The age of agnotology: culturally constructed ignorance

Robert Proctor is a historian of science at Stanford who has pointed out a bizarre modern phenomenon: the coexistence of easily available factual information and ignorance. That is the subject of Clive Thompson's article in Wired:

He has developed a word inspired by this trend: agnotology. Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is "the study of culturally constructed ignorance."

As Proctor argues, when society doesn't know something, it's often because special interests work hard to create confusion. Anti-Obama groups likely spent millions insisting he's a Muslim; church groups have shelled out even more pushing creationism. The oil and auto industries carefully seed doubt about the causes of global warming. And when the dust settles, society knows less than it did before.

"People always assume that if someone doesn't know something, it's because they haven't paid attention or haven't yet figured it out," Proctor says. "But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what's true and what's not."

After years of celebrating the information revolution, we need to focus on the countervailing force: The disinformation revolution.

Thompson suggests that we need to develop more tools like Wikipedia to allow society as a whole to "build real knowledge through consensus," thereby allowing us to expose systematic lies for what they are.

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The American war against telephone poles

In a short article entitled, “The War on Telephone Poles,” the February 2009 edition of Harper's Magazine includes a fascinating excerpt from an essay by Eula Biss, which was originally titled "Time and Distance Overcome” as it appeared in the Spring issue of Iowa Review. Biss's article is a terrific example of the human tendency to resist long-range change that would substantially improve the community as a whole. As she clearly documents in her essay, many people ferociously opposed the erection of telephone poles back in the 1880’s. Whatever their stated reasons (aesthetics and defense of private property were often argued), the real reasons for resisting telephone poles were timeless: fear of change combined with a warped sense of the importance the individual in relation to his or her community. The Biss essay reminds us that Americans have long been quite capable of harpooning critical community-building endeavors in the name of individual freedom. We don’t fight telephone poles anymore, but this destructive tendency is one we still see in modern day America. Only a small bit of Biss's essay is available online. The basic idea presented by her essay is that in the 1880s, numerous people (including elected officials and newspapers) ferociously opposed the erection of telephone poles. They argued that telephone poles were ugly. They characterized telephones to be considered playthings of the rich.

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States don’t have to wait for stimulus payments

What with the Congress mulling over plans for stimulating the American economy, there is an even more critical role to be played by the states in delivering aid to those hardest hit by our current economic crisis. States are where the tires hit the road, and states can act much more efficiently and quickly to meet the specific demands of their citizens. Even after the states have taken action, Congress can support these actions with direct funding and augment the strained budgets the states face with declining tax revenues in our recessionary economy. I’ll use an example from Missouri. We have just elected a Democratic Governor after four years of a GOP Governor who spent his time giving tax breaks and favors to corporations and contributors and left the State of Missouri with a budget shortfall of over $300 million. We have a GOP lead legislature in both chambers of our bicameral legislature. So far, everyone has promised “bi-partisanship” and all are looking at ways to make up the differences in funding because Missouri, like all states, has to have a balanced budget. Regardless of responsibility for why revenues are down, the Governor apparently will have to cut the budget in the current fiscal year to make ends meet. I say apparently because of that pesky requirement we balance or budget each and every year. So how does a state government fully fund priorities when immediate cash revenues keep that from being done? Here’s how . . .

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Rejection of evolution across the pond

Great Britain is catching up to the U.S. when it comes to the rejection of evolution by natural selection.  Consider the following from The Guardian: Half of British adults do not believe in evolution, with at least 22% preferring the theories of creationism or intelligent design to explain how the…

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"To restore science to its rightful place"

It's not that I'm infatuated with the words of Potus44, but Barack Obama's inaugural address (that I've already addressed) hit quite a few notable notes. One of which was the promise to "restore science to its rightful place". He also said,

"Promoting science isn't just about providing Resources-it's about protecting free and open inquiry... It's about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it's inconvenient - especially when it's inconvenient.

That's a breath of fresh air, indeed. But the real question and challenge will be: What exactly is this Rightful Place? The previous administration acted as though they believed that science belongs after political expedience and the Bible, not necessarily in that order. They fired or censored anyone whose carefully calculated conclusions disagreed with their prejudged opinions. It will be a long time cleaning up the resulting mess. Mike the Mad Biologist posted: To Restore Science to Its Rightful Place, We Need to Redefine Elitism. In brief, science is not easy to follow once you reach the discoveries of The Enlightenment and beyond. It takes a certain amount of education and dedication to know good science from pseudoscience. And this is anathema to American principle of Democratic Populism, the idea that all men are not only "created equal", but are in fact equal.

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