Agnotology (WILLFUL IGNORANCE) Encore with Dr. Robert Proctor

Summary

Ologies with Alie Ward: Agnotology (WILLFUL IGNORANCE) Encore with Dr. Robert Proctor

Episode Overview: In this enlightening encore episode of Ologies with Alie Ward, host Alie Ward delves deep into the intricate world of Agnotology, the study of ignorance. Joined by esteemed agnotologist and Stanford University professor Dr. Robert Proctor, the discussion navigates the deliberate creation and maintenance of ignorance in society, exploring its historical roots, modern manifestations, and the profound impacts on various facets of life, including public health, climate change, and racial justice.

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1. Introduction to Agnotology

[03:07] Dr. Robert Proctor:
"Agnotology is the study of ignorance and seeks to answer why we don't know what we don't know."

Dr. Proctor introduces Agnotology, elucidating its origins from the Greek word for "unknown." He emphasizes that Agnotology isn't just about passive lack of knowledge but focuses on the intentional creation of ignorance by various entities, particularly industries aiming to obscure the truth for profit.

2. Agnotology vs. Propaganda

[12:14] Alie Ward:
"What is the difference between creating willful ignorance and propaganda? Is there a difference or is propaganda just another word for it?"

[12:25] Dr. Robert Proctor:
"Propaganda is a more overt form of deception, akin to education gone awry. Agnotology, on the other hand, employs subtle tactics like sowing doubt and creating uncertainty to obscure the truth."

Dr. Proctor differentiates Agnotology from propaganda, highlighting that while both involve deception, Agnotology employs subtle and strategic misinformation to foster doubt, such as the tobacco industry's efforts to downplay the dangers of smoking by emphasizing scientific uncertainty.

3. Historical Manipulation of Knowledge

[14:25] Dr. Robert Proctor:
"Until the 1980s, doctors were more likely to recommend that pregnant women smoke than to recommend against it. This was fueled by the tobacco industry's promotion of the 'smaller babies' theory."

Dr. Proctor provides historical examples of how industries like tobacco and sugar have systematically manipulated scientific research and public opinion to protect their interests, often at the expense of public health and well-being.

4. The Geography of Ignorance

[16:12] Dr. Robert Proctor:
"There are about 1500 trade associations in Washington, D.C., each dedicated to diminishing the perceived harms of various products, from asbestos to sugary drinks."

Exploring the regional and institutional spread of Agnotology, Dr. Proctor discusses how different sectors collaborate to maintain ignorance, creating a complex web of misinformation that hinders informed decision-making on critical issues.

5. The Impact of Social Media and the Digital Age

[28:18] Dr. Robert Proctor:
"We live in the golden age of ignorance. Ignorance spreads at the speed of light now, facilitated by conspiracy theories, denial campaigns, and the siloing of communities through platforms like Facebook."

The conversation shifts to the role of social media in amplifying ignorance. Dr. Proctor highlights how the democratization of information has led to the rapid spread of misinformation, making it challenging to distinguish credible sources from deceptive ones.

6. Ignorance, Fear, and Denial

[20:07] Dr. Robert Proctor:
"Denial is key. Many forms of ignorance stem from fear—fear of economic loss, threat to religious beliefs, or loss of personal identity."

Dr. Proctor delves into the psychological underpinnings of Agnotology, explaining how fear and denial drive individuals and groups to reject inconvenient truths, thereby perpetuating ignorance.

7. Systemic Racism and Ignorance

[41:28] Dr. Robert Proctor:
"Systemic racism is both a product and a perpetuator of ignorance. Historical ties between American racial policies and Nazi Germany's atrocities remain underexplored areas within Agnotology."

Addressing racial justice, Dr. Proctor discusses how systemic racism is maintained through deliberate ignorance, impacting marginalized communities and hindering social progress.

8. Climate Change Denial

[38:18] Dr. Robert Proctor:
"Climate agnotology involves combating powerful industries like oil and gas that are dedicated to maintaining the status quo, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change."

The discussion turns to climate change denial, where Dr. Proctor explains how major polluters fund misinformation campaigns to downplay the human impact on the environment, creating significant barriers to effective climate action.

9. Combating Ignorance: Strategies and Solutions

[45:38] Dr. Robert Proctor:
"Intelligent and sympathetic listening is crucial. Understanding the fears and motivations behind denial can help dismantle ignorance more effectively than confrontation."

Dr. Proctor offers strategies to counter Agnotology, emphasizing the importance of empathetic communication, education, and exposure to accurate information. He advocates for breaking down silos and fostering open dialogues to bridge knowledge gaps.

10. Listener Questions and Insights

Throughout the episode, Alie Ward and Dr. Proctor address various listener questions, exploring topics such as:

• Relation to the Dunning-Kruger Effect:
  [57:04] Dr. Proctor acknowledges a connection, noting that overconfidence in limited knowledge can exacerbate ignorance.

• Demographics of Climate Science Believers:
  [61:50] Discussions reveal that climate denial is more prevalent in regions with strong industrial ties and among certain political and religious groups.

