Agnotology: Study Of The Willful Spread Of Ignorance

[stromboli]

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160105-the-man-who-studies-the-spread-of-ignorance

How do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge? Georgina Kenyon finds there is a term which defines this phenomenon.

In 1979, a secret memo from the tobacco industry was revealed to the public. Called the Smoking and Health Proposal, and written a decade earlier by the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, it revealed many of the tactics employed by big tobacco to counter “anti-cigarette forces”.
In one of the paper’s most revealing sections, it looks at how to market cigarettes to the mass public: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”
This revelation piqued the interest of Robert Proctor, a science historian from Stanford University, who started delving into the practices of tobacco firms and how they had spread confusion about whether smoking caused cancer.

Proctor had found that the cigarette industry did not want consumers to know the harms of its product, and it spent billions obscuring the facts of the health effects of smoking. This search led him to create a word for the study of deliberate propagation of ignorance: agnotology.

It comes from agnosis, the neoclassical Greek word for ignorance or ‘not knowing’, and ontology, the branch of metaphysics which deals with the nature of being. Agnotology is the study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favour.
“I was exploring how powerful industries could promote ignorance to sell their wares. Ignorance is power… and agnotology is about the deliberate creation of ignorance.
“In looking into agnotology, I discovered the secret world of classified science, and thought historians should be giving this more attention.”
The 1969 memo and the tactics used by the tobacco industry became the perfect example of agnotology, Proctor says. “Ignorance is not just the not-yet-known, it’s also a political ploy, a deliberate creation by powerful agents who want you ‘not to know’.”
To help him in his search, Proctor enlisted the help of UC Berkeley linguist Iain Boal, and together they came up with the term â€" the neologism was coined in 1995, although much of Proctor’s analysis of the phenomenon had occurred in the previous decades.
Balancing act
Agnotology is as important today as it was back when Proctor studied the tobacco industry’s obfuscation of facts about cancer and smoking. For example, politically motivated doubt was sown over US President Barack Obama’s nationality for many months by opponents until he revealed his birth certificate in 2011. In another case, some political commentators in Australia attempted to stoke panic by likening the country’s credit rating to that of Greece, despite readily available public information from ratings agencies showing the two economies are very different.

Proctor explains that ignorance can often be propagated under the guise of balanced debate. For example, the common idea that there will always be two opposing views does not always result in a rational conclusion. This was behind how tobacco firms used science to make their products look harmless, and is used today by climate change deniers to argue against the scientific evidence.
“This ‘balance routine’ has allowed the cigarette men, or climate deniers today, to claim that there are two sides to every story, that ‘experts disagree’ â€" creating a false picture of the truth, hence ignorance.”

For example, says Proctor, many of the studies linking carcinogens in tobacco were conducted in mice initially, and the tobacco industry responded by saying that studies into mice did not mean that people were at risk, despite adverse health outcomes in many smokers.

A new era of ignorance
“We live in a world of radical ignorance, and the marvel is that any kind of truth cuts through the noise,” says Proctor. Even though knowledge is ‘accessible’, it does not mean it is accessed, he warns.
“Although for most things this is trivial â€" like, for example, the boiling point of mercury â€" but for bigger questions of political and philosophical import, the knowledge people have often comes from faith or tradition, or propaganda, more than anywhere else.”

Proctor found that ignorance spreads when firstly, many people do not understand a concept or fact and secondly, when special interest groups â€" like a commercial firm or a political group â€" then work hard to create confusion about an issue. In the case of ignorance about tobacco and climate change, a scientifically illiterate society will probably be more susceptible to the tactics used by those wishing to confuse and cloud the truth.

Consider climate change as an example. “The fight is not just over the existence of climate change, it’s over whether God has created the Earth for us to exploit, whether government has the right to regulate industry, whether environmentalists should be empowered, and so on. It’s not just about the facts, it’s about what is imagined to flow from and into such facts,” says Proctor.
Making up our own minds

Another academic studying ignorance is David Dunning, from Cornell University. Dunning warns that the internet is helping propagate ignorance â€" it is a place where everyone has a chance to be their own expert, he says, which makes them prey for powerful interests wishing to deliberately spread ignorance.

"While some smart people will profit from all the information now just a click away, many will be misled into a false sense of expertise. My worry is not that we are losing the ability to make up our own minds, but that it’s becoming too easy to do so. We should consult with others much more than we imagine. Other people may be imperfect as well, but often their opinions go a long way toward correcting our own imperfections, as our own imperfect expertise helps to correct their errors,” warns Dunning.
Dunning and Proctor also warn that the wilful spread of ignorance is rampant throughout the US presidential primaries on both sides of the political spectrum.
“Donald Trump is the obvious current example in the US, suggesting easy solutions to followers that are either unworkable or unconstitutional,” says Dunning.
So while agnotology may have had its origins in the heyday of the tobacco industry, today the need for both a word and the study of human ignorance is as strong as ever.

