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Oh hey, it's that little wooly caterpillar you just picked up and moved off the sidewalk. Who's like, hey, thanks for looking out for my thick bristly behind. Sorry ipe Alli Ward back with the most stupid questions ever packed into a smart episode, because today we are exploring the topic of not just ignorance, but willful ignorance, just intentional misinformation, doubt, controversy.
Oh well, evil, But before we examine our own just lingering stupidity, let's thank the focus at Patreon dot com slash Ologies for all their great questions they submitted, and for supporting the show for as little as a dollar a month. You two can join if you like. Thank you to everyone who subscribes and rates, and of course reviews to keep the show up in the charts. This week's Fresh Pick is from Hoodie Girl five five five, who says they listened every night wearing their Ology sweatshirt.
Thank you for listening, Thank you for wrapping with Anology study. Everyone who left reviews, I've read them, I loved them. I thank you. Okay, Agnetology, we're going to get into it. Agno comes from the Greek for unknown, and according to the originator of the word agnetology, it is the study of ignorance and it seeks to answer why we don't know what we don't know. And the person who coined the phrase, I'm sure you're like, was it a long dead philosopher, Was it a quippie war nurse? Was it
a child wise beyond her years? Nope, it's our guest today, that is correct. The biggest cheese in the agnetology world is here to talk to you, and he edited the book Agnetology, The Making and Unmaking of ignorance, and approximately ten million of you have tweeted and emailed me begging to have him on. He's been on my list for years, so this was a huge get to have him sit
down during a pandemic and chat via computer. He got his bachelor's degree in biology and then went to Harvard University to get his master's and his PhD in the history of science. He is now a professor at Stanford
University teaching the history of science. And I'm going to warn you up top if you do not enjoy political discourse or scientific facts versus religious mythology, or how industry favors profits over health, or the topic of equity for marginalized groups, this episode may not be for you, or rather it might be perfect for you. We're living a very uncomfortable, very polarized, scary times in so many ways.
People are screaming at each other about masks in Costco and it pains me to see the divides because I feel like there's so much a place psychologically underneath these sometimes violent differences of opinion. So we get into all of that, and I was very curious and excited to talk it out with someone who studies ignorance and the comfort of ignorance for a living agnetologist doctor Robert doctor.
Everyone has told me I need to hunt you down to talk about what you study, and you are, technically speaking an agnetologist.
I guess so, yeah, that's one of the things I do. I do a lot of different things. I'm my title as I'm Professor of the History of science at stant University, where I'm also a professor by courtesy of pulmonary medicine. But I work on a lot of different things, including the history of ignorance.
And you've studied also the history of science. How did it dovetail into the history of ignorance? At what point did a light bulb go off and you thought, oh, I want to study that well.
I was always interested in puzzles and mysteries and illusions, even from being a kid. I remember in high school trying to figure out the moon illusion. Why does the moon appear large on the horizon? And I basically I
think figured it out. It's you know, we live in a low dome cosmology where the sky we figure is about two or three miles high and the horizon is about ten or twenty miles high, so it makes sense that if something appears the same above you and on the horizon, it will actually in effect create an illusion of being much larger on the horizon. So that's kind of the popular cosmology we live in, because if a
bird is overhead, it's closer. If it's on the horizon, it's farther, and we normalize that and that creates the moon illusion. So I was always interested in puzzles and Martin Gardner type of mysteries.
Oh and for more on those moon illusions see the Selenology episode with rock Hell Nuno. Also side note, Martin Gardner was a popular and beloved mathematics columnist. Yeah, he made math cool. And he was a founder of the skeptics movement, starting way back with his early nineteen fifties book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. So this guy was the original MythBuster, the founder of the debunking of flim flammery.
And I remember noticing learning things that I thought were true that turned out not to be true. I remember as a kid thinking that we would eat chicken hearts. I grew up in South Texas and we would eat chicken hearts, So I thought my heart was the size of a chicken heart. Still, when I think of my heart, I kind of think of like a little tiny chicken heart.
And I remember thinking that every country was the same size and the same shape, and that I remember puzzling, how can it be that a refrigerator is hot at the back and that it's the heat at the back that makes the cold in the front.
One day, we're going to figure this out in a thermotechnology episode for y'all. I promise that day is not today.
You know. So I was a curious child, and when I went off to graduate school after majoring in biology and chemistry, I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I started noticing that basically all what I was supposed to learn was all of this great science Darwin and Einstein and the double helix. And I thought, you know, well, what about you know, the things people don't know? And what about all the people who don't believe in evolution
and don't understand cosmology? What about them? And that was uninteresting to my Harvard professors, and so I thought, you know, hey, wait a minute, a lot of people don't believe evolution. Why don't we study that? Yeah? You know, and so that's kind of one of the things that got me going on ignorance And.
What about the word itself agnetology? Where did that come from?
I started. I got involved with some radical science groups at Harvard University, where I was studying with Stephen J. Gould.
Stephen J. Gould side note, was known as someone who challenged the scientific theories he found to be rooted in racism, among studying a lot of other things. So this work toward dismantling misinformation goes way back.
And we were studying things like how the chemical industry lies about chemicals, and how the tobacco industry lies about cigarettes, and the sugar industry as its own set of deceptions. And so I was saying, you know, you know, this is kind of a big deal. You know, Harvard was taking all this money from the sugar industry and creating ignorance, and I could see it around me, and I said, you know, we need a word for the creation of ignorance.
There's something called epistemology, which is this study of knowledge, how we know what we know. What are the methods, empiricism, rationalism, you know, the sources of knowledge that was heavily studied, and what I noticed is everyone was ignoring ignorance.
