[piyushpr134]

We also know that science doesn't do a very good job when it comes to long term effects on human beings. They took awfully long time to declare that smoking is bad, despite plenty of evidence. Same goes for alcohol. They have still not figured out fat, carbs, sugar etc.

I feel, science when it comes to directly observable and measurable systems works pretty well and is accurate. However, when same is applied to systems which are not lab controlled/controllable (like human diet) then it really hard to prove of disprove anything. We are better off believing things which are proven in practice than believe bigpharma funded studies which can be (and are) manipulated by fudging, manufacturing and/or simply twisting data.

[TeMPOraL]

I'd cut scientists some slack here. People often forget that almost all of the actually useful and used medicine is less than 100 years old; that almost all that goes into items of everyday life is less than 100 years old too. Cigarettes in the form we recognize today are less than 200 years old, and for most of the time since then 'till now, neither medicine nor biological sciences knew shit about anything, or had any useful equipment to measure anything.

The exponential progress of technology isn't just the Internet and rockets and GDP. It's all knowledge and all tools derived from it, many of which are necessary to make further scientific advances. Arguably, all that's useful has been invented or refined in the last 200 years, with the distribution leaning heavily towards the present.

So yeah, it took scientists a while to declare that smoking is bad. There were many reasons for it, but a major contributing factor was that they had neither good models nor good tools until very recently.

[Klinky]

Science is a method/study, not an isolated entity. Who is "they"? You mean "scientists"? Which ones? The ones paid off by Big Tobacco? Often the negative issues we face are ignored due to conflicts of interest, bias, and societies/economies valuing certain things (wealth of few) over other things (health of many). That is not the fault of "science".