• Flat Earth Beliefs:
  [65:00] Dr. Proctor debunks the misconception that people in the Middle Ages widely believed in a flat Earth, attributing modern flat Earth beliefs to the rapid spread of misinformation in the digital age.

• Empathy in Addressing Denial:
  [77:19] Emphasizing the role of empathy and understanding underlying fears, Dr. Proctor suggests that addressing the root causes can be more effective than direct argumentation.

11. Concluding Thoughts

Dr. Proctor reflects on the pervasive nature of ignorance and the ongoing battle to expose and dismantle the mechanisms that sustain it. He underscores the importance of educational initiatives, critical thinking, and collective action in fostering a more informed and rational society.

[81:20] Dr. Robert Proctor:
"We walk through a tiny slice of life, and that's Socratic wisdom—knowing the limits of what you know. All we can do is scrape together a few things and hope they are true."

Key Takeaways:

• Agnotology is a critical field that examines the intentional creation of ignorance, primarily by powerful industries.

• Historical manipulation by sectors like tobacco and sugar has long-term effects on public perception and health.

• Modern challenges include the rapid spread of misinformation through social media and the persistent influence of systemic racism.

• Combating ignorance requires empathetic communication, education, and strategic dismantling of misinformation networks.

• Understanding the psychological roots of denial and ignorance is essential for effective interventions.

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Notable Quotes:

• Dr. Robert Proctor [03:07]:
  "Agnotology is the study of ignorance and seeks to answer why we don't know what we don't know."

• Dr. Robert Proctor [12:25]:
  "Agnotology employs subtle tactics like sowing doubt and creating uncertainty to obscure the truth."

• Dr. Robert Proctor [28:18]:
  "We live in the golden age of ignorance. Ignorance spreads at the speed of light now."

• Dr. Robert Proctor [45:38]:
  "Intelligent and sympathetic listening is crucial to dismantle ignorance."

• Dr. Robert Proctor [81:20]:
  "Socratic wisdom is knowing the limits of what you know."

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This episode serves as a profound exploration into the mechanisms of ignorance, urging listeners to remain vigilant, informed, and empathetic in the face of widespread misinformation. By understanding Agnotology, individuals are better equipped to recognize and challenge the forces that seek to obscure the truth.

Transcript

[Alie Ward]

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[Dr. Robert Proctor]

We're going to get into it. Agno comes from the Greek for unknown and according to the originator of the word agnotology, 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 quippy war nurse? Was it a child wise beyond her years? Nope.

[Alie Ward]

It's our guest today that is correct.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

The biggest cheese in the agnotology world is here to talk to you. And he edited the book the Making and Unmaking of ignorance and approximately 10 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.

[Alie Ward]

We've got a lot of decisions being made that will impact generations. We've seen a rise in incredibly alarming ideologies and gestures. A lot of folks not talking to certain family members.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Shit is fucked and it pains me to see the divides, because I feel like there's so much at play 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.

[Alie Ward]

Studies ignorance and the comfort of ignorance for a living. Agnotologist, Dr. Robert Proctor. I. Everyone has told me I need to hunt you down to talk about what you study. And you are, technically speaking, an agnotologist.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

I guess so, yeah. That's one of the things I do. I do a lot of different things. My title is I'm professor of the history of science at Stanford 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.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

And you studied also the history of science.

[Alie Ward]

How did it dovetail into the history of ignorance?

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

At what point did a light bulb.

[Alie Ward]

Go off and you thought, oh, I.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Want to study that?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

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 2 or 3 miles high, and the horizon is about 10 or 20 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. 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, you know, Martin Gardner type of mysteries.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Oh, and for more on those moon illusions, see the Selenology episode with Raquel 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 1950s book, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. So this guy was the original mythbuster, the founder of the debunking of flimflammery.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

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. And 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?

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

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.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

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 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 them? You know? And so that's kind of one of the things that got me going on. Ignorance.

[Alie Ward]

And what about the word itself, agnotology? Where did that come from?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

I started. I got involved with some radical science groups at Harvard University, where I was studying with Stephen Jay Gould.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Stephen Jay 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.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

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 has its own set of deceptions. So I was saying, this is kind of a big deal. Harvard was taking all this money from the sugar industry and. 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 the 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.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

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.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Again, it was sort of like, what about them? 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 1990s, 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 bowl, and he came up with agnotology. And originally we spelled it differently, it was a G, N, A and agnatology. And we got protests from the people who study 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 describe 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, etiology of aids, things like that.

[Alie Ward]

And what is the difference between creating willful ignorance and propaganda? Is there a difference or is propaganda just another word for it?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Well, they are slightly different. Both involve deception, but not necessarily and not in every case. For example, I think the Nazis really believed their own propaganda. In other words, propaganda is a 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 at least used to be. And so you can believe your own propaganda. But agnotology is maybe a little more subtle because the tobacco industry, they knew that cigarettes cause cancer. And their whole goal was to create ignorance, to stave off people learning the truth by creating doubt, by throwing a 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 menthol cigarette? And they were, 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 etiologies 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 doubt 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.

