Cultural production of ignorance provides rich field for study By Michael Hiltzik LATimes

[Demeter]

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20140307%2c0%2c3373375%2cfull.column


Robert Proctor doesn't think ignorance is bliss. He thinks that what you don't know can hurt you. And that there's more ignorance around than there used to be, and that its purveyors have gotten much better at filling our heads with nonsense. Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Stanford, is one of the world's leading experts in agnotology, a neologism signifying the study of the cultural production of ignorance. It's a rich field, especially today when whole industries devote themselves to sowing public misinformation and doubt about their products and activities...When this sort of manipulation of information is done for profit, or to confound the development of beneficial public policy, it becomes a threat to health and to democratic society...

And all those fabricated Obamacare horror stories wholesaled by Republican and conservative opponents of the Affordable Care Act and their aiders and abetters in the right-wing press? Their purpose is to sow doubt about the entire project of healthcare reform; if the aim were to identify specific shortcomings of the act, they'd have to accompany every story with a proposal about how to fix it...

Proctor came to the study of agnotology through his study of the Nazi scientific establishment and subsequently of the tobacco industry's defensive campaign. Early in his career, he told me, he asked an advisor if Nazi science was an appropriate topic of research. "Of course," he was told. "Nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship." As part of his scholarship, Proctor says he "watches Fox News all the time."

Proctor acknowledges that not all ignorance is bad.

"There are reasons we don't want people to know how to make an airborne AIDS virus or biological weapons," he says. "And the right to privacy is based on a kind of sanctioned ignorance — we don't want everyone to know everything about us all the time."

But then there's ignorance custom-designed to manipulate the public. "The myth of the 'information society' is that we're drowning in knowledge," he says. "But it's easier to propagate ignorance."

...But Proctor has hope. "My whole career is devoted to pushing back," he told me. "There is opportunity to expose these things through good journalism, good pedagogy, good scholarship. You need an educated populace." The effort needs to begin at a young age, he says. "You really need to be teaching third-, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-graders that some people lie. And why do they lie? Because some people are greedy."

Michael Hiltzik's column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Read his blog, the Economy Hub, at latimes.com/business/hiltzik, reach him at [e-mail], check out facebook.com/hiltzik and follow @hiltzikm on Twitter.


MUCH MORE SPECIFIC DETAIL AT LINK


AND MAY I ADD, AS A PERSONAL OBSERVATION, THAT THE WORST THING ABOUT DEMOCRATIC UNDERGROUND THESE DAYS IS THAT THERE ARE TOO MANY POSTS DESIGNED TO PROPAGANDIZE AND/OR DUMB-DOWN THE POPULACE AND THE CONVERSATION. TOO MANY POSTERS ARE ANTI-KNOWLEDGE AND PRO-AGENDA, AND CONFUSE SKEPTICISM WITH DENIAL, WISHFUL THINKING OR PERSONAL ATTACKS.

IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES. BAD IDEAS USUALLY HAVE BAD CONSEQUENCES.

[bemildred]

1. 90% of everything is bullshit.

It's not a law, but it's a good rule of thumb.
(Credit to T. Sturgeon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)

And we have made it into an industry, the production of bullshit

[Demeter]

2. And a very profitable one, too! Good point!

[Igel]

3. People don't lie just because they're greedy.

They lie because there's something in it for them.

That might be money.

That might be reputation. Honor.

Might be self-image.

Might be wanting to belong to a group. Might be a desire for power, getting more people into your group (even if you don't control the group there's safety in numbers because numbers often mean power for the group).

Some lie to protect others.


Another problem is that not all ignorance is because of lying. If you don't believe the falsehood to be false it's not really a lie.

There's also a middle ground, self-delusion and adjacent territory. When an acquaintance says something that's patently absurd and she believes it because "they say so" she's in that middle ground. It takes 2 seconds to show the falseness of the claim. But she wants the claim to be true, so she appeals to the authority "they" have (whoever "they" may be) and holds off thinking through the claim. It's not self-delusion--she's never convinced herself that the truth is false. She's just never found a sufficient motivation to falsify an absurd claim.

Many prefer easy thinking, "lower frontal cortex" thinking, to harder thinking. We all do it. Some do it a bit more often than others. We do it in different areas of our lives. But we all do it.

I also need to be convinced that misinformation is more common among the populace now than before. Strikes me that it could be a sampling problem. Eighty years ago standards were lower, a different set of people would be polled (if anybody was polled), and the media had a smaller audience. That there's more misinformation in the media might be because the expanded media target the audience that was left off the radar before.

[Demeter]

4. Two words: Fact Check

Perhaps because of my youthful situation (raised in dysfunctionality) I have always tracked down multiple references before accepting anyone's theory or fact. It is the number one skill children need: skepticism and the ability to verify the data, analysis and conclusions.

[LongTomH]

5. I'm with you all the way!!!!

"AND MAY I ADD, AS A PERSONAL OBSERVATION, THAT THE WORST THING ABOUT DEMOCRATIC UNDERGROUND THESE DAYS IS THAT THERE ARE TOO MANY POSTS DESIGNED TO PROPAGANDIZE AND/OR DUMB-DOWN THE POPULACE AND THE CONVERSATION. TOO MANY POSTERS ARE ANTI-KNOWLEDGE AND PRO-AGENDA, AND CONFUSE SKEPTICISM WITH DENIAL, WISHFUL THINKING OR PERSONAL ATTACKS.

"IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES. BAD IDEAS USUALLY HAVE BAD CONSEQUENCES."

Excellent observations!