[jzebedee]

Even that stunt might not be enough for a sufficiently evil shill, e.g. Thomas Midgley Jr. He famously did a similar move at a press conference for tetraethyllead (TEL), where he washed his hands in the stuff to prove its safety:

> On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL, in which he poured TEL over his hands, placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose, and inhaled its vapor for 60 seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#cite_ref-Se...

It probably won't shock you that he frequently suffered from lead poisoning.

[Frost1x]

The trick to this stunt is to, as usual, hide behind complexity. While this sort of stunt may be telling in some cases where a single or handful of exposures lead to health problems, there's an increasing amount of investment in things that may or may not be so obvious, where an exposure or handful of exposures are unlikely to have a huge effect.

In that context you only give the shills more sway. We could take the golden public health case of something like cigarettes. The evidence these days is pretty rock solid and irrefutable but if you didn't have that information because said thing is new, you could consume it right in public with almost no side effects. While it's not advisable, you could smoke a pack of cigarettes over a year in such demo's and have little side effects/risk overall. Heck, if you're smart about it you only puff a few puffs each time to demonstrate to make the exposure even less.

So while these sort of safety demos can be valuable and shine a light on truth, risk, and just how far someone may go to sell something and reap the benefits, you have to make sure the context like dosage, exposure, whatever else is relevant match.

We've been living in a highly reductionist scientific world for awhile and in a lot of cases reductionism is fantastic, if we can generalize and peel away a bunch of context that's great, but we have to remember we can't always do that and these demos appeal to that sort of overly reductionist mindset. It makes it very hard to tell someone not educated about real risk that may exist to take something like a short exposure demo as ironclad proof that something is low-to-no risk and it'll be difficult to ever show that person otherwise.

[siftrics]

> In that context you only give the shills more sway.

This is a really good point that I overlooked.

I'm in an industry where sophisticated participants can see the blatant scams, but laypeople have no chance at spotting them. Your claim makes a lot of sense.

[ars]

Why you call him an evil shill? It sounds like he actually believed it.

It's not evil to be wrong.

[j-bos]

There was evidence of the negative health effects from his own research.

[flagrant_taco]

I'm not sure how that line could be drawn. If a person does something that most would consider evil, but does it for reasons they honestly believed in which side is right?

Some of the Nazis may have honestly believed that Jewish people were the cause of Germany's economic problems, but I don't think many would claim they were anything less than evil.

[6510]

The line isn't drawn at the quality of their indoctrination or the evil doers world view. We judge by our own indoctrination and world view.

We for example don't do trial by ethnicity. We don't give a rats ass if the people who caused the German economic problems were Jewish.

[flagrant_taco]

I think you're agreeing with me, if I'm understanding you right.

> Why you call him an evil shill? It sounds like he actually believed it.

> It's not evil to be wrong.

I was responding to this and making the point that we don't often allow it to be this simple. I raised the Germany example to make the point that most consider what the Nazis did evil regardless of whether they honestly believed in their reasoning that lead to genocide.