can you be in the results?
Were there any possible flaws in the study?” The last question is
particularly important he says because the answer may tell you whether you are
dealing with an honest investigator or a salesperson who is trying to convince
you of a particular point of view. “An
honest researcher will almost always report flaws," Cohn says. “A
dishonest one may claim perfection.”
Other questions to ask include:
§
What kind of study protocol was used? Is enough information
offered to satisfy you that the research method is sound in its design and
that its conclusions are reliable?
§
Why was the study performed?
§
What is the study’s statistical significance and margin for
error?
§
Was it submitted to independent peer review? Has it been published
in a reputable scientific journal? (Bear in mind, however, that authors can pay
to have scientific findings published even in some peer-reviewed journals.)
§
Are the results consistent with the results from other
studies performed by other researchers?
§
Is there a consensus among people in the same field?
§
Who disagrees with you, and why?
Asking some of these questions may seem
daunting. Scientific studies are laden with jargon of the trade that makes it
difficult for outsiders to understand—words like “chi-square,” “allele,”
“epizootic,” and so forth. Don’t let the language put you off. Often you can
find a friendly scientist at your local university who is willing to translate
things into plain English. University scientists are trained and paid to be
educators, and many of them are happy to assist an intelligent, motivated
person with questions. Above all, don’t be afraid to ask, and don’t let the
incomprehensible stuff intimidate you. If someone wants you to believe
something, the burden of proof should be on them to explain it to you in
language that you can understand. If
something is too complicated to explain, maybe it’s also too complicated to be
safe.
Given the uncertainties inherent to
science (and to all human endeavors), we are strong believers in the importance
of the precautionary principle, which we discussed in Chapter 6. Throughout
this book, we have also stressed the importance of democracy in making
decisions about technology and its impact upon people’s lives. The reason that
democracy matters in science and scientifically influenced policy is precisely
that uncertainty exists and that different people reach different conclusions
about important issues. Debate and compromise are the processes through which
people resolve these differences. When a new technology is introduced, such as
nuclear power or genetic engineering, some people will focus entirely on the
potential benefits of the new technology while ignoring the dangers. Others will focus on the dangers and ignore
the potential benefits, while other people fill in the continuum of opinion between
these two poles. In an ideal
decision-making process, the interplay of debate over differing views will hold
the “reckless innovators” in check but enable beneficial innovations to move
forward after the concerns of the “fearmongers” have
been thoroughly vetted in scientific and public forums. This process may slow
the pace of introduction of new technologies, which indeed is part of the point
to having a democratic decision-making process.
By training and enculturation, most
experts in the employ of government and industry are technophiles, skilled and
enthusiastic about the deployrnent of technologies
that possess increasingly awesome power. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, they
are enchanted with the possibilities of this power, but often lack the wisdom
necessary to perceive its dangers. It was a government expert, Atomic Energy
Commission chairman Lewis L. Strauss, who promised the National Association of
Science Writers in 1954 that atomic energy would bring “electrical energy too
cheap to meter” within the space of a single generation.7 Turn to the back issues of Popular Science magazine, and you will
find other prophecies so bold, so optimistic, and so wrong that you would be
better off turning for insight to the Psychic Friends Network. If these prophecies had been correct, we
should by now be jet-packing to work, living in bubble-domed cities beneath the
ocean, colonizing the moon and Mars. The cure to cancer, like prosperity, is
always said to be just around the corner, yet somehow we never actually turn that corner. Predictions regarding
computers are notorious for their rhetorical excess. “In from three to five years, we will have a
machine with the general intelligence of an average human being,” MIT computer
scientist Marvin Minsky predicted in 1970. “I mean a machine that will be able to read
Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight. At that point, the machine will begin to
educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months, it will be at a genius
level, and a few months after that, its power will be incalculable.”8 Expert
predictions of this sort have been appearing regularly ever since, although the
day when computers will be able to grease your car (let alone read Shakespeare)
keeps getting pushed back.
The views of these techno-optimists
deserve to be part of the decision making process but they should not be
allowed to crowd out the views and concerns of the skeptics — the people who
are likely to experience the harmful effects of new technologies and who
deserve to play a role in deciding when and how they should be introduced. Just
as war is too important to leave to the generals, science and technology are
too important to leave in the hands of the experts.
Opponents of the precautionary
principle have caricatured it as a rule that “demands precautionary action even
in the absence of evidence that a health or environmental hazard exists” and says
“if we don’t know something we mustn’t wait for studies to give answers.” This is not at all its intent. It is a guide for policy decisions in cases
where knowledge is incomplete regarding risks that are serious or irreversible
and that are unproven but plausible in the light of existing scientific
knowledge. No one is suggesting that the precautionary principle should be
invoked regarding purely fanciful risks. There are legitimate debates over
whether a risk is plausible enough to warrant the precautionary principle.
