The person who studies the spread of ignorance - agnotologist

[groovedaddy]

"Agnotology is the study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favour."
>
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.”
This revelation piqued the interest of Robert Proctor, a science historian from Stanford University, who started delving into the practices of tobacco firms and how they had spread confusion about whether smoking caused cancer.

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

[AgerolanAmerican]

1. the most important metric is called

Neilsen ratings

[LakeVermilion]

2. Check out Edward Bernays...

He was the enemy of FDR and the New Deal. While disgusting, his story very interesting. pBS has a 2 hour documentary.

[BridgeTheGap]

4. Learned about Bernays years ago in a Sociology class. n.t

[MisterP]

3. this is close to my research--a lot of their power is that they're whitecoats-for-hire

their main theme isn't "the science is complicated" but "you can't argue with the facts! we want facts!" from lead to Love Canal, plutonium to global warming, they don't just invert the data (sheep/goat effect aside) but turn science itself against it--they always brag about how little gamma radiation comes out of a reactor (while pumping long-term alpha and beta emitters into the Columbia), or they'd even wait for a second autopsy to prove once and for all that the corpse's radiation levels were tolerable (since what killed him had a fast half-life!)