I appreciate your opinion and agree that general discussion and decent is good for science but will try and make up an anecdote to illustrate why I don’t think that applies here:

Let’s say your wife is smoker and has a family risk of lung cancer and as a concerned husband you go to your doctor and ask what your wife can best do to keep from getting cancer and he tells you smoking drastically increases the likelihood of getting it and the best way to keep from getting it and dying prematurely is to quit smoking.

Realizing that you have no idea why inhaling cigarette smoke, containing chemicals that you’re unfamiliar with: i.e. benzopyrene, nitrosamines, aldehydes, carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, etc, could lead to abnormal cell growth and that it’s a probably a fairly complex problem you decide to go talk to a bunch of doctors, but not just any doctors, doctors who have years of education, have spent countless hours studying the mechanisms carcinogens take to lead to out-of-control cell growth, have a firm grasp of statistics and have run countless studies determining (or discounting) the causal link between cigarette smoke and cancer. You then go to thirty-three different doctors before you find a single doctor who doesn’t tell you you the same thing: that they think the data and studies indicate smoking undeniably causes cancer.

After going to these thirty-three doctors you go by your family lawyer, who basically hasn’t spent any time whatsoever doing anything scientific, and tell him what the thirty-three doctors told you about your wife smoking and her chances of getting cancer and he says “I don’t think smoking causes cancer” and “I have a ton of friends that smoke and haven’t gotten cancer.”

How much credibility should you give this lawyer? Would the general medical community would be “unscientific” for not paying attention to the lawyer? Should documentaries put the lawyers word against any of the doctors as an opposing point? Should there be public debates that give the lawyer equal time? Should the general public listen to the lawyer to decide if they should smoke? Fuck no.

Don’t get me wrong, people shouldn’t automatically discount that one-in-thirty-three doctor that didn’t think smoking caused cancer. He (hopefully) used the scientific process, studied the subject and the minority opinion can end up being important. Though even his finding should be viewed with scepticism and doesn’t need equal representation in the face of such enormous expert opposition. I also sure as hell think it’s okay to ignore the lawyer and I even think it’s okay to view him as an idiot for giving medical advice with zero training that opposes so many experts.

Damn this post ended up being a novel.