He says this was salient to him because he comes from the Deep South and his beliefs didn't match those of a lot of his relatives.
Again, it was sort of like, what about them, you know, and what about these big corporations lying about tobacco or lying about chemicals? And so I said, well, we need a word. And so this was in the early nineteen nineties. I was writing a book on cancer. I'd already written a book on Nazi medicine, because that's another thing I write about Nazi science. But I was writing a book on what causes cancer, and I needed a word for
all of these efforts to create ignorance. And so I asked a linguist friend of mine, a brilliant linguist by the name of Ian Bole, and he came up with agnatology. And originally we spelled it differently. It was agna and agnatology, and we got protests from the people who studied jawless fish, which is agnathology, and so I changed it to agno. So there's a cognate with, you know, agnostic and agnostic and that sort of thing. So that was sort of
how it came up. I needed a word to described the deliberate production of ignorance, the kind of things we now associate with climate denial or fear of vaccines or you know, the denial of the HIV eediology of AIDS, things like that.
And what is the difference between creating willful ignorance and propaganda? Is there a difference, or as propaganda just another word for it.
Well, they are slightly different. Both involved deception, but not necessariarily and not in every case. For example, I think the Nazis really believed their own propaganda. In other words, propaganda is kind of like an extreme word for education, and it's bad. If it's bad education, it's good. If it's good education, it rear least used to be. And so you can believe your own propaganda. But agnetology is
maybe a little more subtle. Because the tobacco industry they knew that cigarettes caused cancer, and their whole goal was to create ignorance, to stave off people learning the truth by creating doubt, by throwing the smoke screen, by throwing sand in the gears.
Playing tag with the waves a refreshing way to take a walk at the beach. How can you add to it with a mental cigarette.
And they were able to instrumentalize science by doing that. So by funding genetics, by funding the study of viruses, they created all these blind alleys and false ideologies for disease. So it's a much more diabolical thing. Propaganda I think of as more ham handed. It's just brainwashing really, Whereas the tobacco industry was much more clever in creating out by emphasizing uncertainty, and they become really engines of uncertainty by saying, there's two sides to every question.
There are two sides to a story.
You know, there's so they set up the whole Tobacco Institute to promote these non tobacco causes of cancer. It's a kind of giant misdirection campaign, and that's much more subtle than just the you know, browbeating of propaganda.
Yeah, my mom told me a story that when she was trying to loose some weight after her first baby in the early seventies, that her obstrician recommended taking of smoking.
You know, that's I'm so glad you brought that up, because until the nineteen eighties, doctors were more likely to recommend that pregnant women's smoke than to recommend against it. Ah, it was the It was called the smaller babies theory, and the tobacco industry ran with it. They funded the people pushing for this theory. The theory was that yes, it makes a smaller baby if you smoke, but they're just as healthy and it's more pleasant to just have
this nice small baby. And so I've talked to several women whose doctors told them to take up smoking during pregnancy. Again, that was part of that whole you know, the sunny side of nicotine that was pushed by the tobacco industry.
Just a quick side note. In nineteen thirty seven, Philip Morris, tobacco giant, ran an ad in a Saturday Evening post depicting a child bell hop offering up a silver platter of cigarettes with the information when smokers change, to Philip Morris, every case of irritation of the nose and throat caused by smoking cleared completely or definitely improved. Then there are TV gems too.
Time out for many men of medicine usually means just long enough to enjoy a cigarette.
So as an agnetologist, he clearly covers smoking, but His book also includes chapters on military operations and c literal orgasms, issues with indigenous paleontology, racial ignorance and injustice, and of course commerce. What are some of the other historical, especially in America, campaigns of doubt and ignorance that have kind of been waged on our collective intelligence.
Well, there's so many in Washington, d c. There's fifteen hundred trade associations, you know, the Beer Institute, the Sugar Institute, the Methyl beautle Ether Task Force, Salt Institute. Basically, every product that might cause harm has an institute or a trade association designed to diminish that harm or to cast
out on that harm. So there are basically every thing that causes harm, whether it be asbestos or food dies or Coca cola through the Beverage Council or whatever it's called, there are these organizations whose job it is to rescue products.
And you know, some of the more dramatic ones are things like the Lead Institute, which years ago, going back, you know, into the twenties, thirties, forties, they would promote lead and just you know, call cast doubts on the hazards of lead, and the Asbestos Information Association did the same thing. The Calorie Control Council. Coca Cola was funding some of these things, trying to rescue the reputation of sugar,
and these things often were interrelated. So the Sugar Research Foundation president in the early nineteen fifties actually goes to work for the tobacco industry, saying that he could use the same techniques that they'd use to rescue the reputation of sugar to rescue the safety of tobacco. So there's an interlocking. There are even trade associations of trade associations,
see their whole buildings. I remember one, I think it was in Atlanta, where there's a whole building full of these trade associations and they share tricks, and it's a little bit like that great scene and thank You for Smoking, where there's the gun lobby and what is it sugar or tobaccos. We call ourselves the mod Squad, mod merchants of death. We're lobbyists for the tobacco, alcohol, and firearms industries. How many alcohol related that's a year, well a thousand,
that's what two hundred and seventy a day tragedy. So these groups sometimes even work together as engines of uncertainty, engines of ignorance, and.
Does that change for you? I imagine how you just live your day to day life. Do you kind of see things with like an infrared vision that maybe other people don't like when you walk down the soda aisle in your store, or see flashes on social media or the news.
Well, sure, yeah, you always want to know who's funding it. I remember I had an ant who worked for I think it was some kind of dairy council or chicken counsel herself, even in my own family, and there was an issue on the ballot about whether to require certain minimum square footage for chickens, you know, And I remember her raising this to her and she said, oh, chickens hate to run free, you know, they'll just peck themselves
to death. And so she had kind of been bought in, had sort of bought into this mythology of you know, chickens actually like their confinement. So I see it all the time.
