Merchants of Doubt Ch. 5-Epilogue

Merchants of Doubt continues to be a fascinating, if not soul-crushing, story of how a few scientists, aided by well-meaning journalists, engender doubt in the public mind about environmental and human-health related catastrophes. This week’s readings were a bit easier for me to digest compared to last week because of the pace of the writing. The authors inched away, ever so slightly, from the laundry lists of committees, people, and he-said, she-said accusations and had a stronger focus on the actions of events, which was aided by the inclusion of more emotions.

The authors added just a sprinkling of human emotions through the use of humor and frustration. The humor, at times, came coated in very nerdy references with which only a small portion of readers might connect. For example, “…type 2 errors aren’t really errors at all, just missed opportunities.” (p 157).  This humor might connect more strongly with a comprehensive exam question than as a joke for a broad audience. I can see students sweating as their committee asks them to explain, given this excerpt 1) the validity of the claim that type 2 errors are missed opportunities and 2) how the probability of the missed opportunity might change with varying levels of alpha. Although experimental biologists might have felt like the authors were giving them a secret high-five with this aside, this line would not connect with most of the general population. Potentially adding more comic relief would help connect with the audience.  

The authors do connect with the audience in a more direct way when their show of emotions comes in the form of anger. When describing the unethical steps the “Cold Warriors” took to discredit science by “…attacking science in the name of freedom” (p 166), the authors reference an unattributed quote of an unnamed epidemiologist criticizing the work of the EPA as “rotten science” (p 166). The authors react in what I could only assume was outright indignation, “Did any one actually say that? Maybe yes, maybe no—there’s way to tell, because it was given without attribution. It’s not the sort of thing scientists typically say, but even if it were true, so what? It would just be the opinion of one man—and hardly evidence of a conspiracy to undermine the free market.” (p 166).

This reaction by the authors in all likelihood mirrors what the readers are feeling. The realization that these men are making conscious, immoral decisions to promote distrust in science is appalling. Both reader and author can throw their hands up in shared frustration that the unethical actions of a small group have permeated so many modern human-health and environmental crisis. This type of response in which authors place themselves within the story by communicating their thoughts and feelings about the given circumstances, does so much to improve the readability of the text. This type of author involvement in the prose was much more common in Elizabeth Kolbert’s writing. Without much use of this technique in the current book, we can observe the power of this technique when it is excluded.