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The Spread of Ignorance (bbc.com)
New submitter Eric Eikrem writes: BBC Future has just published an interesting article on Robert Proctor, a science historian from Stanford University, who studies how people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge. The spread of ignorance follows certain patterns, whether it is about tobacco or climate change. 'Proctor found that ignorance spreads when firstly, many people do not understand a concept or fact and secondly, when special interest groups -- like a commercial firm or a political group – 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.'
Always comes back to climate change. Take a hard look at the field. Is it not the most politically tainted field of science since the Copernican model of the universe? Climate change is a socialist political movement. Their hysterical predictions never come to pass. It isn't ignorance that causes the masses to reject it, it is the lack of credibility of the field. Rationalize this any way you want.
an ill wind that blows no good
The most ignorant people are the ones who think they're smarter than the idiots around them because they read the right books (or more recently watched the right TV channels or the right websites) (That applies to all groups and fields)
OK some people somewhere may want to take away all of your liberties because climate change, it is a big world ya know. However, most of us are open to discussion of the many approaches. It is your side that does not even want to have that discussion. The meme that the only solutions to climate change are ones that, from an economic perspective, will make the sky fall on us is a fantasy of the climate denier industry. .
The problem has never been that the public disagrees that "smoking is bad for you".
Speaking of gaslighting... it would be nice if you didn't just reinvent history to make a point.
Likewise for climate change as the current cause celebre - It's the solutions, again, being demanded.
Ana again with the gaslighting. No, plenty of people are flat-out denying the science and ignoring the evidence. All you have to do is visit a slashdot thread on global warming/climate change to see this.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I think these two quotes are relevant:
“The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.” - Michael Crichton
“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” - Mark Twain
Then again when writing someone's name in chalk causes as much of an uproar as it did, it makes me think that Trump doesn't have a monopoly on idiot supporters.
I'm still hoping that Sanders can come back and beat Hillary (really long odds, but stranger things have happened) but let's not pretend that some of the political left's supporters aren't the same kind of ignorant, hateful people. They merely spread a different kind of ignorance belief than those individuals on the political right, but beyond that they both act in the same way.
Many people are brought up to blindly accept authority and facts without evidence or actually thinking it over for themselves. Facts are taught as subjective, with an emphasis that reality itself is subjective. This is problematic because it starts with their family at infancy.
Further, those who excel at education or in more extreme cases even participate are ostracized and in more severe cases physically beaten for the simple crime of thinking for themselves. It is considered "uncool" to be smart in many circles and further being violent and stupid are sought after qualities. Is it any wonder that these groups tend to have the worst track records with reality acceptance and actual societal productivity?
Sure everyone has an agenda but until all our youth are universally allowed and encouraged to fact find and think for themselves, it will be easy to pull the BS over their eyes and turn them into puppets.
why did he use a religious term of "denier" to explain people that doubt climate change is as dire as some report?
Because (a) it's not a religious term and (b) 99.9% of them are actual genuine deniers who do not have the background, knowledge or training to make any kind of informed judgement and are flat-out denying the science for ideological reasons, or just sheer ignorance.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Somehow you sound like someone who tries to sell us the fact, that cooking food denaturates protein as if that somehow was a really hidden secret some sinister society in the background does not want us to know.
"Scientists always think they are right about everything."
Could you quote the study that came to that conclusion?
Or is the statement made up and a sample of ignorance and stupidity spread as per the topic of this thread?
Bert
why did he use a religious term of "denier"
Virtue signaling and to establish his tribal identity, same reason everyone else says it. If you look into it, you'll probably find that "ignorance" is really more a tribal identity concept to these people rather than anything about knowledge. Their tribe is the one that follows "the good beliefs" vs. the other tribes who are "ignorant" of them.
The key is that the tribes have to be divided and the other tribe is always a dangerous threat. So you must support and empower and enrich your tribal leaders as much as you can, to fight off the other.
Wrong. Scientists are happy to admit when they are wrong. Descartes' scientific method relies on setting up an enquiry that can be falsified.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Impressive! I think you just applied exactly what the article is talking about! You:
* Associated the author with religion.
* Godwinned
* Gave the author has a secret agenda
* Never actually disagreed with anything the article said.
Are you a professional agnotologist?
Wind mills have been generating weirdos for centuries. Cervantes wrote his books in 1605 already and people are still tilting at wind mills.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Their tribe is the one that follows "the good beliefs" vs. the other tribes who are "ignorant" of them.
This post is not insightful. No, there are *not* two sides to every story. And not everything is about tribal identities. If you believe so, then you should put scare quotes about "good beliefs" when someone asserts the earth is approximately spherical and scare quotes about "ignorance" based on what they say about flat earthers.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Except for climate science, where any question of the alleged "Consensus" is heresy suitable for burning at the stake.
