PDF Summary:Merchants of Doubt, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
Book Summary: Learn the key points in minutes.
Below is a preview of the Shortform book summary of Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Read the full comprehensive summary at Shortform.
1-Page PDF Summary of Merchants of Doubt
Merchants of doubt are people or organizations who discredit science that threatens their agenda or ideology. The first merchants of doubt were members of the tobacco industry—when scientists discovered that smoking caused cancer, that was bad for businesses. It was also bad for capitalism in general because it suggested that the market wasn’t self-regulating, and lack of regulation was killing people. Other defenders of the free market started using the tobacco industry’s techniques, such as funding new (and hopefully more favorable) studies or calling for balanced media coverage.
In Merchants of Doubt, science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway study the doubt-mongering techniques used in several other important “debates”—nuclear disarmament, acid rain, the ozone layer, climate change, and the pesticide DDT. These techniques are still in use today.
(continued)...
Technique #3: Fund Other Studies in the Hopes of Getting More Favorable Results
If MODs don’t like what mainstream science has discovered about a subject, they often spend large amounts of money funding research that might “debunk” mainstream science or show that uncertainty is greater than previously thought. Sometimes they funnel the money through front groups or think tanks to disguise that they’re the source of the funding.
For example, after scientists had determined that smoking caused cancer, the tobacco industry recruited Seitz to allocate $45 million worth of funding to scientists doing biomedical research on the leading causes of death in the U.S. The industry hoped for a discovery that would help them defend against the science that said smoking was unhealthy.
Technique #4: Create the Appearance of Debate in the Scientific Community
MODs recruit people with good credentials (including scientists) to challenge evidence and repeat non-consensus claims. They also put out publications that look like real scientific findings. This makes the public think that the scientific community as a whole is in debate.
Example #1: The tobacco industry recruited famous researcher Martin J. Cline to testify in its favor against a nonsmoking flight attendant who had gotten lung cancer from secondhand smoke in airline cabins.
Example #2: The CFC industry sent Richard Scorer, a professor of theoretical mechanics, on a tour of the U.S. to denounce a Climate Impact Assessment Program (CIAP) study. Scorer spread misinformation: Human activities were so small as to have a negligible effect on the atmosphere and the discussion of ozone destruction was fear-mongering.
Technique #5: Call for “Equal Time” and Balanced Media Coverage
MODs convince journalists that it’s only fair to present “both sides” of a story when there’s a dissent. Some journalists don’t understand that dissenters already received fair consideration during the peer review process and feel like both views really do deserve to be aired. Other journalists allow themselves to be schmoozed, and still others don’t have enough time before their deadlines to dig deep into the research.
In fact, “balanced” media coverage of science actually results in more-biased coverage because minority voices end up with proportionally more time than consensus ones.
Equal attention for all views only makes sense when applied to opinions. For example, two political parties might have differing views on an issue, so it makes sense to hear both. However, there is no opinion in science—it’s either right, wrong, or unknown.
For example, tobacco industry MODs threatened journalists with the Fairness Doctrine—an FCC rule in effect from 1949-1987 that TV journalists had to give equal airtime to both sides of controversial issues. As a result, journalists gave the same amount of coverage to the industry as the mainstream science finding that smoking kills.
Technique #6: Publish in Mainstream Media
Most scientific research is first published in scientific journals, which the average person doesn’t read. Therefore, if MODs can get their “facts” and views into mainstream media such as newspapers and magazines, those are the facts and views the public will see.
Example #1: When Fred Singer wanted to spread doubt about global warming, he published a piece in a popular magazine called Cosmos.
Example #2: In 1990, MOD Dixy Lee Ray published Trashing the Planet, a trade book easily available to the public and reviewed by mass media.
Technique #7: Deflect and Distract
MODs take public focus away from the real issue and direct it toward something else—often true or important, but irrelevant.