Yeah. See the oft sided twenty fifteen study put out by the Coalition for Sustainable Egg Supply. They're like justice, man, These chickens love cages the side of its shoe box. It's cozy as hell, man, actually bad news. Cage Free hens do not typically spend their days roaming rolling green hills. Though they're not out there chasing grasshoppers, singing Joni Mitchell songs into the Golden horizon. Cage free just means that they kind of hang out in a big warehouse, pooping
on each other. Forgive me of robbing anyone of that willful ignorance. I had cage free eggs for burgmos. And what do you think the difference is between just straight up ignorance of not being exposed to something versus willful ignorance when you maybe have an inkling that you perhaps could be wrong about something, but you just don't want to believe it. Where's where does denial fit into that?
Oh well, yeah, denial is key. There's all kinds of ignorance. There's there's native what I call native ignorance. So we all start off, you know, as embryos, we're ignorant, right, we have to come Each one of us comes into the world innocent and not knowing everything. We know we have to learn, and so all of us have a kind of innocent ignorance and then our very lives as as creatures, you know, it has a lot to do
with evolution, because we evolved as predators. We have the forward looking eyes of the predator, which means we are highly focused. And what highly focused means we ignore almost everything, So we have the focus of the predator and not the eternal watchfulness of prey. A horse sees three sixty, but nothing in particular. They're out there on the watch for everything, but they don't focus on any one thing, and the biology of that is, you know, deep in our neural circuits.
At this moment, I felt embarrassed for Robert because he clearly went one hundred and eighty degrees, because you know how people will say she changed her mind and did him three sixty, but you're like, well, technically that just means that they came full circle. I think you mean one eighty. And I looked it up and it read horses have a range of vision of about three hundred and fifty degrees what so he was totally right. Horses can see almost everything around them. I was ignorant of this.
They could pretty much see everything but their own butts. Also, their I anatomy involves something called a nervous tunic, which sounds like something I would wear in a nightmare of me giving a ted talk. Anyway, human eyesight is more literally straightforward.
We have a phobia which concentrates our perception and that's very different from a prey like a deer, and so even in our biology, it means that we have this intensive focus and we have to ignore everything. I mean, if you think about it, if you saw everything at once, you could see nothing, or if you remembered everything you've ever known, you would also know nothing. So a big part of learning is forgetting. A big part of focus
is in attention. You know, you can't focus without defocusing at the very same time on most things that are around you. So that's another as specti bagnetology is actually looking at the creation of ignorance, even in the in the non human animal world. So the reason that deer have white bellies is that's how they create themselves as a non object. All objects in the world have a shadow on the bottom, and if you're prey, you create a white underbelly to dissolve yourself as an object into
the surrounding. So that's a form of ignorance creation or creating the the invisibility or camouflage, and many many animals do that. So as long as there's been predation, there's been camouflage, and that's a kind of way of making yourself invisible.
M So next time you see a deer or a frog or a lizard, just feel free to say that's called countershading. And then if you want, you can high five yourself. And what about what is say, happening on aationwide level the last few years in particular, do you have to use maps at all to study higher levels maybe of willful ignorance? Or how do you how do you parse out who is maybe more susceptible to believing certain things?
Yeah, no, it's it's true. There's a there's a geography of ignorance. So while it's true that basically everything that has been known has been forgotten, it's also true that many of the things that have been forgotten are known to some people. And in a way, that's what the whole field of history is is to recover lost lost knowledge. But education is very selective, right, people are well educated, they're poorly educated. There's a big geography of knowledge, and
humorous deal with this very well. I remember Jay Leno, the comedian, used to do what he called jaywalking, and he would ask people how many moons does the Earth have? What is our galaxy? Call I am it's also a candy bar. I mean, it was kind of one of those who's buried in Grant's tomb kind of questions. But a lot of people don't know a lot of things. And that's one of the things I actually do in my classes is I do a kind of what I call an agnetology survey, where I, you know, ask people
something else that's really how old is the Earth? And it's surprising. I remember when I did this at Harvard for the undergraduates about it turned out about fifteen percent of the biology majors at Harvard were creationists. I thought the world was six thousand years old, So it's In other words, I developed what I call agnometrics, the measurement of ignorance. And you know, there's lots of techniques for studying ignorance and surveys you can do, and yeah, it's cool.
Agnometrics, by the way, isn't the only great word that you're going to learn today? Also consider agnogenesis, which is creating doubt for nefarious purposes, or agnometric generators, which are the forces generating the doubt. Now, why do some opinions seem so regional? What creates factors that are agnogeographical which
is a word that I just made up. Is there something about perhaps the geography of being near a port city or a body of water that exposes people to say different cultures or different types of people.
Yeah, that historically has been true. That's why a lot of the great early empires and intellectual centers are built on maritime commercial centers. You think of the ancient Greeks trading amongst the city states, or do you think of the river cultures either in Mesoamerica or ancient China trade. That's one of the old theories of actually the rise of modern science is that it's deeply connected with cosmopolitan trade. And so there definitely is something to isolation and the
monkish life. You might say that's not conducive to intellectual discovery. Intellectual discovery involves the kind of mixing of ideas and that allows you to see yourself as a as a parochial agent.
Oh ps. A parochial agent is someone who's narrow minded or doesn't know a lot, which is a humbling thing to have to google, but.
It certainly is a that's part of the need is to you know, to get rid of parochialism, to ask why are we the way we are? You know, that's kind of the undergraduate experience.
