watch the news to keep them as customers, and it would need to create doubt in the minds of the non-smoking public in order to keep government away from the regulation of secondhand smoke.
In hindsight, we now know that cigarette smoke causes cancer, heart disease, and a variety of other terminal issues. Your health insurance company asks if you’re a smoker for a reason: because if you are, you’re going to die sooner, and probably cost a bunch of money before you go out. We’re now so certain of it that some are suggesting that early smoking deaths could help save Social Security.[53]
The argument about tobacco is mostly settled, but we still face the production of doubt. In 2007, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists—the last major scientific body to reject climate change’s existence and cause— changed its mind. Climate scientists reached consensus: global warming is “unequivocal” and mankind is the primary cause.[54] Since then, no recognized scientific body has dissented from the theory[55] or rejected the idea of climate change.
In the five years since consensus was reached by the scientific community, the number of people doubting climate change’s occurrence has increased. When the battle for scientific minds ended, the doubt production machines shifted into overdrive.
In 1998, a public relations representative for the American Petroleum Institute named Joe Walker had foresight. He wrote an eight-page memo suggesting that the institute spend $5 million over two years to “maximize the impact of scientific views” consistent with theirs and noted that “public opinion is open to change on climate change.”[56] Fast forward to 2007, the
Slowly but surely, these scientists have produced pseudo and counter facts for money, and muddied the waters of public debate.
In 2009, thousands of emails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit illegally found their way onto the Internet. The emails lit a fire across the Web called
Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin said that all climate science was “junk science and doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood.”[59] Soon after, radio host Rush Limbaugh and a variety of climate skeptic “pundits” piled on with sound bites. The leaked emails gave folks like the American Enterprise Institute along with allied pundits what they needed in order to create a closed epistemic loop that pulled a significant portion of people away from scientific truth.
Of course, investigation after investigation has shown that the emails were taken largely out of context, and the scientists doing the research were exonerated. That’s according to an independent internal review, as well as others by Penn State, the British House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee, the UK’s Royal Society, and the United States Department of Commerce. But the damage was done, giving those who wanted to deny climate change’s existence something to point to that confirmed their beliefs.
You have to ask yourself what’s more likely: that nearly every scientist in the broadest, most skeptical fields of science (everyone from pediatricians to geologists) has been co-opted by Al Gore’s secret agenda to make us carpool, or that a smaller number of companies with billions of dollars invested in the status quo are manufacturing doubt so that we don’t change. To me, the latter seems a lot more feasible. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Al Gore, and he’s just not that charming.
Confident Ignorance
In 2011, comedian Jon Stewart stated that Fox News viewers were “the most consistently misinformed” viewers of the media. It set off a bit of a controversy, and Politifact, a reputable fact-checking organization run by the
They pointed to public polling from Pew and the University of Maryland— reputable pollsters—that found that viewers of shows like the O’Reilly Factor were actually just as knowledgeable about politics (through correct answers to questions like “Who is the Speaker of the House?” and “Who is the president of Russia?”), scored as more highly informed than average media viewers, and were in roughly the same league as viewers of the Daily Show, PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and National Public Radio.
Stewart responded by apologizing to Politifact for being misinformed, but then fired back with a laundry list of news stories that Politifact itself stated that Fox had gotten wrong: headlines like “Texas Board of Education May Eliminate Christmas and the Constitution from Textbooks” and “Cash for Clunkers Will Give Government Complete Access to Your Computer.”
The truth is, they’re both right, and pinpoint our new kind of ignorance: one that comes from the consumption of information, not the lack of it. The new ignorance has three flavors—all of which lead us to information obesity: agnotology, epistemic closure, and filter failure.
Agnotology
Robert Proctor is an historian at Stanford University, and the first historian to testify against the tobacco industry. Through his study, he coined the term
Agnotological ignorance does not affect those who don’t tune in. It affects those who do. At the University of New Hampshire, Professor Lawrence Hamilton polled 2,051 people across different regions in the United States. He asked them how informed they were about climate change, where they stood on the issue, and what their political party was.
The results shouldn’t be surprising if you’ve read this far: those who claimed to know the most about climate change (as a result of consuming news or scientific data) had the most divergent opinions of its cause. Those who claimed to know very little about climate change were closer together in their opinions.
In 2008, Pew found a similar result around the climate change debate: 19% of Republicans with college degrees believed that global warming was happening because of human activity, versus 31% for Republicans without college degrees. Eighty-five percent of Democrats with college degrees believed that global warming was happening because of human activity versus 52% of those without degrees. The more informed someone is, the more hardened their beliefs become; whether they’re correct is an entirely different matter.
Epistemic Closure
The CATO institute is a right-leaning, pro-business, libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C. The offices of CATO are not lined with people holding signs that say “keep your government hands of my Medicare”—but rather with smart people who tend to believe that market forces can settle things more effectively and efficiently than government regulations. While they’ll find more comfort at the cocktail parties on the right, these politicos tend to hang out by themselves, unable to find an intellectually honest home (or bar) in either party. Most Republicans identify with libertarians. But not all libertarians identify with Republicans.
Julian Sanchez is one of those folks from CATO who is probably too smart and too honest to get invited