For example, when merchandising doubt about the ozone hole, Fred Singer argued that there are plenty of causes of skin cancer besides UV radiation (the hole allowed UV radiation through). This was true, but irrelevant to the point that UV radiation causes cancer.
Technique #8: Claim the Solution is Worse Than the Problem
MODs claim that the solutions to issues science has unveiled will create more problems than the original issue. Therefore, it’s better not to act.
- Example #1: After scientists announced that CFCs (chemicals used in refrigerators and aerosols) were destroying the ozone layer, MODs claimed that CFCs alternatives (which didn’t exist at the time) would be toxic, dangerous substances.
- Example #2: After scientists discovered that sulfur emissions were causing acid rain, MODs wrote that controlling acid rain would have huge economic consequences.
This technique is supported by rational decision-theory analysis—if there are unknowns, the best course of action is usually to do nothing because acting has costs, and if you’re not sure you’re going to get any benefits, they’re not worth it. (Additionally, the costs are usually in the present and the benefits in the future.) This is part of why doubt-mongering works so well.
Technique #9: Attack Other Scientists’ Reputations and Accuse Them of Having Political Motivations
If a scientist discovers something an MOD doesn’t like, the MOD will often personally attack the scientist.
Example #1: MODs accused Rachel Carson, who revealed that the use of DDT (a pesticide) was damaging the environment, of being “hysterical.”
Example #2: MODs accused Benjamin Santer, who helped prove that climate change was caused by humans, of secretly editing an International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report and corrupting the peer review process. MODs and fact-fighters wrote that Santer admitted he’d doctored a report to make it fit political policy (he didn’t), tried to stop Santer from publishing a defense of himself, tried to get him fired, and contributed to the break up of his marriage.
Technique #10: Attack Science
The final technique is to call science that doesn’t support your position bad or junk science. MODs might make claims that scientists massaged the numbers or rigged the experiment to further their agenda.
For example, MODs accused the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of doing bad science on secondhand smoke. They claimed the EPA wanted to regulate so badly that it manipulated the science to support regulation.
Protecting Yourself From Doubt-Mongering
You can’t do the science and original research yourself—you don’t have the expertise in every single field you might be interested in. Therefore, you have to rely on the information that other people provide.
When you encounter a piece of information, keep in mind the following:
1. The information tends to be legitimate when it comes from a reputable source like:
- Scientists who are experts in a relevant field, who regularly publish in peer-reviewed journals, and who are independently funded.
- Organizations who have been asked (for example, the National Academy of Sciences) or self-organize (International Panel on Climate Change) to investigate something.
Example #1: Benjamin Santer’s papers and presentations about climate change were legitimate because he was a climate modeler and part of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Example #2: Fred Seitz was a scientist, but he was a physicist, not a medical professional, and he was funded by think tanks and the tobacco industry. Therefore, his input on tobacco was more likely to be doubt-mongering than real science.
2. Dissent can be doubt-mongering when the attacker is:
- In disagreement with expert consensus
- A known contrarian who often plays the devil’s advocate
- Associated with a group with an agenda
- Emotional or displaying intense conviction
For example, MOD Steve Milloy regularly and dramatically attacked a variety of issues he didn’t agree with (among other things, he accused Rachel Carson of being a mass murderer). He worked with strongly pro-industry organizations.
Want to learn the rest of Merchants of Doubt in 21 minutes?
Unlock the full book summary of Merchants of Doubt by signing up for Shortform.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being 100% comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you don't spend your time wondering what the author's point is.
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
Here's a preview of the rest of Shortform's Merchants of Doubt PDF summary:
PDF Summary Introduction
...
Peer Review
How does expert consensus come about? The basic system has been in place since the 1600s. When scholars first became interested in learning new information (in medieval times, learning was about studying ancient texts and preserving what was already known), they realized that there had to be some sort of way to check new ideas for validity, or people could just make things up and be taken seriously. To prevent this, they built a system in which claims had to be backed up by evidence, and both the claim and evidence needed to pass the judgment of other scientists to be considered legitimate. If a claim failed the process, it was just a claim, not science.