And what about social media or just the democratization of information in the digital age. Do you think that we're getting more brainwater more quickly or are we finally getting exposure to voices that have been systemically oppressed for a long time through large media channels. I'm learning a lot more about just how to word things and how to include people, But at the same time, it seems like we're distracted by stupid stuff.
No, for sure, I think we live in the golden age of ignorance. Ignorance spreads at the speed of light now, and with the rise of conspiracy theories, with the rise of denial campaigns, with the siloing of people into reinforcing like communities through Facebook or whatever, it's easy to find self reinforcing bubble worlds, and that's a huge problem.
Now.
There's also the kind of the flattening of data and source, the sheer flatness of an iPhone. If you're getting information off that or a laptop, it doesn't discriminate by quality, and so that democratization has also been a kind of a dumbing down. I think a lot of media and it's very easy to circulate. If everyone can pop off anything they want on Twitter and that's all you read, there's no quality control there. So that is a big.
Problem and I always think about you know, even when I was growing up, I grew up in near San Francisco, and everyone had to copy the chronicle, and that's where they got their news. You woke up in the morning, you read it when it was delivered, it during in the morning, whenever. And granted a lot of voices were probably stifled by not getting through to the press, but at the same time you probably had less disparate sources of information and maybe was there more collective trust.
Well, yeah, certainly in the pre Watergate era was more collective trust and all kinds of institutions.
Oh, in the Watergate era case you're like, was in the mid nineteen seventies. So all you youngins who were born after the mid nineteen seventies, which technically is me FYI very young and cool.
But you know, it's it's also another whole thing I look at is virtuous ignorance so not all ignorance is bad. That's another one of our myths. In fact, many of our forms of ignorance. You have to have the whole right to privacy, is a form of ignorance that you don't want other people to know everything about you your medical records or personal life or whatever. So we create ignorance about things all the time in order just to have a right to privacy. The same thing with all
kinds of dangerous knowledge. Right, no science magazine will publish, you know, a recipe book on how to make aids airborne. Right, I mean there's all kinds of dangerous things that should not be known. And uh, there are all kinds of institutions that require ignorance. So juries must be ignorant of the particulars of a of a case before they go in, or or there's medical confidentiality. There's all kinds of virtuous ignorance. So yeah, there's there's a mix in how things circulate.
And the flatness is a big, big concern I have. But it's also important to realize, you we can it's easy to be a wash in information and as easily to be a wash and misinformation.
And how do we know if we're ignorant or not. I mean, I understand people say ignorance is blissed. I don't know how you feel about that. But how do we know if we're the dummies who are misbelieving things.
Well, for one thing, all of us are profoundly ignorant. You know. One of the things I work on is gemstones. You had an interesting episode on gemology, and that's one of the things I do, is I cut in polished stones. And what I fantasize about are all the gemstones on other planets. I call them exo agots, you know, and we'll never know about that, right, I mean, think of the infinity of beautiful gemstones on other planets. So each of us is profoundly ignorant.
You know.
We walk through a tiny slice of life, and you know that's you know, Socratic wisdom is knowing the limits of what you know. So all we can do is, you know, scrape together a few things and hopefully those turn out to be true.
Just a side note disclaimer. That Gemology episode was one of the first ever recorded, and it's a wild ride not just through minerals and rocks, but also exploring the gemologists' faith in crystal powers, which I discuss from a neuroscience perspective. The mechanisms of the placebo effect are very thrilling and interesting. So does having a point to gem in your bra cause you to alter your decisions throughout
the day. Feel free to run the experiment yourself. Now, let's move on from my bra to the apocalypse climate change. So the top contributors worldwide to carbon emissions China and the US. So while many of us in industrialized nations are wringing our hands every day looking at climate data
as a whole, there's actually a lot of shrugs. According to some gallop data, which is now admittedly ten years old, residents of the US and China are less worried about climate change and less likely to agree with do you think rising temperatures are a result of human activities? Less likely to agree In the nations with the biggest carbon emissions Latin America, European countries, they're like, hell yeah. But
the Middle East is also like probably not because of humans. So, as you'll hear in my ignorant question coming up, I thought the US was more vocal and concerned, but no, oh no, we're not. It's just my little bubble because there we tend to have more resources but are the most maybe vocal in terms of combat and climate change, but we're the biggest contributors. How does anyone kind of grapple with that?
Well, both those things are true in a way, we diagnosed the problem earlier than a lot of people because we're the ones making the problem, right, And it's exactly true that you say we're the biggest culprits and we're going to have to lead out of the mess that we've created. Now. Fortunately, you know, we do have a lot of critiques and tools that we can use to try to undo some of the ignorance the damage that's
been done. But again, that's why I'm so interested in a lot of other people are interested in climate agnetology, because there are these dedicated bodies like the American Petroleum Institute, or these various fronts of oil producers whose job is dedicated to continuing the carbon world. And so that's what we've really got to expose and fight again. So it's just a big debate in our Senate at Stanford last week about whether to divest from carbon stocks, you know,
big oil and so forth. So a lot of institutions have already done that. Harvard has done that, and a lot of other institutions. So there's going to have to be a reckoning and a break with this carbon world, and unfortunately things are heading in the wrong direction at present.
Most of that comes down to, of course, greed. Now, what about how power is established or maintained through willful ignorance and hate? And what about racial justice? It always struck me even as a kid, reading the All Men Are Created Equal, which a left out women entirely and was written by slaveholders. What at what point do you think that this country might start to recognize its own ignorance and racism and correct course.
