Why do you assume that the financial incentive is for the truth rather than for the conspiracy theory?
But do you not see how this will result in conspiracy theories? You are no longer engaging with the merits of a study and are instead questioning the motivations and source behind that study. You are shifting from a more objective argument to a more subjective one allow more room for conspiracy theories.
>Collusion is very real when billions of dollars are on the line and it is naive to assume otherwise.
Yes, which is why "do your own research" is often misleading because those billions of dollars have greatly impacted what research is available to you.
It’s fundamentally an epistemological question: what is the ontological basis for thinking we know something?
Once again this is thinking that doesn't go beyond the first layer. If this situation is possible for the first link, it is possible for the second and the third and everything on the first 5 pages. However deep this hypothetical researcher is willing to go, if there are enough billions at stake the manipulator can keep pumping out misinformation. They have a financial incentive to lie and no one has a strong financial incentive for truth so how does this researcher find the needle of truth in the haystack of lies?
This is basically "fact checking". In theory it's good, but it inevitably degrades into a farce with stuff like [1] or [2].
If however fact checkers were a pain in the butt for mainstream media and politicians as well they would be much easier to listen to.
Skepticism of any claims is a pretty good heuristic, but should be equally applied to counter claims.
Everyone would agree that a person wandering around the street firing live rounds into targets is acting in a dangerous manner.
No-one would agree that a person drinking a cup of tea in their own house is acting in a dangerous manner.
But coronavirus isn't one of those things. It's genuinely a borderline issue, and not because of the science, but because it's almost exactly on the line in which some people consider it to be a disaster and others consider it to be a bit of a nothing burger.
As a result, you end up in a situation as described by rgrieselhuber below.
Some people think that we need to close (e.g.) schools to stop coronavirus. Other people think that we need to stop caring so much about coronavirus, so that we can go to (e.g.) school.
The question of whether there's misinformation is almost tangential to the point because there are huge numbers of people who do not doubt official statistics or modelling but also believe that data or those models are not severe enough to require us to 'stop the world' so to speak.
I guess my thoughts are that, if we can't even convince each other (and from what I can tell neither of us have really fallen for misinformation), what hope is there for the actual 'vaccines cause 5g' nutjobs?
What does this have to do with the price of fish?
Moreover, it's not just about the media's coverage of COVID or the moon landing, but about their overall credibility during the prior decade. For example, the media has reliably and brazenly lied and mislead on racial justice protests from ~2014 through 2020, which almost certainly affects its credibility on other issues (e.g., covid). Of course, the same applies to the academy and other institutions.
Unfortunately "bad science" cuts both ways when it comes to miscommunication.
Do you think 'scientific research' is in a great position from a funding perspective right now?
Have you looked at the press or out the window as to how "science" is portrayed due to covid? The lack of sanity in both political directions is alarming and depressing all at the same. Both sides of the public on this are both, equally, damagingly, wrong. However, they pick up and throw around scientific papers as though it gives them the right to be the next pope...
If science is paraded around like nonsense in the press there's a matter of time until we end up with politicians who make the decisions sit there and say "I don't see any public benefit in researching this".
That day will only come sooner if things carry on as we head into a recession.
Edit: My proposal to fix, as I've suggested elsewhere, keep scientific papers behind some (non-for-profit) walled access, obviously that has damaging impacts when you say X from country Y can't read paper on Z, but frankly maybe the public isn't grown up enough for completely open discourse when they can't understand the material.
I’m not sure that has anything to do with “science”.
I think the problem could be "science communication", not bad communication or anything like that, but the existence of it in general. There's a casual interest in scientific stuff in the public, there's an entertainment market for it, and so now we have a scenario where people that publish research have to weigh this impact when publishing, including it's benefits. But most people interested are only casually interested (and most vendors of the entertainment have incentives not necessarily aligned with presenting fact, but that's not my point, only a secondary problem). I think it's possible that it might be better if, when someone was interested in something, they had to dig it up online. If we get rid of the whole "science communication" thing, truthful or not you get rid of all these problems.
I know it's impossible to do that, but it's interesting to consider that the problem isn't bad communication, but this drive to communicate everything all the time skewing the incentives and public perception.