There are also reasonable debates over how
to implement the precautionary principle. However, groups that seek to
discredit the principle itself as “unscientific” are engaged in propaganda, not
science.
When you hire a contractor or an
attorney, they work for you because you are the one who pays for their
services. The PR experts who work behind the scenes and the visible experts who
appear on the public stage to “educate” you about various issues are not
working for you. They answer to a client whose interests and values may even
run contrary to your own. Experts don’t appear out of nowhere. They work for
someone, and if they are trying to influence the outcome of issues that affect
you, then you deserve to know who is paying their bills.
Not everyone agrees with this position.
Jeff Stier is the associate director of the American
Council on Science and Health (ACSH), which we described in Chapter 9. Stier goes so far
as to claim that “today’s conventional wisdom in favor of disclosing corporate
funding of research is a ‘new McCarthyism.’“
Standards of public disclosure, he says, should mirror the standards
followed in a court of law, where “evidence is admissible only if the
probative value of that evidence exceeds its prejudicial effect.” To disclose funding, he says, can have a
“prejudicial effect” if it “unfairly taints studies that are scientifically
solid.” Rather than judging a study by
its funding source, he says, you should simply ask whether its “hypothesis,
methodology and conclusion” measure up to “rigorous scientific standards.”9 When we
asked him for a list of ACSH’s corporate and
foundation donors, he used these arguments to justify his refusal. With all due respect, we think Stier’s argument is an excuse to avoid scrutiny. Even in a court of law, expert witnesses are
required to disclose what they are being paid for their testimony.
Some people, including the editors of
leading scientific journals, raise more subtle questions about funding disclosure. The problem, they say, is
knowing where to draw the line. If someone received a small grant 20
years ago from a pharmaceutical company to study a specific drug, should they
have to disclose that fact whenever they comment about an entirely different
drug manufactured by the same company? And what about nonfinancial factors
that create bias? Nonprofit
organizations also gain something by publishing their concerns. They may have
an ideological ax to grind, and publicity may even bring indirect financial
benefits by helping attract new members and contributions. Elizabeth Whelan of ACSH made these points
during a letter exchange with Ned Groth of the
Consumers Union. “You seem to believe
that while commercial agendas are suspect, ideological agendas are not,” Whelan
complained. “This is a purely specious distinction. ... A foundation’s pursuit
of an ideological agenda — perhaps one characterized by a desire for social
change, redistribution of income, expanded regulatory control over the private sector,
and general promotion of a coercive utopia—
must be viewed with at least as much skepticism and suspicion as a
corporation’s pursuit of legitimate commercial interests.”10
There is a certain amount of truth to
Whelan’s line of reasoning. Nevertheless, corporate funding is particularly
important to track, for the following reasons:
§
Corporations are consistently driven by a clear and
self-evident bias — namely, the desire to maximize profits, whereas assessing
“ideological bias” in nonprofit foundations is itself subjective and
ideological.
§
Even if money doesn’t always create bias, it is a leading indicator
of bias. Some nonprofit groups receive their money from the public at large
or from a broad sector of the public. Consumers
§
The money that corporations pour into influencing public
policy is huge compared to the expenditures of nonprofit organizations. In
1998, for example, environmental organizations spent a total of $4.7 million on
lobbying Congress. The sum total for all single-issue ideological groups
combined — pro-choice advocates, anti-abortionists, human rights groups,
feminists, consumer organizations, senior citizens, and a variety of other groups
— was $76.2 million. By contrast, the agribusiness industry alone spent $119.3
million, and the lobbying expenditures of all industries combined added up to
$1.2 billion. These numbers are just
lobbying money and do not include campaign contributions, “soft money” or any
of the other ways that corporations buy political influence. Of course, no one
is truly immune from ideological bias As a practical matter, however, the
biases you need to worry about the most are the biases held by people who have the
money and power to influence government policies that affect your life.11
The simplest way to find out who is
funding an organization is simply to ask. Request an annual report or list of
institutional donors. Don’t just ask who is
paying the bills. Ask how much money is
involved. Spin doctors have mastered the art of the “nondenial
denial.” Remember the strategy that
Philip Morris used to conceal its role as the creator and primary founder of
The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition: “We will not deny being a corporate
member/sponsor, will not specify dollars, and will refer them to the TASSC
‘800’ number.”12
The strategy of admitting to being a sponsor while refusing to
specify dollar amounts was designed to deflect questions while avoiding outright
lies that could embarrass the company if its funding role was later exposed.
