Agnotology: The politics of ignorance

In the January, 2009 issue of Discover Magazine, Robert Proctor discusses "agnotology," defined as the "politics of ignorance."

It’s the study of the politics of ignorance. I’m looking at how ignorance is actively created through things like military secrecy in science or through deliberate policies like the tobacco industry’s effort to manufacture doubt through their “doubt is our product” strategy [spelled out in a 1969 tobacco company memo]. So it’s not that science inherently always grows. It can actually be destroyed in certain ways, or ignorance can actually be created. . . . It’s pretty common. I mean, in terms of sowing doubt, certainly global warming is a famous one. You know, the global warming denialists who for years have managed to say, “Well, the case is not proven. We need more research.” And what’s interesting is that a lot of the people working on that were also the people working for Big Tobacco. The techniques of manufacturing doubt were created largely within the tobacco industry, and then they were franchised out to other industries.

In this Wikipedia article, the root causes of agnotology are deemed to be "media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness." To this list, I would add, fatigue, the bright-shiny distractions and gadgets offered by society, the "Dunning-Kruger Effect," limited attentional capacities and the banality of evil. I do like the trend that so many writers and scientists are beginning to focus in on these topics and the related topics of undue certitude and "tortucanism."

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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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