The Spread of Ignorance

Posted on 2016-04-03 by arjaybe

Businessmen putting their heads in holes in the ground. Image shot 2011. Exact date unknown.

I often post on the dangers of ignorance and fallacious reasoning. You can see some examples here, here and here. Science has learned a great deal about our tendencies when it comes to how we perceive reality, and has even been able to categorize the typical errors we make. For example, type I and type II errors. A type I error is detecting an effect that is not present, while a type II error is failing to detect an effect that is present. For a list of the most common logical fallacies, check this list at the University of Idaho. Our tendencies are so predictable and reliable that people can use them to influence our beliefs. Now the science historian, Robert Proctor, has created a new word for the study of this practice. The study of the deliberate spread of ignorance and confusion is agnotology. It’s a combination of agnosis and ontology. If you don’t want to follow the links, agnosis is “not knowing,” or ignorance. Ontology is the philosophical study of being.

The classic example of deliberately creating ignorance and confusion is the campaign by the tobacco industry to hide the dangers of smoking. This was revealed by a secret memo showing how they manufactured doubt and artificial controversy to quash the growing evidence of the danger. The strategy is being used today against the growing evidence of climate change. Keep people ignorant and suggestible to doubt, and create the impression of controversy where there is none.

See this article by Georgina Kenyon at the BBC for more.

— How do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge? Georgina Kenyon finds there is a term which defines this phenomenon.

— Proctor explains that ignorance can often be propagated under the guise of balanced debate. For example, the common idea that there will always be two opposing views does not always result in a rational conclusion. This was behind how tobacco firms used science to make their products look harmless, and is used today by climate change deniers to argue against the scientific evidence.

— “This ‘balance routine’ has allowed the cigarette men, or climate deniers today, to claim that there are two sides to every story, that ‘experts disagree’, creating a false picture of the truth, hence ignorance.”

— Proctor found that ignorance spreads when firstly, many people do not understand a concept or fact and secondly, when special interest groups — like a commercial firm or a political group — then work hard to create confusion about an issue. In the case of ignorance about tobacco and climate change, a scientifically illiterate society will probably be more susceptible to the tactics used by those wishing to confuse and cloud the truth.

Source: BBC – Future – The man who studies the spread of ignorance

rjb

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Growing the Commons

Posted on 2016-04-01 by arjaybe

Thanks to Cat Johnson at Shareable for making me aware of this. Ryan Merkely, CEO of Creative Commons, has written a series of blog posts about sharing and growing the commons. As you know, if you’ve followed my blog, Creative Commons is all about giving the creators of cultural goods a way to use their copyright to share their work under their own terms. You know that I have published my work, Green Comet and Parasite Puppeteers, under a Creative Commons Attribution and Share-Alike license (CC-BY-SA.) This license means that you can take those stories and do whatever you like with them, including re-releasing them, as long as you give attribution to me, the original creator (BY) and you share your version in the same way (SA.) My reward is in the sharing, and in seeing people enjoy and expand upon my work. Unfortunately, unless people take the time to tell me they’ve enjoyed it or used it to further their own creativity, my reward is largely theoretical. Ryan Merkely and Creative Commons are planning on making it more tangible.

Here are some quotes from Cat Johnson’s article:

We’re now faced with the most restrictive copyright laws in history, not to mention that much of the world’s scientific knowledge is locked behind paywalls.

Recently, numerous medical publications opened up papers related to the Zika virus. It was an acknowledgement from the medical establishment that openness leads more quickly to solutions.

“What if we were to say, ‘Let’s open cancer,'” (says Merkely.) “What if we opened up all the research that relates to this work? Let’s shine a bright light on this disease that we’ve allowed to hide in the shadows and behind paywalls, and crush it with innovation. What would that look like?”