Well, yeah, that's what's what's been going on for years now, right is a slow study, you know, one step forward, several steps back sometimes. That was actually yet another prompt for ignetology. As I I I was studying science and wanted to go I thought about going to MIT out of high school, and I looked at it. It was ninety six percent male, and that wasn't going to go spend my best hormonal years at MIT around you know, ninety
six percent guys. And I thought about going there for graduate school again, and it was still ninety two percent male. So I became aware of that very early. It's how I became a feminist and involved in feminist critiques of science early on. And I was amazed that no one was researching this, or that this was not a primary object of study. This was I'm talking about the late nineteen seventies now, and that again was like a gaping hole. Why is no one studying this? Why is there silence
around that? The same theory with racial equality and inequality. Again, I came from the Deep South where I remember White's Only signs in the early nineteen sixties, late nineteen fifties, and why were people not studying that? And that's why I actually wrote two books on Nazi medicine, looking at how the American racial experience was actually used by Hitler and by the Germans and the Nazi regime to carry
out their programs of racial destruction. That there was this bond between America and racialism and the racism of Nazi Germany, and people hadn't really written on that either, So that was another gaping hole. So we've got a lot of these holes. They have not been properly excavated or filled.
Yeah, it seems a little bit. It seems that that is what's happening a bit with police brutality in Black Lives Matter, that's right.
Well, And of course one glimmer of hope is that these things are being filmed.
You know.
That's why body cams are so important, as we can actually get a record of this, this horror, and that makes it possible to address it. I mean, imagine how difficult it would be to prove something like what we saw with the George Floyd case thirty years ago, you know, before ubiquitous or so even.
Now without video, even with video, you know, so imagine that without video, right, Yeah, do you get along with all your relatives in this house till or do you just not talking? Yeah?
I get along with them. Yeah, I don't see them a lot, but yeah, I think we know we have different different points of view. But it is interesting because my mom, she didn't even know that her dad was in the Ku Klux Klan, and I could sort of tell by talking with him something like this was going on, and she was surprised to learn it from me that
her own dad had been in the Klan. So some aspects of this get covered up it's getting part of the sort of psychological denial maybe that that you were bringing up earlier.
Having studied this, I know that there's a difference between research and diagnosing versus prescription perhaps, but do any studies come up that show what is effective in changing ignorance in our in ourselves?
Well, of course, that's what heedagogy is all about. That's why a lot of educators have become so interested in agnetology, because that's what education is all about. In a way, It's about overcoming overcoming ignorance. You know, there's no magic wand that you can waive. But the thing you can do, I think is, you know, try to get some of the big money out of politics to try to go after these institutions that create ignorance. And one of the things I do I testify against the tobacco industry as
an expert witness. And that's one of the things we always talk about is how the hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to create this fantasy world of what was called alternative causation or the sunny side of nicotine, and so exposing that how that worked, diagnosing it and showing how it went to very high levels because what I found is that twenty five Nobel laureates
have taken money from big tobaccos. So the corruption of science, that's one of the main things I'm interested in is how science itself can become corrupted.
Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn't stop to think they should.
Good science as part of these engines of ignorance to create distractions about wealth. Cancer is all genetic, it's your ancestry, it's all food dies, it's all you know, anything but cigarette. So once you understand how these powerful institutions work, that lets you understand you know how they might be dismantled.
And side note, it's easy to look back on horrible ignorance and injustice and lies and say, of course that was wrong. How could people not know then? How could their intuition or moral compass be so skewed by outside sources from cigarette commercials to misogyny and more. Now what will future generations look back on now with utter mortification? What would they profess to build a time machine to
come back and fight? How opioids are marketed and have led to an epidemic our daily dependence on oil, how we vaped on TikTok or America's love affair with cheeseburgers.
Well, sure, and that's why you have these ag gag laws in so many states where you can't even film inside a slaughter house. There's a recognition that if people saw the horror of some of the ways we process animals, that this might give us pause. So there are a lot of things we do in life that are really made possible by a kind of invisibility, a kind of distancing. That's something that's important to realize, is that a lot of what we are able to see is only because
we are allowed to see it. I remember when I was at Penn State, we were calling to arrange a lecture series and I called up and it was like, this is Department of Undersea Warfare. And this wasn't even the card in the catalog, the college catalog that we that we had whole section or division on undersea warfare. And so there are a lot of things that are kept from us. And again that's why I like to
expose secrets. I like whistleblowing. You know, you have to see these things to let the sunshine in.
And I have questions from listeners. Is it okay to pepper you with them?
Sure?
So many questions. And before we get to questions, some words from sponsors of the show, who make it possible
to donate to a cause each week. And this week, while researching, I learned of a lecture our guest gave citing some extremely hurtful racist tobacco advertising in an effort to teach students about how big industries use systemic racism as a weapon, and he read off the names of a few of the brands that many people in attendance were deeply hurt to hear aloud, and later released a statement saying it was in effort to illuminate the wrongness
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Okay, now to your questions. Now, the first question is about willful ignorance and if it's related to the Dunning Krueger effect, in which the less you know, the smarter you think you are. Nicole Hawley, Joe Michello, l wink Ed Mastovek and first time question asker Phyllis wanted to know.
People are very excited at the topic, and some people asked about the Dunning Dunning Kruger effect and whether or not agnetology is related to the Dunning Kirger effect, where people who maybe think that they're more intelligent than they are are ignorant of what they don't know. Do you use that in research at all?
Well, I don't use that specifically, but that's certainly true. Is there's a kind of I link it also to a kind of myopia of specialization. You know, the more expertise you often get in science, the more narrow is your focus, and that becomes a kind of tragedy because it's you don't see the forest for the trees, and I believe that the truth is in the hole and
you have to see the big picture. I'm a big fan of what we call big history, and also the unity of what we know with what animals know, as well our unity of biological life in the course of evolution. That's one of the things I study also as human origins, how we became human. A lot of our deep biology is still expressed in our limitations today.