[Alie Ward]

Yeah, My mom told me a story that when she was trying to lose some weight after her first baby in the early 70s, that her obstetrician recommended taking up smoking.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

You know, that's a. I'm so glad you brought that up. Because until the 1980s, doctors were more likely to recommend that pregnant women smoke than to recommend against it. And 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.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Just a quick side note, in 1937, Philip Morris, tobacco giant, ran an ad in a Saturday Evening Post depicting a child bellhop offering up a silver platter of cigarettes. With the information, when smokers changed to Philip Morris, every case of irritation of the nose and throat caused by smoking cleared completely, are definitely improved. Then there are TV gems, too.

[Alie Ward]

Timeout for many men of medicine usually.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Means just long enough to enjoy a cigarette.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

So as an agnotologist, he clearly covers smoking. But his book also includes chapters on military operations and clitoral orgasms, issues with indigenous paleontology, racial ignorance and injustice, and of course, commerce. What are some of the other historical.

[Alie Ward]

Especially in America, campaigns of doubt and ignorance that have kind of been waged on our collective intelligence?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Well, there's so many in Washington, D.C. there's 1500 trade associations. You know, the Beer Institute, the Sugar Institute, the Methyl Butyl 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 that be asbestos or food dyes or Coca Cola, through the Beverage Council or whatever it's called, there are these organizations whose job it is to rescue products. And some of the more dramatic ones are things like the Lead Institute, which years ago, going back into the 20s, 30s, 40s, they would promote lead and 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 1950s, actually goes to work for the tobacco industry, saying that he could use the same techniques that they'd used 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, in other words, 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 in thank youk for Smoking where there's the gun lobby and what is it, sugar or tobacco. We call ourselves the Mod Squad, Mod Merchants of Death. We're lobbyists for the tobacco, alcohol and firearms industries. How many alcohol related deaths a year? Well, that's what, 270 a day. Tragedy. So these groups sometimes even work together as engines of uncertainty, engines of ignorance.

[Alie Ward]

And does that change for you? I imagine how you just live your day to day life. Do you kind of see things with an infrared, a 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?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Well, sure, yeah. You always want to know who's funding it. I remember I had an aunt who worked for, I think it was some kind of dairy council or chicken council herself, even in my own family. And there was a, an issue on the ballot about whether to require a 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, yeah.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

See the oft cited 2015 study put out by the Coalition for Sustainable Egg Supply, they were like, trust us, man, chickens love cages the size of a shoebox. 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 breakfast.

[Alie Ward]

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.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Something, but you just don't want to believe it?

[Alie Ward]

Where does denial fit into that?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Oh yeah, denial is key. There's all kinds of ignorance. There's what I call native ignorance. 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 creatures. You know, this 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 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 360, but nothing in particular. They're on the watch for everything, but they don't focus on any one thing. And the biology of that is deep in our neural circuits.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

At this moment, I felt embarrassed for Robert because he clearly meant 180 degrees. Because you know how people will say she changed her mind and did a 360, but you're like, well technically, technically that just means that they came full circle. I think you mean 180. And I looked it up and it read horses have a range of vision of about 350 degrees.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

What?

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

So he was totally right. Horses can see almost everything around them.

[Alie Ward]

I was ignorant of this.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

They could pretty much see everything but their own butts. Also their eye 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.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

We have a fovea 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 inattention. You know, you can't focus without defocusing at the very same time on most things that are around you.

[Alie Ward]

20, 25 me here. So since this episode aired, we have put out a three part ADHD episode series that will either change your life or maybe the life of someone in your life. It's linked in the show notes. It's a banger. Okay, cool.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

So that's another aspect of agnotology is actually looking at the creation of ignorance even 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 surroundings. So that's a form of ignorance, creation or creating the invisibility or camouflage. And 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.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

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.

[Alie Ward]

On a nationwide level the last few years in particular?

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Do you have to use maps at all to study higher levels maybe of willful ignorance?

[Alie Ward]

Or how do you parse out who.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Is maybe more susceptible to believing certain things?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Yeah, no, it's true. 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, to recover lost knowledge. But education is very selective, right? People are well educated, they're poorly educated. There's a big geography of knowledge. And humorists 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 called? It's also a candy bar, Mars. 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 agnotology survey where I 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, it turned out about 15% of the biology majors at Harvard were creationists. Thought the world was 6,000 years old. So it's. In other words, I developed what I call agnometrics, the measurement of ignorance. And there's lots of techniques for studying ignorance and surveys you can do. Yeah, it's cool.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

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 agno geographical, which is a word that I just made up.

[Alie Ward]

Is there something about perhaps the geography of being near a port city or a body of water that exposes people to. To say different cultures or different types of people?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

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 you think of the river cultures either in Mesoamerica or ancient China. So trade, that's one of the old theories of actually the rise of modern science is that 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 a kind of mixing of ideas and that allows you to see yourself as a parochial agent.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Oh, P.S. a parochial agent is someone who's narrow minded or doesn't know a lot, which is a humbling thing to have to.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

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.