[josephpalazzo]

Talk to me about it. I've been fighting ignorance all my life. With the advent of cable TV, Fox News and the internet, the flood gates of ignorance have been wide open. In the US in particular, there is a complete distrust for experts of any kind. The 2000 election was a flagrant example: more preferred to have a beer with Bush than have a talk with Gore, perhaps more stiff than Bush, but knew the issues at hand. Just think for a second how the world would be today if Gore had won!  The worst part is the beating that science took during that time with this "guerrilla fight" that has been perpetuated against science: reduced funding in science research, a ban on stem cell research for a long time, climate change denial, a total assault on the theory of evolution, to name a few, the end result being that slowly the US has lost its edge in frontier research. When you have a Republican sitting on the House Science Committee who believes that the earth is 6000 years old, you know that we have become a banana republic. Ok, enough of my ranting...

[Baruch]

The cutting of already awarded grants for research already underway at the NIH ... was particularly cruel during sequestration struggles.  And we may have more of this struggle over the US federal budget.

On the rest ... propaganda plus American know-nothingism?  This is very old.  The US only led the world is science, because of refugee scientists, particularly Jewish ones, fleeing Hitler.  Our supply of refugee scientists has dried up.  The universities were buoyed by funding for the Cold War, but the Cold War is over.  There is a financial crisis in our universities, not just with undergraduate students.  End of cycle problems that people refuse to address.  Part of the political spectrum sees universities as opponents (convenient punching bags really).  And we have an elite that says ... move everything to China and India.  Another end of cycle problem bigger than the previous one.

So do I blame ignorance?  The common people have always been ignorant.  There was no age of Enlightenment, except for elite Americans and returning GIs after WW II.  And that generation has run its course, and so have the Baby Boomers.  Unless you can do something for the Millennials, this is end of game.  Will we tie and go into overtime?

[josephpalazzo]

Here's your typical example of the dummy down of the culture, right here on this forum:

http://atheistforums.com/index.php?topic=9203.msg1110333#msg1110333

[stromboli]

Actually NASA got handed more money on this budget, so somebody was paying attention. Ted Cruz was too busy campaigning to stick a fork in it, or something. But if you are looking for the willful spread of ignorance, you can cover it with Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump.

People also hear what they want to hear. The Republican congress hears climate change denial because it is directly correlated with money in their pockets from oil companies.

[josephpalazzo]

People also hear what they want to hear.

That's the big problem. Those in power have all the motivation to keep their power, but that was always true from ancient Egypt to the present. But democracy can only survive with a population that is well informed, and the rich will do everything so that the population doesn't get well informed. In politics, there was a time when a politician was found out to factually lie, his career was over, today, if a politician is caught outright lying, most people just shrug, and so you get the Trumps, and before that the Cheneys, and so on. We live in the age of infotainment thanks to those who are rich and pulled it off to get people only interested in entertainment. Look at our own posters on this forum, like Baruch, with whom every single thread is turned into a farce, and how many really challenge him? Most members go for the entertainment he provides. In the long run, nobody cares about facts, or rational discussion. It's a fucking sad state that we are turning this world into. 

[stromboli]

No shit. Btw JP I had an image of you sitting in a wicker chair swirling a glass of wine while you were saying that. Weird.

[Unbeliever]

God Almighty loves book burners, but...

[josephpalazzo]

No shit. Btw JP I had an image of you sitting in a wicker chair swirling a glass of wine while you were saying that. Weird.

That's weird as I rarely drink wine. Must haven't been on an off-day...

[Baruch]

That's weird as I rarely drink wine. Must haven't been on an off-day...

Maybe try a Bartles & James ... we serve no Internet post before its time ;-)

Get a sense of humor?  Then life is more entertaining.  The facts one can nail down are far and few between.

[josephpalazzo]

Drinking (alcoholic beverages) is way over-rated... (ditto for illegal drugs).

[Baruch]

Drinking (alcoholic beverages) is way over-rated... (ditto for illegal drugs).

Just say know? ;-))  I agree regarding intoxicants.

[stromboli]

Drinking (alcoholic beverages) is way over-rated... (ditto for illegal drugs).

(Stromboli decides to cancel the "post here if you're stoned on illegal drugs" thread)

[josephpalazzo]

(Stromboli decides to cancel the "post here if you're stoned on illegal drugs" thread)

Chicken...

[stromboli]

Not going to be the one calling attention of the NSA to the forum.