But we have seen that movie many times, haven’t we? It’s a given that if someone builds a business on a thing and that thing turns out to cause buttcancer, they gonna cover that shit up.

Sometimes covering it up is easy if you just rely on scientific ground truths, like “the dose is the poison”. Even water is a poison if you chug too much of it, so just the discovery that something is poisonous at some dose is almost like tautological. I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the “cover up” was based on that kind of science.

Basically, if there’s utility to something, then there’s money to be made, careers to be made, legacies at stake, etc - and that will bias folks towards covering shit up.

I bet you the folks involved in the cover up were good people who just failed to check their biases.

But what if there are no alternatives?

What if the alternatives are worse?

What if the alternatives are the kind of thing that could possibly be worse but we don’t have enough experience with them yet to know that they are worse?

Often the known bad thing is better than the thing you don’t know to be bad yet.

Democracy is slow.

Thats why I don’t usually use greed as an explanation for stuff. Of course greed is part of the system and sometimes it causes bad things to happen. Sometimes it also causes good things to happen. So, if you want to prevent the bad, it’s useful to look for some explanation that isn’t just “greed”.