[Alie Ward]

And what about social media or just the democratization of information in the digital age?

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Do you think that we're getting more.

[Alie Ward]

Brainwashed 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.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

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 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.

[Alie Ward]

Do you remember Twitter? We were so young. Since this episode first aired, Twitter is now X having been purchased by Emerald Mine Air and richest person in the world, Elon Musk and other media forces who control the information kind of making its way to your brain are the founders of Meta and Google execs, the TikTok top brass, the one time book retailer and now newspaper owner Jeff Bezos and others who prominently attended the last presidential inauguration and are holding some critical positions in the government. Also, since this episode was recorded, we have a new friend in our pocket, a little chatgpt and other artificial intelligence services. And for this I wanted to see what AI had to say about me. So I googled myself and I followed the prompt Whatever happened to Alie Ward? Which was the most humbling thing I have ever read. But the AI overview then confidently listed the recent removal of my thyroid as this ongoing health issue. And my thyroid, which is stationed faithfully still in my throat, was insulted and frankly pissed at this misinformation. I have a thyroid, but if I didn't know me, I might assume that that bullshit was factual. It was right in the AI overview. Isn't that vetted? No. And to prove also that this update is fresh, just yesterday, February 10, 2025, a paper came out in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, and it was titled Turning An Experimental Study on the Political Value Shift in Large Language Models. And it found that ChatGPT's social, economic, and political biases show, quote, a clear and statistically significant rightward shift in ideological positioning over time. But it's tough to keep an eye or a study focused on bias these days. Just in the last few weeks, in 2025, the National Science foundation has been ordered to scrub certain words from its website, including flagged words like advocacy, biased, biased towards, biases towards bipoc, black disabilities, diverse equality, equitable female gender, hate speech, LGBT marginalized, RAC justice, sexual preferences, trauma stereotypes, socioeconomic victim women, and more. So if you find it infuriating and unnerving that there's been some shakeups in governmental agencies, you can stick around till the end of the episode when I give you some resources from some folks that work within those agencies. But why is science frequently in the crosshairs? Well, since this episode first aired, Dr. Proctor has also published a book titled Science and the Production of When the Quest for Knowledge Is Thwarted, in which he explains that when industries know they're up to some harmful stuff, they can fund research with deliberately murky results and then they can say they don't know for sure. If, say, smoking is bad for you, they'll say it needs more research. And Dr. Proctor writes that it's really quite brilliant because it captures the authority of science and the allegiance of scientists and it made the tobacco industry seem open minded and it made public health advocates seem like closed minded fanatics. So that is an interesting read. We'll link that in the show notes. And also this week in this illuminating interview featuring political scientist and professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Erica Chenoweth was titled the Nature of Our Power, in which Erica says, when you see what autocratic leaders try to eliminate, you get clearer on what constrains or threatens them and why these systems, procedures, institutions and the dedicated civil servants within them are so important to protect. So so this year, Meta suddenly eliminating fact checking and loosening hate speech restrictions. And the Bezos owned Washington Post declining to publish a presidential endorsement for the first time in decades. Or the TikTok ban. And then the instant reboot. In a time when tech giants control what we see and AI can fabricate images and they can deep fake voices and social media owners are installed Rasputin like behind some pretty historical desks, can we even trust our own perception? And I always think about, you know, even when I was growing up, I grew up near San Francisco and everyone had a copy of the Chronicle and that's where they got their news. You woke up in the morning, you.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Read it when it was delivered at.

[Alie Ward]

Three in the morning, whatever. 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?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Well, yeah, certainly in the pre Watergate era there was more collective trust in all kinds of institutions.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Oh, and the Watergate era, in case you're like, was in the mid-1970s. So all you youngins who were born after the mid-1970s, which, which technically is me, FYI, I'm very young and cool.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

But you know, 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 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 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 there's medical confidentiality. There's all kinds of virtuous ignorance. So yeah, there's a mix in how things circulate. And the flatness is a big concern I have. But it's also important to realize it's easy to be awash in information and as easily to be awash and misinformation.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

And how do we know if we're ignorant or not?

[Alie Ward]

I mean, I understand people say ignorance is bliss. I don't know how you feel about that. But how do we know if we're the dummies who are misbelieving things?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Well, for one thing, all of us are profoundly ignorant. You know, one of the things I work on is gemstones. I saw you had an interesting episode on gemology. And that's one of the things I do is I cut and polish stones and what I fantasize about are all the gemstones on other planets. I call them exo agates. 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. We walk through a tiny slice of life and, and that's 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.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

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 discovered discuss from a neuroscience perspective. The mechanisms of the placebo effect are very thrilling and interesting. So does having a pointy 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 U.S. 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 Gallup data, which is now admittedly 10 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.