That only happens if you ignore the existing evidence, and bring none of your own.
A little bit of doubt can be very effective for those people already looking for it.
That particular technique is only used because it is effective. If it weren't, people wouldn't use it or would use something else instead. The problem isn't that arguments are being made in that way, it's that all of the different issues you've listed are really complicated and you can hardly expect that average person to have enough understanding of them or the ancillary knowledge necessary to make a reasoned decision. Add in human tendency for confirmation bias and what you've called "frame" becomes the most effective way in a democracy to effect the types of change that you want. We only see it because all of the other tactics or strategies have proven to be less viable and therefor the people who employ them less successful. It's merely natural selection in terms of presenting arguments.
I don't believe it makes it impossible to have a meaningful debate, only that people haven't yet figured out how they should debate against it. Rather than attacking the framing of the opposition, most simply construct one of their own. However, I suspect that if you study a particular frame well enough, the cracks become apparent and it's only a matter of pointing them out and using basic logic to point out the inconsistencies or the contradictions created by a particular frame. In the face of that, a person using a particular frame either has to stop using it, or revise it in such a way that it no longer creates those contradictions, but any frame that continues to be based on subjective beliefs will still continue to have those problems.
Once exposed, it cannot stand on its own. Adherents may continue to hold it up, simply out of stubbornness, but most people will see that the emperor has no clothes. The problem is that people are either too lazy to fully understand a particular issue and to fully explore the nuances and minutiae that are necessary in order to actually solve a problem or they have a vested financial interest in the problem not being solved or their proposed solution (as incorrect as it may be) being used. People are naturally too self-interested to be expected to always and completely cooperate in a way that resolves this problem. Perhaps if we lived in a truly post-scarcity world it might be achievable, but we don't so the discussion is moot.
The "Consensus" is a prime example of this.
Consensus has nothing to do with the science itself. Rather, it is what is appropriate to use when converting science to policy. A policy maker does not have the scientific background nor the time to perform science or to judge scientists. Rather, they have to depend on other scientists to do that job, and base the policy on the consensus. Unless, of course, you have a better alternative.
Consensus is an important part of science, but it is not the only part. The scientific method is strong enough that the truth eventually prevails even if the current consensus is wrong (such as for your Einstein example). People who spread ignorance use the fact that consensus is not always correct to disregard it whenever it disagrees with their point of view. Hence "teach the controversy".
Very well said.
"Global cooling", oops, now called "Global warming", oops, now called "Climate Change", is, in truth, just the latest Apocalyptic The Gods Are Angry End Of The World Unless We Repent Cult. There's a new such cult every few generations complete with sinners (climate change deniers), purchasing external signs of righteousness and piety (Prius cars as an example), the ability to sin at will by buying forgiveness from the gods (carbon credits), outlawing sins against the gods (banning plastic bags for example), large visible tributes to the gods to show our piety as a social group (huge wind power projects as an example), and most of all a uniting of the ruling and clergy class (politicians and "scientists") to strip the people of their wealth in sacrifices (taxes) to conduct ceremonies and make offerings to the gods to appease them. Human nature is simply human nature and does not change appreciably over thousands of years. These behaviors have made the elites rich through all of human history and the average human alive today is no more wiser about the manipulation the an ancient Egyptian making an offering to a priest to help make sure the Nike flooded again this year to make the soil fertile.
I think he's alluding to that smart and educated people who know a lot about something sometimes makes the jump to start believing they know everything about anything.
Do you have an example of a smart and educated person who claims to know everything about anything? I very much doubt there is a single person who has ever made that claim. Even the economists who say that all the climate scientists are all wrong (even though that it obviously outside their field of study) would not dare to claim that they know everything about anything.
The whole idea that scientists think that they are infallible comes from the uneducated, so-called skeptics who are unable show that the science is wrong, and so denigrate the scientists instead. That is called playing the man and not the ball.
To put it in simple terms, if a scientist says that they know everything about anything then they have suddenly put themselves out of a job because there is nothing left to study.
Utterly false. A bunch of examples in Collapse by Jared Diamond. Can you put an example of your "loss of will" nonsense?
Odd. Especially considering that Germany was aiming for self-sufficiency during that time and it had a pretty decent car industry even back then. Yet nobody tried to make car (and tank) fuel out of alcohol. Even when the Nazis came to power, they were aiming for coal and wood gas generators rather than alcohol as fuel, and believe me that one, getting rid of that dependency on oil (which was hard to come by for them) was one of the key research topics during that time.
Strikes me as odd.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Except for climate science, where any question of the alleged "Consensus" is heresy suitable for burning at the stake.
