Not really, scientists for example also have their whole careers based on the truth of some theories that they use. However, they're willing to put them to proof in different ways. The reason they do so is that they have a high degree of confidence that these theories are true. This cannot be said of people doing advertisement.
The reproduction crisis in sciences suggest the self- interest is pretty wide spread.
And the social stigma in science of being someone who tries to take down, discredit, or disprove your colleagues/superiors/ competitors theories is pretty substantial: IME there has historically almost been a taboo against attacking our speaking negatively about publications and your own sciences + faculties practices.
The saying of sciences advancing one funeral at a time doesn't exist because they're all such great skeptics and falsifiers, and current scientific practice is heavily biased towards positive findings and contains general publication biases.
indeed there's actually a LOT of common ground with advertising self-interest, since a lot of publication in science is effectively just advertising your brand...
I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to say. Scientists’ whole careers are based on running hypotheses to prove or disprove their theories. That IS their career.
And disproving a theory with lots of research backing it would be great. Imagine if someone found a huge hole in general relativity. There would be a boom in the grant writing industry.
This is a dangerous misconception to be spreading. It is not at all related to your other claims, namely:
> Sampling can skew results. Scientists are people too. We all have flaws.
These are of course correct statements. But they do not influence truth. They may well influence people's understanding of what the truth is, but that's different.
If you really believe truth is relative, walk to the grocery store tomorrow without wearing clothes and convince yourself that it will be fine. Or run a lighter under your hand - maybe it won’t burn today? Of course you wouldn’t to those things though because, at the end of the day, we rely on truth for everything we do. We just don’t always know what it is. Relativism is not the same as “it’s hard to figure out because it’s so complex”
Are you implying that the probability of someone going to a store named and getting out of it without harm is zero? There’s plenty of photographic and video evidence of the contrary. Probably not the best example.
Same for a lighter, there are many factors involved, and playing with lighters that way was a party trick where I grew up.
We use truth as a concept every day as an approximation, but the universe is not bound to follow. Very unlikely things happen all the time.
Truth is an unhelpful concept anyway (in science at least). What’s more useful is the likelihood to get a given result from a given experiment and the ability to make predictions.
And yes, when we put things that way it brings a lot of possible issues with sampling, processing, and measuring (and who’s doing the measuring). Some of these things would be harder to control for in a study of the effectiveness of advertising.