[Alie Ward]

And a 2025 update for you. So, yes, according to the 2023 paper, Climate Watch Historical GHG Emissions via the World Resources Institute, the top five contributors of greenhouse gases per capita are the United States, Russia, South Korea, Iran, Japan, and then China. That was 6 extra bonus. But us very much in the top there. And a 2024 paper in the journal Nature titled the Social Anatomy of Climate Change Denial in the United States found that nearly 15% of Americans deny that climate change is real. And that denialism is highest in the south, with more than 20% of the populations of Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, consisting of deniers along the and east coasts, Belief in climate change tends to be higher. But a 2018 paper also in Nature titled Relationships Among Conspiratorial Beliefs, Conservatism and Climate Skepticism across nations notes that there is a political culture in the United States that offers particularly strong encouragement for citizens to appraise climate science through the lens of their worldviews. So why does this happen? Why does the nation that contributes the most per capita toward climate change, why do we believe it the least? Is it because you can't see something because it's so close to you and it could unmoor your sense of safety and your identity? Kind of like having eyebrow blindness. Because we tend to have more resources but are the most maybe vocal in terms of combating climate change. But we're the biggest contributors. How does anyone kind of grapple with that?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

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 what 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, we do have a lot of, 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 and a lot of other people are interested in climate agnotology, because there are these dedicated bodies, 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 against. It was just a big debate in our Senate at Stanford last week about whether to divest from carbon stocks, 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. And unfortunately things are heading in the wrong direction at present.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Most of that comes down to, of course, greed. Now, what about how power is established or maintained through willful ignorance and hate?

[Alie Ward]

And what about racial justice? It always struck me even as a kid reading that all men are created equal, which a left out women entirely.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

And was written by slaveholders.

[Alie Ward]

At what point do you think that this country might start to recognize its own ignorance and racism and correct course?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Well, yeah, that's what's been going on for years now. Right. Is a slow, steady, one step forward, several steps back sometimes. That was actually yet another prompt for agnotology. As 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 96% male. I wasn't going to go spend my best hormonal years at MIT. Around 96% guys. And I thought about going there for graduate school again and it was still 92%. So I became aware of that very early. That'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. I'm talking about the late 1970s 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 whites only signs in the early 1960s, late 1950s, 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 in the Nazi regime to carry out their programs of racial destruction. That there was this bond between American 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 that have not been properly excavated or filled.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Yeah, it seems a little bit. It seems that that is what's happening.

[Alie Ward]

A bit with police brutality and Black Lives Matter.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

That's right. Well, and of course, one glimmer of hope is that these things are being filmed. That's why body cams are so important as we can actually get a record of 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 30 years ago, before ubiquitous video, even now, without video.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Even with video.

[Alie Ward]

So imagine that without video.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Right.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Yeah.

[Alie Ward]

Do you get along with all your.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Relatives in this house still, or do.

[Alie Ward]

You just not talk?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Yeah, I get along with them. 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 clan. So some aspects of this get covered up. It's, again, part of the sort of psychological denial, maybe, that. That you were bringing up earlier.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Having studied this, I know that there's.

[Alie Ward]

A difference between research and diagnosing versus prescriptive, perhaps, but do any studies come up that show what is effective in changing ignorance in ourselves?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Well, of course. That's what pedagogy is all about. That's why a lot of educators have become so interested in agnotology, because that's what education is all about. In a way, it's about overcoming ignorance. There's no magic wand that you can wave, but the thing you can do, I think, is 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 25 Nobel laureates have taken money from big tobacco. 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.

[Alie Ward]

With whether or not they could, they.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Didn'T stop to think they should. Good science as part of these engines of ignorance, to create distractions about, well, cancer is all Genetic. It's your ancestry. It's all food dyes. It's all, you know, anything but cigarettes. So once you understand how these powerful institutions work, that lets you understand, you know, how they might be dismantled.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

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.

[Alie Ward]

And since we last recorded this, we're now in February of 2025. That list of potential future mortifications is like, oh, it's, like, so cute now. It's so innocent.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Well, sure. And that's why you have these ag gag laws in so many states where you can't even film inside a slaughterhouse. 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 in the catalog, the college catalog, that we had a 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 sun shine in.

[Alie Ward]

Please see our episode on Genocide with Dr. Dirk Moses for more in this vein.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

And I have questions from listeners.

[Alie Ward]

Is it okay to pepper you with them?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Sure.

[Alie Ward]

Okay, good. So, so many questions.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

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 an effort to illuminate the wrongness of the messages, saying, quote, my whole career has been devoted to exposing, analyzing and condemning racism and white privilege. And I wanted to support the National Black Law Students association, who spoke out about the incident and educated so many on the pain that even in historical and scholastic contexts. So this week I'm choosing that a donation will be going to them. And I support the shared goal of dismantling systemic racism. And I thank organizations who work to keep us all less ignorant, especially when it comes to intentions versus impact, which is so important. Dr. Proctor also wanted to support savingblacklives.org, which is the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council, which educates the public about tobacco products and their effects on black American and African immigrant populations. And he's been working closely with them for years. So a donation goes to them and why not? Let's do a third donation. This is an important topic. It's going to go to the Public Health Advocacy Institute. They use the civil justice system to improve public health by focusing on litigation targeting tobacco industry products and unhealthy foods and deceptive health marketing. Maybe jade eggs, I'm not sure. But deceptive gambling practices also, all to advance public health and social justice. So a lot of great donations this week and a lot of ignorance on all of our parts. But what's important is the willingness to learn. So those donations were made possible by sponsors who you may hear about.