So how many people have been burnt at the stake for being a denier?
Now if you mean simple ridicule, hell yeah, just that same as people who believe that the earth was created in 4004 b.c.e, or that all life was created at once in it's present form.
Or that the earth is flat.
You are entitled to your own beliefs. You are not entitled to your own facts. It is getting very difficult to be a denier these days without joinng the camp of the others I just posted. When even Exxon confirms the physics - even if they lied about them, when even the patron saint of the deniers and his one time discrepancies becoming in line with the other data and him as co-author of an article saying just that - there isn't much room left on that limb of denial you are perched on.
What is it you have left? Calling Michael Mann an asshole? Sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling neener, neener, I can't HEAR YOUUUUU!
Not much, is it? Michael Mann isn't an asshole, and the laws of physics don't care how loud you yell. Carry on.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It's important to be sceptical, check facts and keep asking questions. But the level of disinformation and denial taking place in the US is off the charts. I read about global warming in the news almost every day. The great barrier reef dying because the sea water is too warm. Ice sheets and glaciers melting away revealing the bare rock underneath where before everything was white. Plagues of jellyfish that thrive in the warmer waters while the rest of the fish are dying off. Huge summer fires and severe drought periods in California, Southern Europe, Russia, Africa. The evidence that something is happening is everywhere, and it's happening faster than ever before. It's so plain to see I don't even have to read the news. Where I live there has been snow twice only for a couple of days in the last 5 years. Before the winters where white for weeks. I'm sorry but you have to be an ignorant fool to disregard all of these massive changes that are taking place.
Funny how you extreme-rightwingers can always quote that number - but have no idea what capitalism's death toll is, and how you ignore that where socialism was achieved democratically rather than through revolution (i.e. most of the world) - it's death toll is lower than where capitalism is achieved democratically. You also utterly ignore that where capitalism is achieved *without* democracy - it's death toll is worse. Citing big numbers without context is a great way to sound scary while saying nothing at all.
100-Million out of how many ? Over how many years ? You need both time and per-capita measures to actually *compare* anything. Pinochet killed at least 40-thousand people in his first 2 years in office - and he was a hardcore capitalist.
So clearly the system of government is a much bigger factor than the economic system in determining how many people the government kills. In the meantime, today, the world's greatest bastion of capitalism is also one of the last bastions of the death penalty in the developed world while the democratic socialist countries have all done away with it - often decades ago, meaning that capitalism has killed more people *just* in America in the past 30 years than socialism has killed globally !
And of course, if you're really going to compare death tolls of economic systems you should count every preventable death within them. Everybody who has ever starved because he was underpaid or couldn't find work and capitalism didn't provide a social safety net (that's a socialist idea). Everybody who ever died because the boss skimped on a critical safety feature in the factory to increase profits (that's easily topping your 100-million all by itself about once a decade - hell *just* goldmines are killing *at least* 3000 people per year - for the most capitalist purpose of all - to stick bars of metal in vaults and never use them for anything), everyone who ever died because they got a curable disease and couldn't afford the medical care they needed to survive. For fairness - you could limit it to the century between 1910 and 2010 - since the Soviet Union sort of began in 1910 and including the Industrial era before that is a number we have nothing to compare with.
Hell you could go as far as to conclude that the extreme death toll of 19th century capitalism, it's rabid exploitation of the poor and the horrible treatment of workers were the *reason* that revolutionary Bolshevist states arose in the first place. Which means that the entire 100-million you cite was *actually* killed by unregulated capitalism, since if the markets (especially labor) had been properly regulated in the 19th century and not had bred all that terrible poverty and suffering the Russian revolution would never have happened.
When you inform your ideas with simplistic big-numbers you get stupid conclusions. Now I'm not saying you should be pro-socialism or pro-mixed-economy or pro-capitalism or pro-something-else-entirely(yes there a literally thousands of economic philosophies in the world that are neither capitalism nor socialism). What I am saying is you ought to base your decision, and what ideas you support based on a careful and analytical consideration of all relevant facts, not some scary big number with no context to give it meaning.
To hammer the point home. Last year the South African AIDS death toll was a frightening 200-thousand people (and considering most of them were just too poor to buy good drugs - you can chalk that up to "killed by capitalism" by the way). That's a big frightening number eh ? Well, no, actually - it was 4 times that much in 2010. The number is proof that South Africa is *winning* the war against AIDs. That it's still so big means we have a lot of work left to do and the war is far from over and nobody denies that, but it does prove our strategies are working. See the point ? Numbers without context is a way to tell lies and decieve people while appearing to tell the truth. Abandon the lie - read a bit wider - and form an informed opinion. You may
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