THE MAN WHO STUDIES THE SPREAD OF IGNORANCE

[pangaia]

An interesting, now rather obvious, explanation of a, also rather obvious, present day great danger

"Agnotology is the study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favour." Robert Proctor

"In 1979, a secret memo from the tobacco industry was revealed to the public. Called the Smoking and Health Proposal, and written a decade earlier by the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, it revealed many of the tactics employed by big tobacco to counter “anti-cigarette forces”.
In one of the paper’s most revealing sections, it looks at how to market cigarettes to the mass public: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160105-the-man-who-studies-the-spread-of-ignorance?ocid=ww.social.link.facebook



Also.. interesting info in WIKI--
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology

AGNOTOLOGY: " is the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data." WIKI

[ymetca]

1. I like to call it "Uroborotics"

Which is the technique of ingesting yourself to the dissatisfaction of others. Even the tobacco heads smoked their own product, just to "prove" their point. After all, you might get hit by a bus tomorrow! Carpe diem, y'all...

Spreading doubt (as Truth, no less!) is as old as the first cave drawings. We tell ourselves tall tales about the nature of reality until that reality consumes our carefully constructed false model. Thus fall whole civilizations.

We tell ourselves "this time we got it right", and do everything possible to dismiss, deny, imprison, and out-and-out murder anyone who doubts the veracity of our strongly held conclusions about how everything must be. But doubt creeps back in, slithering like a snake under the surface of our faith. It whispers such things as "race is a lie", and "you only imagine the Earth is a ball floating in space", but very few of us see the truth of it. That the Ultimate Reality might just be relativistic.

Or, as Aleister Crowley, the so-called "Great Beast 666" (i.e. just a human), once stated, "I slept with faith and awoke with a corpse. I slept with doubt and awoke with a virgin."