[Alie Ward]

Now, I know I usually save my secrets for the end of the episode, but I'm going to tell you my secret favorite candy. It's Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. It's really Reese's. Anything but Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are the thing that I'm like, have I had a bad day? I get these. Have I had a good day? I get these chocolate salty peanut butter. The textures. I love everything about them. Also that there's two. So I'm like, oh, I get this one for later. Which is one second later. Anyway, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. I love you. That's all. If you're me, you can shop Reese's Peanut Butter Cups now at a store near you found wherever candy is sold. And I am. This show is sponsored by Better help. Have you ever gotten in a relationship, whether it's a friendship or romantic thing, and you go, how did I get here? Why this person don't worry about if they need therapy Think about talking to your own brain. We often hear about the red flags we should avoid. 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[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Okay, now to your questions. Now the first question is about willful ignorance. And if it's related to the Dunning Kruger effect. In which the less you know the smarter you think you are. Nicole Howley, Joe Michello, Elle Wink, Ed Mastavec and first time question asker Phyllis wanted to know.

[Alie Ward]

People are very excited about the topic. And some people asked about the Dunning Kruger effect.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

And whether or not agnotology is related.

[Alie Ward]

To the Dunning Kruger 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?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

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 you don't see the forest for the trees. And I believe that the truth is in the whole. 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 is human origins, how we became human. A lot of our deep biology is still expressed in our limitations today.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

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 gotta 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 Dr. 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? Well, turns out a lot of you first time question asker. Ethan Stoller, Aaron Maglesic, Sutton Taggart, Megan Walker, Zora Phoenix, Devin Robertson, Misty Dawn, Beth Monaco, Sam Correa and Greg.

[Alie Ward]

A few people had a question about.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Whether or not fear plays into ignorance. And Emily Meredith Lewis is a first.

[Alie Ward]

Time question asker asks how much does vulnerability play into it versus entitlement?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

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 be 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 peoples 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 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 critique. So 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. But then you still retain your humanity and your recognition there is right and wrong and you are free to critique. You don't 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.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Oh, that's beautiful.

[Alie Ward]

When it comes to the travel, travel.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Travel part, what if that causes more.

[Alie Ward]

Of a carbon footprint?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Well, of course, donate to mangoes. That's part of the big problem. The world of the future is going to be very different. We're not going to have ubiquitous travel, we're not going to have 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 kind of sailing away, as people like to say, running the book of Genesis backwards and creating this unholy world. And that's going to have to change.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

I'm doing my part by being infertile. You're welcome. Now, did anyone ask about the demographics of climate science believers? Kata Zarandi did as well as Hannah.

[Alie Ward]

Johnson also was a first time question asker. Asked if there have been research about the demographics of people who are more.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Likely to be science deniers.

[Alie Ward]

Like significant differences across gender, education level, income, et cetera.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

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. 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 foul our 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. And 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 1, 2, 3 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.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

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 Christian right. But there are a lot of evangelical Christians who do not find that the teachings of Christ align with certain political parties wholly, wholly 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 2016, 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 DB Narverson, MacKenzie Campbell, Kate Stomps, Kayleigh Douglas, Cassidy Williams, science teacher Karen Blaisdell, another science teacher and first time question asker Chloe Chambers, first time question askers Kevin Beamer and Mara Rosenblum, 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. I don't know. Is the road flat? Ben, think about it.

[Alie Ward]

Kind of asked along that line, like, without the ability to connect with people.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Digitally, do you think that there'd be fewer flat Earthers? Like, when did we start believing the earth was flat?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

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 19th 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 1830s, the myth that people used to think the world was flat or rose. 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. And so there may be more flat earthers now than there have been in the last 300 years.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

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. 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.

[Alie Ward]

You know, Francesca Huggins and Toby Krisnick 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.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Promoters of the religion.

[Alie Ward]

And 2025 update here. So this confused me because, like, we got this new president who signed all these executive orders, and one was an executive order titled Eradication of Anti Christian Bias, which is confusing because I thought that the administration didn't believe in bias. But anyway, this executive order is supposed to, quote, ensure that any unlawful and improper Conduct policies or practices that target Christians are identified, terminated and rectified. And the president also signed an order that establishes a White House faith office which is to be led by this televangelist who has been, she's been married like three times. She was kind having an affair with another televangelist, but I'm not sure if that goes against any like personal or religious beliefs. And really who people sleep with is like none of my business. But anyway. A few weeks ago, at the customary interfaith service of prayer for the nation at the Washington National Cathedral, this Episcopalian Bishop Marion Buddy sermon spoke to Christian values and family values that a lot of political leaders have often used to galvanize their cause.

[D]

In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared. Now, there are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives. And the people, the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, wadara and temples.

