Sometimes it is easy to see why a person, group or organisation holds a particular view, for they may have a particular motive or vested interest. For example, if a representative of the tobacco industry tells you that smoking is not really harmful and that the health risks are exaggerated, then you should rightly dismiss what they say. After all, they would say that, wouldn’t they? But all too often people mistakenly apply this same reasoning when they don’t need to. For example, if a climatologist says that Earth’s climate is changing rapidly and that we need to modify our lifestyles to prevent catastrophic consequences, a climate change denier will often counter with, “Well, of course they would say that.… They’re in the pay of ‘x’ ” (where ‘x’ could be an environmental group or green energy company, or just perceived liberal academia).
I am not denying that in certain cases this cynicism may be justified, for we can all think of examples of research that is funded for ideologically driven or profit-driven motives. And we must also be wary of so-called data dredging—also known as ‘p-hacking’—whereby analysis of data is misused deliberately in order to find something that can be presented as statistically significant, then only reporting those cherry-picked conclusions
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