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Jane Mayer

Beyond Scientific Ignorance: Seeking the Roots of Democratized Anti-Knowledge

A new article on Stanford’s prominent historian of science, Robert N. Proctor, made the rounds last week. The BBC’s Georgina Kenyon profiled him in a January 6 piece for his excellent work on “agnotology”—from the Greek ‘agnosis’, translated as ‘not knowing’. Proctor’s project was first discussed here at the blog in 2011. I picked up on the term from discussions at Crooked Timber in the year prior (links at my post). In what Susan Jacoby called The Age of American Unreason, anything that forwards the cause of how we study the propagation of ignorance, deliberate or otherwise, is worth our Read more