Okay, quick question, because I am unwillingly ignorant. What is big history? Okay? I looked it up, and it's history taught from the Big Bang onward instead of just starting when us hairy humans meandered on the scene. So big history ends up being kind of multidisciplinary because in order to teach how the planets and the stars formed and the universe expanding. You got to go back and learn about physics and astrophysics. It's a bit of a hodgepodge
of sciences, which is fun. And for more on that, you can enjoy the two parter on cosmology with doctor Katie Mack, wherein I get cosmic vertigo, which is a kind of horror at the scale of things. Now, speaking of fear, who asked about fear fueling ignorance? Turns out
a lot of you. First time question asker Ethan Stoller, Aaron Maglisik Stutton, Taggart, Megan Walker, Zora Phoenix, Devan Robertson, Misty Don Bethmanico, Sam Coorea and Greg A few people had a question about whether or not fear plays into ignorance, and Emily Meridith Lewis is a first time question asker asks how much does vulnerability play into it versus entitlement.
Well, that's a great question too. That's why we talk about homophobia. That's fairly new to talk about ignorance as a kind of fear, or fear as a kind of ignorance to not know what it really means to say the homosexual, for example, leads to a kind of alien misunderstanding, and that I think is a really important part just of human relations. Is the distancing of of people from one another allows stereotypes to develop, and stereotyping and blanket ignorances.
It goes back sort of to your point about circulation and travel. Descartes used to say, there's three great principles for science, travel, travel, travel, because really knowing the other and walking in their shoes. That's why I talk about the importance of in the history of science of wonder, sympathy, and critique. You want to wonder like a child, but you also want to have sympathy and you want to
have critiques. The sympathy part is you want to walk in the shoes of the past or in this case, in someone else's experience, to understand them so you don't fear them then, but then you still retain your humanity in your recognition there is right and wrong, and you can't you are free to critique, want to lose yourself in someone else's shoes, So you want to maintain principles. So those are three of the principles I operate with. Wonder, sympathy, and critique.
Oh that's beautiful when it comes to the travel travel travel part. What if that causes more of a carbon footprint.
Well, of course, that's that's part of the big problem. The world of the future is going to be very different. We're not going to have you biquitous travel, We're not going to have you know, cigarettes being sold, We're not going to have meat consumption the way we've had it, and hopefully we'll even have a lower population because that's also part of the problem. So the world of the
future is going to have to be very different. We're we're kind of sailing away, as people like to say, running the Book of Genesis backwards, you know, and and creating this this unholy world, and that's going to have to change.
I'm doing my part by being infertile. You're welcome. Now, did anyone ask about the demographics of climate science believers? Katas around He did, as well as Hannah Johnson. Also as a first time question, Asher asked if there have been research about the demographics of people who are more likely to be science deniers, like significant different differences across gender, education, level, income, et cetera.
Yes. Well, of course, of course, wealth is power. Power is wealth, knowledge is power. Wealth helps create knowledge wealth can also destroy knowledge, but of course there's huge, huge differences in that regard. There an interesting connection with climate science denialism is the whole evangelical problem, because a lot of climate denialists are evangelical Christians who don't want to confront a world where their God is abandoning them in a sense or allowing us to follow our own own nest.
I mean, there's some problems even with the recency of the age of the Earth in that whole view, But there are some progressive evangelical critics of us fouling our net. And that's why we need to think very important metaphorically about what kinds of metaphors do we use to overcome denialism. Metaphors of the garden, of the steward, of the flock, and you know, the caring for our own life as for other people. So we're going to have to rethink
our metaphors. You know, we can't just get away with polar bears and even the one two three degree threshold problem. That's not good enough. We've got to think much more creatively about how to bond people in the stories we tell, the allegories, the stories we tell about why we need to act differently from how we've acted in the past.
And I did a little bit of research on this, and it turns out that evangelical Christians that just means Christians who want to spread the good news, and it's kind of been co opted a little bit to mean the christ wright. But there are a lot of evangelical Christians who do not find that the teachings of Christ align with certain political parties. Holy Holy with a w Amy Black is a professor of political science at Wheaton
College and writes a lot about faith and politics. She wrote in twenty sixteen, because evangelical voters are an important voting bloc, politicians have many incentives to pander to them. In this time of rapid social change. Church leaders need to train people in the pews on how to respond, helping them understand and embody the core commitments of the Christian faith. Now, what about folks who do not have
faith that the earth is round? A lot of you asked about flat earthers, including Dee B. Narverson, Mackenzie Campbell, Kate Stomps, Kayley Douglas, Cassidy Williams, science teacher, Karen Blaisdell, another science teacher, and first time question asker Chloe Chambers. First time question askers Kevin Biemer and Mara Rosenbloom and Ben Bignell, who says, I drive by a sign for flat Earth, Canada twice a day, five days a week and wonder every day why people can believe it is
the road flat. Ben, think about it? Kind of asked along that line. Without the ability to connect with people digitally, do you think that there'd be fewer flat earthers, Like, when did we start believing the Earth was flat?
No, that's actually a great question. One of the favorite gotchas or corrections historians of science like to make is actually most people did not think the Earth was flat. Say, in the Middle Ages, people knew the world was round. That goes back to antiquity. The actually myth that people used to think the earth was flat really arises in the nineteenth century in order to basically beat our own chest and say how much greater we are than the
Middle Ages. There's a whole book about this about how in the eighteen thirties the myth of that people I used to think the world was flat arose Now obviously, if you go back far enough, I'm sure most people were flat earthers. But yeah, since we are in a world where misinformation disinformation circulates faster than ever before, I
think your questioner is quite right. That's allowing some of this craziness to flourish, you know, and so there may be more flat earthers now than there have been in the last three hundred years.