Today, the process is called peer review, and no science is considered legitimate until it passes peer review. Typically, the process works like this:
Step #1: A scientist comes up with an idea, collects evidence to support it, writes a paper, and then submits it to a scientific journal for publication.
Step #2: The journal sends the paper to three other scientists to review. The reviewers aren’t paid—since everyone’s work has to be peer-reviewed to be considered science, someone else will...
PDF Summary Chapter 1: Sowing Doubt
...
This belief isn’t completely wrong—in many ways, modern life is better than medieval life, and there have been historical instances of governments oppressing their citizens with regulations. However, cornucopianism includes two potentially flawed assumptions:
- Technology is guaranteed to advance fast and well enough. Technology has advanced in the past, but things are different today. In the past, human-caused environmental problems were small and regional. Today, they’re global and have a time limit, and technology is not developing quickly enough to meet it.
- All advances were entirely generated by the free market. This claim originates from Milton Friedman—he wrote that no technological advances had ever been generated by centralized government—but that’s untrue. (It only wasn’t dismissed as nonsense because he was an influential economist.)
- For example, the communist Soviet Union was a technological powerhouse—it launched the first satellite, Sputnik, into space.
Individual Merchants of Doubt
Four notable merchants of doubt were involved in doubt-mongering multiple scientific questions from the 1960s-2000s. All of them media-savvy,...
PDF Summary Chapter 2: Tobacco
...
- Promoting the work of Wilhelm C. Hueper, with his permission. Hueper was chief of the Environmental Cancer Section for the National Cancer Institute (a reputable organization), and he had given a talk questioning how related tobacco and cancer were. (This might have been because he was often called as a witness in asbestos litigation, where sometimes, lawyers would try to blame the plaintiff’s cancer on smoking instead of asbestos. If there was no link between cancer and cigarettes, then asbestos would have to be the cause.)
- Asking previously settled questions. The industry asked journalists questions that scientists and the industry (but not the journalists) knew the answers to. Phrasing the facts as questions made them seem uncertain. For example, the industry asked: Why do more people get cancer in the city than in the country, even if the smoking rates in both regions were the same? (The answer is that other things cause cancer.)
- Establishing relationships with reputable organizations. By the early 1960s, the tobacco industry had connections to medical schools, public health, and doctors.
Further Scientific Exploration
**Scientists continued...
What Our Readers Say
This is the best summary of Merchants of Doubt I've ever read. I learned all the main points in just 20 minutes.
Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Chapter 3: Secondhand Smoke
...
The MOD's Response
The tobacco industry attacked both papers. They criticized the first because the offices were “smoky,” but scientists hadn’t measured exactly how much smoke the workers were exposed to. (This is a hard thing to measure because smoke quickly disperses in the air.)
To deal with the second paper, they hired consultants to disprove Hirayama. One consultant accused Hirayama of making a critical statistical error, and the Tobacco Institute advertised the critic’s work and got the press to cover it by calling for coverage of “both sides” again. (Industry internal memos acknowledged that Hirayama’s study was accurate, and he was an expert scientist.)
Policy and Public Action
The industry received their equal media coverage, but their tactics didn’t fool the scientific community, and medical professionals and anti-tobacco activists pushed for regulation of smoking in public. States started restricting public smoking, the Civil Aviation Board considering banning smoking on flights, and Congress considered advertising controls.
In 1986, **a Surgeon General’s report announced that secondhand smoke could cause health problems, including lung...
PDF Summary Chapter 4: Strategic Defense—Star Wars
...
The right-wing media also picked up on the discrepancy and cited the higher percentage to misleadingly imply that the Soviets were expanding their military and the U.S. was falling behind. (In reality, the Defense Intelligence’s number suggested that the Soviets were less efficient and weaker—they had to spend more money to get the same amount of weaponry.)
