Janesdiggo's List: Agnotology

• We  Will Overcome Agnotology (The Cultural Production Of Ignorance)
• jokes are hard evidence of  sociological currents.
• A joke can only work on national TV, if  the majority of viewers is able to understand the cultural reference  in a split-second and if a general consensus allows the joke  to take sides
• This is about a society's choice  between listening to science and falling prey to what Stanford  science historian Robert N. Proctor calls agnotology (the cultural  production of ignorance), Production has been booming.
• If  a nation purposely kept in the dark about an imminent danger  for so long manages to overcome public inertia and become acutely  aware of a complex issue like global warming in the span of two  years, it means that the power of reason is ultimately able to  overcome the forces of ignorance driven by economic interests  and religious dogma

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• George Marshall Institute,
• The presenters had such lists—useful in evaluating the motives of any new organization not yet known to be a front for agnotology
• With help from Google I managed to duplicate such lists, proving an ability to apply their method of identifying new such fronts in the future without even remembering an old list of names—all you need is the above list of known previous front organizations and you are off and running.
• While I was googling the useful list of agnotologist think tanks and institutes, I was amazed by the fact that the majority of them had affiliations with the Libertarian Political  Party and several with George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. 
• The Charles G. Koch Foundation has been a major supporter of George Mason University
• Is the Libertarian Party aware that it may be inadvertently morphing into an oligarchy of agnotologists?
• Covert Operarations by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, August 30, 2010, pages 45-55.  The following amazing quotation is from the New Yorker Article:
• Mark Twain called willful withholding of vital information a silent lie.
• be very careful about the credentials of your sources
• The only difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction should be completely believable.                                          

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• A historian of science at Stanford, Proctor points out that when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: Ignorance increases.
• 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.
• "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."
• Even the financial meltdown was driven by ignorance. Credit-default swaps were designed not merely to dilute risk but to dilute knowledge; after they'd changed hands and been serially securitized, no one knew what they were worth.
• if we argue about what a fact means, we're having a debate. If we argue about what the facts are, it's agnotological Armageddon, where reality dies screaming.

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• • Who is/are 'The Marshall School of Business'??
• A study by the Marshall School of Business projects that the United States, despite its paltry welfare programs, will still be short 35 million workers by 2030; Europe, despite its generous decent minimum wages, will need 80 million. The most direct and politically feasible solution, the one most governments will continue to use to square the circle and fill the hole, will remain immigration.

• Today a campaign on behalf of a public relations firm to skew online debate about the Canadian election was caught using Craigslist to recruit new writers to their cause.

   

  The series of job postings appeared in large Canadian cities across the country, and invited prospective writers to apply for jobs to post on newspaper comment sections, media forums, facebook pages, and other online outlets. The goal? To "help balance the left-wing bias of the major media outlets".

   

  Though the ads were promptly flagged and removed from Craigslist, we scored a screen cap. 

• Last week, several friends alerted me to a claim that the iPhone supposedly uses as much electricity as two refrigerators — when you count the energy needed to make it, run it and power the “behind-the-wall” equipment to deliver data to the device.
• Just as happened last time, Mr. Mills, in the CBC report, has made attention-getting claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny (Kawamoto et al. 2002, Koomey 2000, Koomey 2003, Koomey 2008, Koomey et al. 1999, Koomey et al. 2002, Koomey et al. 2004, Romm et al. 1999, Roth et al. 2002). He cherry picks numbers to achieve his desired results, and his report has vague or non-existent references (but lots of footnotes).
• Mr. Mills proved more than a decade ago that he is not a reliable source on the issue of electricity used by information technology. His recent work simply confirms this conclusion.
• There’s very little marginal effect of your accessing the network—almost all of the electricity is needed to keep the system running
• Recent data from Sweden for 2010 that is now under peer review at The Journal of Industrial Ecology (Figure 9, from Malmodin et al 2013) shows that 2G phone systems (which exist in modest numbers in Sweden but are dominant in the developing world) have an electricity intensity of 37 kWh/GB transferred, while 3G systems use approximately 2.9 kWh/GB, and (according to the latest data from Australia) 4G systems use between 0.4 and 0.8 kWh/GB transferred
• Data flows also differ greatly for 2G, 3G, and 4G devices, so simple averages of “typical cell phones” will mislead you, especially if you apply monthly data flows for 4G phones to the electricity intensity of 2G/3G phones (as the Breakthrough Institute post and an associated email to the Time Magazine reporter appear to do). Careless choice of data can therefore result in inconsistent comparisons that are meaningless.
• A savvy Internet user would infer that the blue underlined text in the footnote above is associated with web links, but when you read the PDF version of the CBC report, you find that it’s just blue underlined text, with no links

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• "The question is the degree to which the commercialization of academic science is increasing public doubt and destroying the public good at the university and at places like the CDC [Centers for Disease Control]," he says. "Such that they no longer look distinctly different from the tobacco industry or Big Pharma. This is a big problem, given the rampant commercialization at major research universities like UCLA."
• Wise cites a 2004 British parliamentary report showing that three-quarters of all randomized trials appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Assn. and the British Journal Lancet are funded by the pharmaceutical industry. "These are the kinds of things emerging that undermine public trust," he said.

• The dangers of ignorance's foothold in public discourse are twofold.

   

  First, once allowed to take root, misinformation — whether cultural or manufactured — is very hard to dislodge
• A second danger is that ignorance interferes with the creation of intelligent policy.
• As Stanton A. Glantz of UC San Francisco documented last year, the tobacco industry was deeply involved in the evolution of the tea party movement, which promoted some of the industry's cherished aims, such as fighting tobacco taxes and anti-smoking laws.
• Given the torrent of misinformation washing about the public space and the multiplicity of pathways for its distribution, is there any hope for beating back the tide?
• 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."

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