Just going to toss in real quick. If you want more info on this, watch the documentary Behind the Curve. I just saw the trailer for it, and wow, wow wow. Thank you to patron Nicole Thomas who wrote in quote. At first I was furious, but after watching that, I understand that people who operate on the fringe beliefs usually
get further marginalized and isolated with their thoughts. And since no one is engaging them with the correct information and they've isolated themselves from everyone that has a different set of beliefs, it's really easy to retreat to the community bubbles that have the same belief set. Thanks for writing in, Nicole Thomas, good point. Indeed, you know. Francesca Huggins and Toby Krisnik seconded this question. Francesca just asked religion what gives?
And I do wonder you mentioned evangelical Christians. It seems sometimes that there's a disconnect between the teachings of a certain religion and the actions of its most extreme promoters of the religion. Where is that disconnect where you're like, I don't think Christ would do that.
That's for sure. I mean, you know, the Sermon on the Mound is very different from some of the craziness we hear in Omega Church nowadays. You know, there are good lessons, good principles in all religions, and there are moral aspects, there's ontological aspects, and so I think part of the problem is they become this commercialization of the churches, the merger of churches with the Tea party movement, which itself was created by big oil and big tobacco in
order to fight taxation, in fact, fight governmental regulation. So you have to look at these things politically, in the political context and see how religions have bonded to these other powerful institution. And in many parts of the world you can be three religions. You know, in Japan, you can be Shintoist and Daoist and Confucian. There's no contradiction there. It's really kind of the for something strange about parts of the West that we feel we have to be
either Jewish or Protestant, or Catholic or Muslim. That either or is part of the problem. We need to view these things as maybe more like a buffet of practices, sacred practices, and remember the sacred means that which you value, you know, that which cannot be touched in some negative way. And we need, I think, to revisit aspects of the sacred.
Yeah, and you know, you mentioned that kind of really stark dichotomy. And I always feel like everything from the colors to the mascots. Our political parties have become like opposing sports teams more and more. But do you think that a strong like third party or more political parties would would help see those kind of gray areas more.
Yeah, I think that would be because there is something weird about the binary world we're in where winner takes all. Some of the European systems I think are better in the sense of parliamentary representation, you know. So I think we do have some big problems in how we organize our binary world, and I think it's getting much worse. So I do worry a lot about that.
And Jessica Kraver asked, is there a good way to handle talking with someone on a subject like refusal to wear a mask when any slight mentioned just makes them very angry and worked up and they are maybe incapable of hearing reason in times of pandemic and self preservation, any way to get through to people there's that denial be just out of fear.
It is odd that something as simple as wearing a mask has become politicized. You know, basically it's something you just follow the rules, right, I mean just but I think people need to be just a little more chill, you know, as we say in California, don't harsh my mellow.
Yeah, they still call out.
Ye.
Kelsey's story had a health question and a lot of people secondedd this. They said, why are people so willing to believe in wellness therapies such as cleanses to remove toxins from our bodies thanks liver, but so resistant to facts from actual health professionals.
Yeah, that's you know, there's a whether what's an idiot born every moment or something? A lot of my agnatology class I teach both an introduction to agnetology and an advanced agnatology class. We've had several students do interesting projects on food supplements and how people will pay hundreds of dollars for basically something which is basically additives without food. And you know, there's a lot of mythology surrounding what we eat. I'm a big fan of Michael Pollen. You know,
eat simply. There's so many mythologies about what we put in our bodies. I think because we've had so many powerful trade associations promoting sugar or additives or salt or whatever, highly packaged processed food. So that's been part of the problem. Is that trade association problem I mentioned. I mean just one simple example of that. My granddad. Three of my four grandparents died from smoking. But my dad's dad, he died of a heart attack, and he had smoked two
packs a day and died in his mid fifties. But the theory promoted by the tobacco industry at that time was that eggs are what kill you, and so the family story was always he died of eggs. So I was always terrified of eggs. And then when I finally realized by reading the industry's secret documents, the tobacco industry basically created that theory attacking eggs that in order to exonerate smoking. Oh my god, so you know we do live. A wash in mythology is about what.
We eat, So so so many patrons ask this next question, almost fifty. It's the one question on literally all of our minds. So I'm just gonna read the names of the first time questions submitters who asked it. Another high school science teacher, Miranda Chavez, Susan Webb, Alloyd Johnson, scientist Courtney Malo, Emily Taylor, Kazio Wisnooski, Troy Langnek, Samantha Sonitch, and Kevin Lee He who is the second time question asker but forgot to say it was their first time
last time. And also, you know all of us want to know. And one last question A lot of listeners had essentially like in Shirley Dark's words, as they say, I know others who seem to hold tight to their wrong ideas. What are some good steps to take to make sure you can maybe get through to people? And that that's also you're not clinging to false information. I mean, I think I just see, you know a lot of the fake news, a lot of of the the doubts cast on a lot of media. How do how do
we correct that? What do we do?
Yeah? Well, if it's one on one, of course, intelligent listening and sympathetic listening is absolutely crucial. You know. I think there's too much often too much talking, not enough listening and so and you know, view other people as,
if nothing else, as anthropologically fascinating. You know, my own brother has become all right recently, and we've had many back and forth about that, but if nothing else, I still love him, and I'm still fascinated by how in the world this happened almost you know, in a medical sense. But you know, I think we need to be sympathetic and to listen and to learn from people whose views
are very different from us. That's the kind of the anthropological ethnographic aspect of think of being a scholar or an ordinary person in the world is learning from others, however strange they they may seem.