Merkely’s blog posts are here, here and here. And here is an article that he contributed to the Globe and Mail in September 2015. Very brief summary: Sharing does not expect compensation, as in the so-called sharing economy. That is a transaction, not sharing. In true sharing the return is to the reputation of the sharer, and in the gratitude of the receiver. So the receiver gets the immediate benefit of whatever is shared. And the sharer gets long-term benefits: reputation, gratitude and the stimulation of more sharing as their gift is paid forward.

This is good, and it appears to be enough. After all, there are already over a billion works being shared under a Creative Commons license. But Creative Commons is planning to make it even better. In the welter of information that we live in today, a creator’s work is easily lost. While the people benefitting from the sharing might want to reward the sharer, it’s too easy for it all to get lost in their hectic daily lives. So the creator can be left in a partial vacuum, with little or no feedback to let them know how their work is received.

Ryan Merkely says that Creative Commons is going to work toward “ensuring that the legal, technical and policy infrastructure we create is designed to foster cooperation and sharing.” They want to make the Internet sharing-friendly. They want to make the works in the commons “easy to discover and curate, to use and remix,” and to make the creators “feel valued for their contributions.” To do that, Creative Commons should “do more to offer tools, education, advocacy, and community-building.”

For the next 3-5 years CC will focus their efforts on three things: discovery, collaboration and advocacy. Discovery means making the commons more usable. CC works need to be found, and then easily used. This means, for example, search, curation, meta-tagging, analytics and one-click attribution. Collaboration means just that. Developing ways for users of the commons to work together. Advocacy means CC continuing to use their position to grow and improve the commons.

Sharing is not about Uber or Airbnb. It’s about creators sharing their work, and the recipients being able to show their gratitude. It’s about growing the commons, and rewarding those who help it grow.

rjb

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Some Women See a Hundred Million Colors

Posted on 2016-03-21 by arjaybe

An unknown percentage of women can see a hundred times as many colors as the rest of us. While normal humans have three types of cones in their eyes for perceiving the three primary colors — red, green and blue — some women have an extra cone that gives them four primary colors. Most of us can theoretically distinguish a million colors. These women can see a hundred million colors.

Tetrachromatic women have a strong relationship to color-blind men. How does a deficiency — color-blindness — relate to this increased color perception? It has to do with the X chromosome and the fact that the genes for color perception reside on the two sides of it. With only a Y chromosome, and missing one of the arms of the X chromosome, men have less chance for redundancy. If they have a mutation in a color gene it usually means some loss of color perception. Women related to these men will likely have the same mutation, but they will have redundant genes on the second arm of their X chromosome. So the men will be down to two functioning cones, but the women will still have all three, plus the mutated one, which might still provide some color.

More recent research indicates that we might all be tetrachromatic after all. It turns out that parts of our optical system absorb the shortest wavelengths of the light that passes through them. It was assumed that our vision cut off at about 400 nanometers — blue — but it’s been discovered that the higher blues and the ultraviolets are being absorbed by our corneas and lenses. People who have their lenses removed in cataract surgery often report a new sensitivity to very short wavelengths.

Recently the BBC made a tetrachromatic woman famous. Concetta Antico is an artist and she can see colors that most of us can’t even imagine.

Some women are born with hyper-sensitive eyes that can see the world in ways most of us cannot even imagine. What’s it like to live with this gift?

Source: BBC – Future – ‘I see colours you cannot perceive or imagine’

This led to an Internet spasm, of course, and tetrachromacy became all the rage. There were even websites set up that purported to test you for the condition. Soon thousands were reporting on their social networks that they were tetrachromats. Fortunately, Snopes came to the rescue and showed quite simply why they were wrong. Computer monitors only use three colors so they can’t possibly test you for four. The Snopes article refers to Newcastle University’s tetrachromacy research project and credits them in debunking the Internet fad. Newcastle University has a FAQ on their research.
newcastle-tetrachromacy-project

When I look out the window and see all the shades of green and brown in my back lawn, it’s hard to imagine that I’m not seeing it all. Learning that some people can see a hundred times as many shades makes me think about how little of reality I’m really seeing.

rjb

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