[Alie Ward]

For some reason, that sermon didn't sit right with some high level politicians in the front few rows. And our sitting president later posted that Bishop Buddy quote, brought her church into the world of politics in a very ungracious way and that she was nasty in tone and not compelling or smart. He continues, apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one. She is not very good at her job. She and her church owe the public an apology. And Time magazine asked for the bishop's reaction to that. And she said that her message, quote, was rooted in Jesus, she said, not a partisan agenda. And she continued, I'm not going to apologize for asking for mercy for others. She also warned against America's culture of contempt as well as the harms of polarizing narratives. And a week or so after the sermon, some folks were still fuming. One US House of Representatives said that Bishop Buddy should be deported. Bishop Buddy is from New Jersey, so I think she's safe. But yes, why sometimes do politicians appeal to the Christian right? Like, why sell a line of $60 Bibles to be used in public schools, but not place your hand on a Bible for swearing in? Did Chatgpt come out with a recent translation of the Scriptures, that's different. Where is that disconnect where you're like.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

I don't think Christ would do that, that's for sure.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

I mean, you know, the Sermon on the Mount is very different from some of the craziness we hear in a megachurch 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 has 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 and fight governmental regulation. So you have to look at these things politically and in the political context and see how religions have bonded to these other powerful institutions. And in many parts of the world, you can be three religions. In Japan, you can be Shintoist and Taoist 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, that which cannot be touched in some negative way. And we need, I think, to revisit aspects of the sacred.

[Alie Ward]

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 help see those kind of gray areas more?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

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. 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.

[Alie Ward]

Jessica Craver 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.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

They are maybe incapable of hearing reason.

[Alie Ward]

In times of pandemic and self preservation. Any way to get through to people, or is that denial just out of fear?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

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. And I think people need to be just a little more chill you know, as we say in California, don't harsh my mellow.

[Alie Ward]

Kelsey's story had a health question and.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

A lot of people seconded to this.

[Alie Ward]

They said, why are people so willing.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

To believe in wellness therapies such as.

[Alie Ward]

Cleanses to remove toxins from our bodies?

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Thanks, liver. But so resistant to facts from actual health professionals.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

A lot of my agnotology class, I teach both an introduction to agnotology and an advanced agnotology class. And 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 Pollan, you know, eat simply. There's so many mythologies about what we put into our bodies. I think because we've had so many powerful trade associations promoting sugar or additives or salt or whatever, highly packaged processed foods. So that's been part of the problem is that trade association problem I mentioned. I mean, just one simple example of that. 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-50s. But the theory promoted by the tobacco industry at that time was that eggs are what kill you. And so the family story, he died of eggs.

[Alie Ward]

Oh my God.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

So I was always terrified of eggs. And then when I finally realized by reading the industry secret documents, the tobacco industry basically created that theory attacking eggs in order to exonerate smoking.

[Alie Ward]

Oh my God.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

So, you know, we do live awash in mythologies about what we eat.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

So, so, so many patrons ask this next question. Almost 50. It's the one question on literally all of our minds. So I'm just going to read the names of the first time question submitters who asked it. Another high school science teacher, Miranda Chavez, Susan Webb, Aloy Johnson, scientist, Courtney Mallow, Emily Taylor, Kazia Wisniewski, Troy Langnick, Samantha Sonich and Kevin Leahy, who is a 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 Darke's.

[Alie Ward]

Words, they say, I know others who seem to hold tight to their wrong ideas.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

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 the.

[Alie Ward]

The doubts cast on a lot of media. How do, how do we correct that?

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

What do we do?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Yeah, well, if it's one on one, of course, intelligent listening and sympathetic listening is absolutely crucial. I think there's often too much talking, not enough listening, and view other people as, if nothing else, as anthropologically fascinating. My own brother has become alt 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 in a medical sense. But I think we need to be sympathetic and to listen and to learn from people whose views are very different from us. That's kind of the anthropological, ethnographic aspect, I think, of being a scholar or an ordinary person in the world is learning from others, however strange they may seem.

[Alie Ward]

Is there a way to use empathy.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

To kind of de.

[Alie Ward]

Escalate the denial that might come with ignorance?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

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 denying 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 doesn't believe in climate change, is that because they're worried economically that their way of life is going to disappear? Is it they're worried about a threat to religion, a religious view they might have. In other words, what stands behind these movements? Because a lot of this goes back to our talk about fear. A lot of ignorance is really, as you said, about fear.

[Alie Ward]

And so maybe we would have better luck having an open discourse by being.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Empathetic to the fears that are behind.

[Alie Ward]

That and addressing those, rather than, say.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

With the people in our lives that.

[Alie Ward]

We might see having viewpoints that are not super kind.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

I think that's exactly right. Yeah. You. You have to say what is at stake, who benefits? What are the alternatives? And until you get behind those, then it could be just shadow boxing or useless confrontation.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Alie Ward]

I think that especially right now, it's.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Imperative that white people in their lives.

[Alie Ward]

Have those conversations with people that they know. 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.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Get out of your bubble.

[Alie Ward]

Yeah, yeah. And have those conversations privately with people.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

In your life, as well as publicly to the people who agree with you.