The combined pressure from all these detente (disarmament) opponents citing uncertainty prompted the CIA’s director, George H.W. Bush, to allow an “independent” analysis by panelists. All the panel members already thought the CIA had underestimated the Soviet threat, and as a result, they came to the following conclusions:
- The Soviets only supported detente because it would give them a chance to get ahead—if the U.S. stopped and they didn’t, they could reach superiority.
- The Soviet’s goal wasn’t mutual deterrence; it was to win, and they’d attack as soon as they thought they had enough firepower. (In 1995, CIA interviews found that the Soviet leaders had never thought they’d win, or even that it was possible to win a nuclear war.)
- The Soviets were building a new, sophisticated missile defense system....
PDF Summary Chapter 5: Nuclear Winter
...
Announcing the Nuclear Winter Hypothesis
The astrophysicists started work on a paper that would be known as TTAPS for the last names of its authors. Notably, the “S” was for Carl Sagan.
In 1982, organizations worried about the effects of nuclear war approached Carl Sagan and three other scientists about giving a conference. The TTAPS paper hadn’t been published yet, so the scientists agreed to hold a conference only if the paper passed peer review during a workshop, and only after it was reviewed by prominent biologists. (Typically, peer review is done individually, but workshop review didn’t violate any scientific protocols.)
Shortly after Star Wars was announced, the TTAPS did pass peer review and the biologists found it so compelling they wrote their own paper, so the conference was green-lighted.
Three days before the conference, Sagan published an article in Parade, a Sunday magazine with more than 10 million readers, that summarized the nuclear winter hypothesis and emphasized the worst-case scenario while not discussing the caveats in detail. He also published an article in Foreign Affairs around the same time as the conference. **He argued that...
PDF Summary Chapter 6: Acid Rain
...
- Merchants of doubt can more legitimately bring up uncertainty and lack of proof to delay regulation.
- Regulators need to keep reevaluating and updating policy as scientists discover more.
- It’s hard to put a number on the value of clean air and species conservation. It’s a lot easier to do the math on how expensive it is to reduce pollution. Usually, the more a policy will cost, the more certainty that’s required.
In this chapter, we’ll first look at the history of U.S. environmentalism. Then, we’ll look at how this foundation informed the acid rain “debate,” and in later chapters, other “debates.”
A History of U.S. Environmentalism
In the first two-thirds of the 19th century, environmentalism was “preservationist”—focused on preserving natural places. This kind of environmentalism was popular and bipartisan—many people valued outdoor recreation and aesthetics and felt that preserving the environment was moral. (For example, when the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives voted on the 1964 Wilderness Act, it passed by a landslide.) Some environmentalists were interested in science, but people didn’t need proof to see the value in nature.
During **Nixon’s...
PDF Summary Chapter 7: Ozone Hole
...
Nitrogen Oxides (NOX)
In March 1971, the Department of Transportation held a conference on stratospheric flight. One of the attendees, Harold Johnston, an atmospheric chemist, disagreed with the SCEP study’s conclusion that NOX wouldn’t significantly deplete ozone. Johnston handwrote a paper while at the conference that showed that NOX would have a huge effect—10-90% ozone depletion, depending on region. The higher-air-traffic regions, such as the North Atlantic, would see the greatest depletion.
None of the other scientists were very worried about NOX, but Johnston was so vehement they recommended doing more research on NOX at the end of the conference. No one knew how much NOX was currently in the atmosphere, so it was impossible to know if the SST emissions would be a drop in the bucket or a huge amount.
Johnston revised his handwritten paper and tried to publish it in Science. The peer reviewers rejected it because Johnston hadn’t cited an important paper on NOX and because his tone was biased—he wrote that an SST fleet would deplete ozone concentration by 50% and cause blindness. **Johnston went to work revising it, but an earlier draft leaked to...
Why are Shortform Summaries the Best?
