[dontbenebby]

>Are you saying that all these people are fraudulent / incompetent

This sound vaguely like an appeal to authority - or perhaps I'm not using the correct phrasing, but the underlying logic of "X number of scientists can't be wrong" isn't a good look. While I hate when people say things like "evolution is just a theory", it's not a good idea to use # of scientists who hold a view as a proxy for if it's valid if the idea is much less tested than things like evolution or climate change.

[mochomocha]

Well the original claim was extremely grand. I was trying to bring some nuance to the typical HN comment on ads which usually goes along the lines of "oh I saw a terrible ad yesterday, Google is so dumb and evil and ads don't work based on my own anecdote".

What I'm saying is that maybe it's not unreasonable to believe that some of the most successful tech companies of these last decades didn't completely build their empires on sand and that maybe what they sell is not 100% BS.