it's not just that the tobacco companies covered up reports, they literally put out ads with actors dressed as doctors saying "smoking is good for you".

e.g.: http://tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_main/images.php?token2=f...

Even if you were able to "reason" that smoking was bad, there was a whole dedicated culture jamming operation to push the message "you're wrong and foolish if you think smoking is bad" and it worked very well.

Every NFL team had (has?) a bunch of doctors telling players that they can shrug off concussions and other serious injuries, and a deeply-engrained (and specifically engineered) culture to back up that message.

Hell, when I was growing up (not that long ago!) the NFL used to produce and tout official videos of the biggest / hardest hits in a season.

Looking at them now, you can literally see the stiff arms sticking in the air that is a symptom of brain trauma, and people getting up concussed as fuck.

It's all true and very bad, I agree. My greater point though is that, throughout all time, people live in a society where someone is trying to take advantage/lie/cheat/steal basically they don't care about what is best for you. People need to learn to think independently.

Hell, science still can't agree on if an egg is healthy or not. I eat them because I enjoy them and their are no obvious downsides. If there were some correlation that was known and proved unhealthy I might stop eating them. For example, while big tobacco was doing their thing... people knew their family members smoking were unhealthy, coughing like crazy, getting cancer/sick, so their was some clues in society telling you that you're probably being lied to. I have memories of this as a kid, "Joe died at 55 but, you know, he smoked 2 packs a day" was a valid way of thinking. So the health effects were widely known, just not in a measurable & undisputed scientific way.

The same thing goes for tobacco, NFL, climate change, ... all kinds of stuff. The anecdotal information around you says one thing, but the scientist can't agree and some of them are biased/being paid to say something regardless of truth. Years later the anecdotal information turns out to be true and people claim they were victims when really they could have just exercised some common sense.

>People need to learn to think independently.

You can't really leave it at that though. Most learning that people do is not independently driven, it is learning that complements teaching... which is never independent. Very rarely do people come to intelligent conclusions independently.