Daniel Akst's article in The American,
Science and the Chattering Classes, falls into that commonplace journalistic sin, handwringing over the stupidity of the masses without offering anything but a pablum response to a given problem.
The problem is scientific illiteracy. Akst writes, With its great stress on specialization, capitalism has eroded
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Take OTC drug cocktails. We have one cocktail for menstrual pain that's caffeine and acetaminophen. We have another cocktail for headaches that's caffeine and acetaminophen AT THE SAME AMOUNTS. And then we have caffeine pills, generic acetaminophen and a pill splitter for the same cost as the name brands. If people actually understood what was behind the first two products, they wouldn't buy either one.
Pharma companies *REALLY* don't want the public to know "It just has to be statistically better than a placebo," not "Well, it wasn't quite as effective as the drug the patent just expired on."
Electronics. Take something like digital cameras. The number they advertise, megapixels. What they don't want consumers to know is more megapixels for a given sensor size == more noise in the image.
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