I think this is a distinction without a difference; if you use insulin from Novo Nordisk, what does it mean to "apply a high degree of skepticism to anything they do or say"? Do you have an independent (small?) lab check that it is what it says it is, every time you fill your prescription? If not, isn't a measure of "trust" implicit in and required for use?

If the behavior is identical between party A who uses the insulin but somehow doesn't "trust" the producer, and party B who both uses it and "trusts" the producer, what has party A achieved through their mistrust?

I actually would riff on this idea more like "Even though corporations are made of of people, don't expect them to have the same attributes of a human being, like empathy or the concept of doing the right thing. Expect that their actions are better explained through abstract concepts like group actions towards a larger goal that's separate from human well-being, like profits and self-survival of the organization at any cost."

So even though there exist people at Facebook that have human attributes of empathy and "let's not fuck up half of society" – as a company, they don't behave that way, since it affects more abstract non-human concepts like the survival of the organization, or profit motives that are detached from individuals (like an employee's stock price or yearly bonuses).

It's just general advice, not an ironclad rule on how to live your life. Apply as you see fit.

Even if you distrust your insulin supplier, there's good reasons to think that the insulin will be effective. The company will lose customers and sales if they put out a product that harms their customers and also that would likely put them at risk of litigation. However, if the supplier is taken over by some kind of asset stripping owner, then they might not care about future performance of the company.

My mind also went to pharmaceuticals. And how "don't trust big companies" seems to be contributing to the "vaccine skepticism" phenomenon (or whatever you want to call it) and anti-medicine in general. RFK has brought them out of the woodwork.

I've seen acquaintances share fact sheets about times when drug makers were sued/fined for lying to the FDA, harming customers, manipulating prices, etc. All true! So people reasonably ask why they should be "forced" to have their products injected into them. And then they can get into all the reasons not to trust the FDA too...

Logically, just because a company has done some bad things doesn't mean their vaccines are unsafe. Or that the risks are worse than the disease. Or that sometimes mistakes just happen. And of course in their own lives people are hypocrites, break rules, do things like go back to cheating partners, etc.

I don't have a point here except to lament that things are complicated. Of course people are looking for justification of their beliefs. But maybe we should have held these companies to higher standards, and by allowing them to persist we were unwittingly eroding public trust to a tipping point that is now putting all of us at risk.

The problem with vaccine skepticism is that the wingnuts make it impossible to be a legitimate skeptic. And yes, skepticism is warranted. Are we all such severe sufferers of Gell-Mann amnesia??

Vaccine manufacturers are not special. They are for-profit corporations, and the importance of the product they make gives them tremendous power.

For example take a look at Hep B vaccination. I spent hours one night trying to dig up primary source material and research from the 70s to justify it and the 3-course recommendation. It's obvious that Hep B is a serious illness for babies that can lead the problems much later in life, we know that. But how prevalent was it in the USA before the standard vaccine schedule was rolled out? Has anyone actually gone and looked through VAERS over the past 40 years and compared the rate of serious side effects like GB to a counterfactual base rate of Hep B? That's not a trivial statistics project, and nobody that I'm aware of has done it (although I'm bad at searching), yet we continue to vaccinate every single baby with 3 courses of Hep B. It's probably not a big deal, and I'm willing to believe that the people at the CDC probably know what they're doing (pre-2024) and have/had access to the right data and the right decision-making tools to set a good vaccine schedule. But if it came out that Hep B vaccination actually wasn't all that useful and we should probably stop doing it, it would certainly be inconvenient for the vaccine manufacturer. So there is absolutely an incentive to steer legitimate scientific inquiry toward some directions and away from directions.

All that is to say, trusting the science and being a supporter of evidence-based public health requires skepticism, precisely because for-profit corporations are always going to act like for-profit corporations regardless of what business they are in.

we don't place trust in the producer. that's what regulation is for. unfortunately, we can't trust the people above the regulators that often either.

Yeah but it's kind of too sensible as to be not very useful or actionable.

I mean, of course we don't trust big corporations.

Millions of people sent their DNA to 23&Me, for example. The advice was pretty actionable in that scenario but people did it anyway.

23&Me was hardly a big corporation at the time. Or does this saying apply to all companies with a few hundred employees?

I don't think people cared about that data so much?