[Alie Ward]

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 cry, either from a philosophical or just from a practical standpoint, like filing?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

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 I would say is the worst part of my job right at the moment, but I'm hoping that will change.

[Alie Ward]

What about the thing that you love the most about what you do?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

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. It 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, what could be better?

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

And that is what he is trying to do for us also. What color is Dun? How does one even spell that? Of course, I looked it up for us, and it's a camel Y creamy kind of buckskin color. D U N. So a dun horse is like a pretty beige horse. So when in doubt, Google a reputable source. What else?

[Alie Ward]

Any. Any places people can start to look if they want to make sure that they're dismantling their own ignorance?

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

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 Janet Karane and Martin Carrier. Those are people who are. Agnotology is also being taught now in Europe. And there's the Areske's Conway book, Merchants of Doubt. There's our agnotology book, or I've published a lot of other books. One is called the Golden Holocaust, which is about the use of science as a form of deception by the tobacco industry. So there's so many great. I just finished assigning to students the Wallace Wells, Uninhabitable Earth. And before that, we did the Shock of the Anthropocene, which is such a great book. So those are some of the hot topics that we like to explore in the agnotology world.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

Great. I will put links to those in the show notes as well as to.

[Alie Ward]

Yours the Making and Unmaking of IGN.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

So we'll make sure that we we put that up too. But this was so amazing.

[Alie Ward]

I can't thank you enough for doing this. This is an episode people couldn't be more thrilled or ready for. So great.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Well, it's very timely.

[Dr. Robert Proctor]

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 Dr. Robert Proctor. You can grab his book the Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, which was co edited with Londa Scheibinger wherever books are sold. And dude also came through with some book recs. So if you hit the link in the show notes to alieward.com ologies agnotology 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.

[Alie Ward]

We are logies on Bluesky and Instagram. I'm ward with one L on both. If you need perhaps an Ologie sweatshirt, a beanie, maybe a T shirt, don't hesitate to hit up ologiesmerch.com we also now have smallogies. Those are shorter, classroom safe, kid friendly versions of Ologies episodes. They're in their own G rated feed. You can look for smologies S M O L O I G s wherever you find podcasts. It's got new green artwork or you could find it linked in the show notes. Thank you to Erin Talbert for admin in the wonderful Facebook group. Hello to all the Ologies redditors. Thanks to all the folks who [e-mail] Ologies Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Noelle Dilworth is scheduling producer. Susan Hale managing directs the whole shebang. This episode was initially edited by by Steven Ray Morris and Jarrett Sleeper of mindjam Media. Jake Chaffee is one wonderful editor here. Mercedes Maitland is our lead editor and did some extra producing on this encore. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed our theme music. If you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this week, before we get to that, I promised you some resources for what to do about government agencies, particularly in the science sector, being targeted and censored. One thing I'll say is to read these executive orders firsthand. When we see a headline, we often don't get the full scope or the wording, especially on like serm, many recent executive orders coming all at once, so no one can possibly go through them in one sitting. But it's very illuminating and a little bit more shocking. But when you actually read the executive orders, you'll feel more ready to sort of digest the enormity of them. So if something's going to scare you or piss you off, you kind of owe it to yourself to read it fully because it's oftentimes worse than expected. Or if you're in support of these, then it's good to know exactly what you're supporting word for word. So you can go to whitehouse.govpresidential actions to see exactly what's getting signed. Also, I've been chatting with our lovely sea turtle scientist and coloniologist Dr. Cameron Allen, and she works with NOAA a lot. She gave me a list which we can also put on our website, which can be found at the link in the show notes. She said if any of the censoring of science is bothering you, then you can speak out against current and future harmful executive orders and funding cuts. You can go to five calls.org you can also go to senate.gov and house.gov where you can look up senators and representatives by state and get contact information. Another thing you can do is donate to NGOs, which are suing against the unlawful executive orders. And you can go to aclu.org, you can go to nrdc.org she also says keep speaking your truth on your social media accounts and connecting with trusted media sources. You can educate yourself on all that's happening to the federal workforce. Heather Cox Richardson has a substack that covers that. ThePublicServiceAlliance.com is another one. And if you want to find out more about how the federal workforce is important to you, the public, you can check out a link that will post to noaa.gov they have a podcast called Planet Noah from sun to the Sea and Everything in between where they talk about what Noah does. So we'll put those resources up on our website. And then the second secret is that I'm drinking hot tea out of a vase. It was a vase that came with flowers from the nice lady who helped us design our new kitchen cabinets. I used it as a vase and then I washed all the flour gunk out and now I use it as a mug. Doesn't have handles, which means it can hurt my hands, but the size is right and I just, I guess I remain willingly ignorant about how the situation is just not convenient. It's not intelligent. Sometimes I put a sock on it, and then I'm just drinking out of a vase with a sock on it. Okay. Bye. Bye. College Homeology, cryptozoology, lithology, nanotechnology, meteorology, olivectology, mapology, serology, selenology.

[Guest (Dr. Robert Proctor)]

Fool me once, shame on. Shame on.