The Science of Ignorance

American Thinker ^ | June 22, 2012 | G. Murphy Donovan

[neverdem]

The first attempt to formalize the study of ignorance came recently with historian Robert Proctor of Stanford University who coined the neologism "Agnotology" to describe what he believed to be culturally produced ignorance. His purpose was to expose junk science used by tobacco companies. Proctor's best contribution may be rhetorical, however. Science has lots of junk in the trunk, as do many other disciplines. Where method masks error, historic examples are legion.

Phrenology, graphology, and astrology were all, at one time, considered sciences. And reason or precedent is often used to promote falsehoods. Even Galileo capitulated when confronted with the received wisdom of the church. Luther and Calvin promoted predestination, the devil's influence, and anti-Semitism at the expense of reason, choice, and free will. Edison clung to direct current long after the advantages of Tesla's alternating current was known. William Randolph Hearst promoted the errors of National Socialism until Kristallnacht. And like a politician, Einstein was for nuclear weapons much longer than he was against them. Alas, Bob Proctor seems to be more concerned with the willful misuse use of science or method, rather than the study of the vice and virtue of ignorance

That vacuum was filled, in part, recently by Stuart Firestein at Columbia University, who now attempts to explain the large scientific role of ignorance in a small book. If brevity is the soul of wit, Firestein hits the mark. He criticizes the traditional brick building, or hypothesis based, approach to science and recommends more metaphors, more questions -- and more humility. Socratic nostalgia is not novel, but any use of metaphors or modesty is sure to annoy empiricists. With artistic aplomb, Firestein invokes the metaphorical black cat in a dark room.

When or if we turn on the lights, we often find that there are no...

[RipSawyer]

“I see jobs that require college degrees all the time, but many could be easily performed by high school graduates after a bit of on the job training. The degree is simply a ticket, in some cases, to getting your foot in the door.”
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You are speaking of TODAY’S high school graduates, consider that college graduates of today don’t even have what used to be a high school education and the fact is that many college graduates now are working at the sort of job that would have been done fifty years ago by high school dropouts. I am not exaggerating, there used to be a lot of supervisors in manufacturing plants who had not finished high school, some of them advanced much farther than that. Now it is common to see “college graduates only” in ads for the sort of jobs that no college graduate would have considered taking in 1960. It was quite common then to see young men who had a high school diploma married and supporting children by the age of 22. In fact I was considered rather strange when I was still single at 23! By the time I finally married two days after my 28th birthday it was a shock to many who had long since decided that I would never marry!