[acdha]

> The objective truth in the 70s was, "smoking is good for you". Since then, the narrative changed.

Your misunderstanding of the history doesn’t mean it was ever good for you. People didn’t call cigarettes “coffin nails” because they thought it was good for you and e.g. the specific lung cancer link was known at least as far back as the 1920s. The reason why it wasn’t named earlier is the same reason you’re wrong about it today: it was an enormously profitable industry and they were able to produce the ads you’re remembering which got far more attention than those pesky scientists who had been correct for half a century by that time – and many smokers blamed people for not telling them earlier, even though they had downplayed the warnings given at the time. A very similar story unfolded with climate change where people like to say that it was confused or contradictory for a long time when it was settled by the late 1970s because they didn’t want to admit having given equal weight to the fossil fuel lobbyists as they did climate scientists.

That’s the key distinction here: we have processes for verifying and testing theories. Yes, scientific research has had fraud but we know about those because their work has been critically examined. We should expect that everywhere rather than giving up on the concept.