[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.