Is there a way to use empathy to kind of de escalate the denial that might come with ignorance.
Yes, And that's why I have an idea I developed it called on surrogacy. Basically, when people deny evolution or climate change, they're really not so much dying, evolution or climate change. There's something usually that is behind that. So we need to understand a particular form of denialism as possibly standing for something else. If someone is doesn't believe in climate change, is that because they're worried economically that their way of life is going to disappear? Is their
way about a threat to religion? A religious view that they might have. Is it, in other words, what stands behind these movements? Because a lot of this goes back to talk about fear. A lot of ignorance is really as you said, about fear.
And so maybe we would have better luck having an open discourse by being empathetic to the fears that are behind that and addressing those, rather than to say with the people in our lives that we might see having viewpoints that are not super kind.
I think that's exactly right. Yeah, you have to say what is at stake, who benefits? What are the alternatives? You know, and until you get behind those, than it could be just you know, shadow boxing or useless confrontation.
Exactly. Yeah. I think that, especially right now, it's imperative that white people in their lives have those conversations with people that they know. As the election approaches this fall, you may have friends from back home, cousins who live in a state that votes very differently than you, And of course it's easier to leave the tough issues unspoken. It's almost harder to speak up on a family group text than it is to post a lot of hashtags on Twitter to people who agree with you.
Yeah, get out of your bubble.
Yeah yeah so and have those conversations you know, privately with people in your life as well as public ator the people who agree with you. Right and last questions. I always ask every guest what is the worst thing about your job or the thing that you dislike the most. What is something that sticks in your craw either from a philosophical or just from a practical standpoint, like filing.
Well, you know, I have a great job, which is being a professor. I get to interact with students. I do miss the personal contact because now it's all over zoom, and I miss the interaction in terms of artifacts. When I teach ignorance, or I teach world history, or I teach human origins, I bring in artifacts and it's not the same in the screened world. We already live obsessively in a screened world, and so I do miss the
loss of the artifactual world. So I guess that would I would say, is the worst part of my job right at the moment. But I'm hopefully hoping that will change.
What about the thing that you love the most? About what you do?
Well? I love dealing with young people who are learning about the world. I love challenging my own views. I love finding out where I'm wrong, what I didn't know? You know, I wasn't so long ago. I learned there was a color called done. I never heard of the color done before. So I love learning new things. And if people can tell me something I didn't know that, I just what could be better?
And that is what he is trying to do for us. Also, what color is done? How does one even spell that? Of course I looked at up for us, and it's a camely creamy kind of buckskin color. Du win. So a dune horse is like a pretty beige horse. So when in doubt, google a reputable source? What else? Any any places people can start to look if they want to make sure that they're dismantling their own ignorance.
Well, they can always check any of these books that are coming out now about ignorance. There's there's a whole slew of them. There's a new one, Science and the Production of Ignorance, that just came out by a Janet Karini and Martin Carrier. Those are people who are agnetology. It is also being taught now in Europe. And there's
the Oreskis Conway book Merchants of Doubt. There's our agnetology book, or you know, I've published a lot of other books on One is called the Golden Holocaust, which is about the use of science as a form of deception by the by the tobacco industry. You know. So there's so many great. I just finished as signing to students the Wallace Well's Uninhabitable Earth.
Great.
And before that we did The Shock of the Anthropist Scene, which is such a great book. So you know, those are some of the hot topics that we like to explore in the Agnetology World.
Great. I will put links to those in the show notes as well as to yours agnetology the making and unmaking of ignorance, so we'll make sure that we put that up to This was so amazing. I can't thank you enough for doing this. This is an episode people couldn't be more thrilled already for so.
Great, that's very timely.
It is indeed, so ask smart people stupid questions, because the only thing worse than ignorance is when you don't want to do anything to get rid of it. So, yes, that was doctor Robert Proctor. You can grab his book Agnetology, The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, which was co edited with LANDA. Schibinger wherever books are sold. And Dude also came through with some bookres. So if you hit the link in the show notes to Aliward dot com slash ologies slash agnetology, there will be links to all of
those books he mentioned, including his. So I hope you'll call a local bookstore and order those up. We are at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at ali Ward with one L. And if you need perhaps an ologies Sundvisor, a swimsuit of Beanie, maybe a T shirt, please don't hesitate to hit upologiesmerch dot com. You can tag photos
of you in ologies Merch hashtagologies merch on Instagram. We'll repost you and thank you to Shannonfelds and Bonnie Dutch of the comedy podcast You are that for managing merch. Thank you to Aaron Talbert for admitting the wonderful Facebook group. Hello to all the Ologies redditors, and thanks to all the folks who support on Patreon at patreon dot com slash ologies, Thanks Emily White and all the ologies transcribers who are making these episodes accessible, and Caleb Patten for
leaping them making him kids safe. Those are both available at allie dot com slash Ologies, dash Extras. There's a link to that in the show notes as well. Noel Dilworth keeps me on schedule and is amazing sleeper assistant edits and makes me popcorn when I'm sad. And thank you to Dinosaur and Kitty lobbyist Stephen Ray Morris, who hosts the podcast see Jurassic Rights and the per cast for being lead editor. And Nick Thorburn wrote and performed
the theme music. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, you know I tell you a secret every week, And I know I've confessed to you in the past that I enjoy canned smoked oysters, but just hear me out. If you add a can to some black luster soup, it's pretty good. I mean the whole thing will taste like hot canned smoked oysters, but just toss them in your clamp chowder. Let me know how it goes. If you don't like it, it's not my fault. I mean it is, but it's my fault
and I'm sorry. Okay, byebye.
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in store or online Tesco. Every little helps available the most stores, prices, very and express