We're the most efficient way to learn the most useful ideas from a book.
Cuts Out the Fluff
Ever feel a book rambles on, giving anecdotes that aren't useful? Often get frustrated by an author who doesn't get to the point?
We cut out the fluff, keeping only the most useful examples and ideas. We also re-organize books for clarity, putting the most important principles first, so you can learn faster.
Always Comprehensive
Other summaries give you just a highlight of some of the ideas in a book. We find these too vague to be satisfying.
At Shortform, we want to cover every point worth knowing in the book. Learn nuances, key examples, and critical details on how to apply the ideas.
3 Different Levels of Detail
You want different levels of detail at different times. That's why every book is summarized in three lengths:
1) Paragraph to get the gist
2) 1-page summary, to get the main takeaways
3) Full comprehensive summary and analysis, containing every useful point and example
PDF Summary Chapter 8: Climate Change
...
Lyndon Johnson read the report but had bigger problems (such as the Vietnam War) and didn’t do anything about it. The next president, Nixon, did consider atmospheric changes, but he was focused on the greenhouse gas effects of water (from supersonic transports (SSTs)), not CO2.
Drought and Famine
In the 1970s, there was drought in Asia and Africa that caused famine. The famines affected the whole world because the price of food increased globally. This brought some attention to the fragility of the global food supply, which would be affected by changes to weather patterns and global warming.
The Jasons Study
In 1977, the Department of Energy asked the Jasons, an independent, elite scientific group, to review the science on climate and CO2. The Jasons group:
- Confirmed that agriculture was vulnerable to climate change
- Used a model to determine that if atmospheric CO2 concentrations doubled from preindustrial levels, the earth’s average surface temperature would rise by 2.4 degrees Celsius. The poles would warm 10-12 degrees.
**Other scientists had already established all this, but the Jasons were highly regarded...
PDF Summary Chapter 9: DDT
...
DDT also had mixed results when it was used as part of the Global Malaria Eradication Campaign. From 1955-1969, the World Health Assembly and the U.S. sprayed indoor surfaces and walls with DDT and other pesticides. This spraying helped end malaria in Australia and Europe and reduced it in parts of Latin America and India, but wasn’t very effective in less developed areas.
Spraying failed for three reasons:
1. Spraying wasn’t the only factor that eliminated malaria. Health care, education, nutrition, and reducing mosquito breeding grounds were also important, and the less developed countries didn’t always have these supporting factors.
2. For spraying to work, the pesticide needed to remain on the walls, so people couldn’t wash them or refinish them. Many people didn’t understand or like this—it conflicted with other public health instructions and made their homes feel dirty.
3. As they had in Florida, mosquitoes were becoming resistant. Indoor spraying doesn’t produce resistance quickly because only a small percentage of the mosquito population (the ones that get into buildings) are exposed to DDT. However, in many of the regions that used indoor spraying,...
PDF Summary Chapter 10: Fighting Doubt
...
- The MODs reprised the same settled issues that we looked at in previous chapters. For example, the tobacco debate restarted around vaping in the U.S.
Additionally, today, it’s even easier for MODs to go public with their opinions, no matter how ludicrous or dangerous, because of the Internet. Anything on the Internet is sharable and permanent, and there aren’t gatekeepers on the Internet (for example, journals that will refuse to print an MOD’s letter).
Oreskes and Conway believe the world is in a bad place, and they see this book as a wake-up call. Scientists are often told not to be negative because they’ll depress people, which leads to them giving up rather than acting. Oreskes and Conway agree that negativity can be paralyzing, but reassurance that things aren’t so bad when they really are creates the same effect—inaction.
Protecting Yourself Against Doubt-Mongering
Doubt-mongering is still alive and well—so how do you avoid being taken in?
First, don’t count on scientists to set the record straight for you. Other than defending Ben Santer, the scientific community as a whole hasn’t done much to counter the MODs. This is likely for some of the...