This is the most 2021 thing I’ve ever tweeted, but: I feel like the people taking Steak-umm to task here for also being pedantic and wrong don’t adequately appreciate how much harm NDT’s bullshit does with regard to conspiratorialist thinking. https://twitter.com/numbersmuncher/status/1381804144344903682

“Science Is True” is the kind of framing that gives people a permission structure to abandon science when they decide it can’t explain something that’s important to them. Because if Science was True, wouldn’t science already know?

It’s easier to dismiss science when you have a cartoonishly simplified understanding of what it is and how it works and how knowledge is produced.

Will those people dismiss science anyway? I mean, probably, but why make it easier for them?

I don’t personally know any scientist who would say anything like “science is true”, at least not without a bunch of caveats and footnotes, and *there is a reason for that*. It’s not just that it’s a problematic statement, it’s that it’s a troubling one and they’re alarmed.

So no, we probably don’t need more meat companies playing science advocate on Twitter, but I think we need way less NDT also.