Even if an organization itself doesn’t
disclose its funding, sometimes the information is available from other
sources. Examine the interests and affiliations of the organization’s board of
directors. If the organization refuses
to make any of this information publicly available or hedges its answers, that
in itself is cause for suspicion.
In addition to examining someone’s
funding sources, you can also learn a lot about them by asking what positions
they have taken in the past on specific issues. Pay attention to nuances.
Industry front groups like to portray themselves as moderate and representing
the “middle ground.” Watch for words
like “sensible,” “responsible,” and “sound” in organization names. Just as the true mission of The Advancement
of Sound Science Coalition was to stigmatize science that inconvenienced its
sponsors, a group called “Citizens for Sound Environmental Policy” is likely to
be in the business of trying to discredit genuine environmentalists Industry-sponsored organizations
frequently adopt misleading names.
Examples have included the Foundation for Clean Air Progress, the
National Environmental Policy Institute, the National Wilderness Institute,
the Science and Environmental Policy Project, the Council for Solid Waste
Solutions, Citizens for Sensible Control of Acid Rain, and the
Funded by big business and major
foundations, think tanks devise and promote policies that shape the lives of
everyday Americans. Social
Security privatization, tax and investment laws, regulation of everything from
oil to the Internet. They supply
experts to testify on Capitol Hill, write articles for the op-ed pages of
newspapers, and appear as TV commentators.
They advise presidential aspirants and lead orientation seminars to
train incoming members of Congress.
Think tanks have a decided political
leaning. There are twice as many conservative think tanks as liberal ones, and
the conservative ones generally have more money. This is no accident, as one of the important
functions of think tanks is to provide a backdoor way for wealthy business
interests to promote their ideas.
“Modern think tanks are nonprofit, tax-exempt, political idea factories
where donations can be as big as the donor’s checkbook and are seldom
publicized,” notes Tom Brazaitis, writing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “Technology companies give to think tanks
that promote open access to the internet.
Wall Street firms donate to think tanks that espouse private investment
of retirement funds.” So much money now
flows in, that the top 20 conservative think tanks now spend more money than
all of the “soft money” contributions to the Republican party.15
A think tank’s resident experts carry
titles such as “senior fellow” or “adjunct scholar,” but this does not
necessarily mean that they even possess an academic degree in their area of
claimed expertise. Elsewhere in this book we have criticized the ways that
outside funding can corrupt the integrity of academic institutions The same corrupting influences affect think
tanks, only more so. Think tanks are like universities minus the students and
minus the systems of peer review and other mechanisms that academia uses to
promote diversity of thought. Real
academics are expected to conduct their research first and draw their
conclusions second, but this process is reversed at most policy-driven think
tanks. As economist Jonathan Rowe has
observed the term “think” tanks is a misnomer.
His comment was directed at the conservative Heritage Foundation, but it
applies equally well to many other think tanks,
regardless of ideology: “They don’t think; they justify.”
One of the reasons that life in the
information age has become such a welter of conflicting claims is that
journalists have failed to live up to their responsibilities. Reporters are
supposed to be one rung up from the average citizen on the information ladder,
and they have a responsibility to verify the credentials and reliability of
their sources. When they allow their reportage to be leavened with propaganda,
they cheapen and degrade their product just as surely as a baker who adds
sawdust to his flour. If you see a news story that fails to identify the
background, credentials, and potential bias or conflicts of interest of a
cited authority, complain. Send a letter, make a phone call.
The scientific press is expected to
meet a higher standard of accountability than the general press. When it fails to meet this standard, the harm
is multiplied, because general news reporters often repeat information that
appears in scientific journals, using even less fact-checking than they would
apply to information from other sources.
In December 1999, for example, the British
Medical Journal published a “study” claiming that shaken (not stirred)
martinis have beneficial anti-oxidant properties The
so-called study was part of the BMJ’S annual
joke issue. It accompanied other
similarly humorous papers examining the effects of “too much sax” on jazz
musicians, the frequency of swearing by surgeons, and the question of whether
young women named
Not only does the media fail to
adequately investigate the information it reports, often it fails even to
disclose information that is readily available. Take, for example, the
thousands of video news releases (VNRs) that are
incorporated into television news broadcasts.
TV news directors certainly know who supplies their VNRs,
and it would be very easy to place small subtitles at the bottom of the screen
stating where they came from — for example, “Footage supplied by Pfizer
Pharmaceutical.” This is almost never done, mainly because the stations
themselves realize that it would be embarrassing if people found out how much
of their so-called news is actually canned material supplied by PR firms. It
can only be hoped that as the public becomes better educated about the use of VNRs and other public relations tactics, pressure will be
brought to bear upon the media to reform itself.