Today, in my reading, I came across the word "cryptomnesia."
"In a much discussed 2004 article in the Times Literary Supplement, Michael Maar announced his discovery that there was an earlier fictional nymphet named Lolita, who had appeared in a 1916 German short story by Heinz von Lichberg, and argued that Nabokov had probably read but subsequently forgotten the story during his years in Berlin. Thus, his later coupling of name and theme was a case of 'cryptomnesia.' With regard to Pale Fire and a particular short poem by Frost — which is not 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' — I claim neither 'cryptomnesia' nor, certainly, plagiarism, but rather a delicate but demonstrable network of inspiration and allusion. This discovery is both less surprising (every reader of Pale Fire knows that John Shade resembles Robert Frost) and more revealing, for it shows Nabokov in the act of conscious composition and similarly conscious camouflage." — "Shades of Frost: A Hidden Source for Nabokov's Pale Fire." Abraham Socher, in Liberal and Illiberal Arts: Essays (Mostly Jewish), Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2022. p. 123.
I knew I'd seen this word before, but where? I searched my computer for it. Ah, there it is, in a novel I published two months ago and which I'd edited and reread several dozen times.
"Memory is 'paratactic reordering' of images, says Heriberto Yépez, 'folkloric cryptomnesia,' 'an ars combinatoria of arbitrary signs.'"
In other sections in this novel, I'd discussed plagiarism. For example:
That word was my own insertion in my reexplication of what she said. Such paraphrasing avoids plagiarism but also leads to misrepresentation.
and
A Torah scroll is a copy. It is a painstaking hand-copy of another scroll which is itself a copy of another scroll. Across this lineage, not a single serif may change. The perfection of its plagiarism is what makes it valid.
But here is how it differs from other plagiarism: Copying isn’t enough. You are supposed to study and understand it. The two words at the exact center of the Torah are “darosh darash,” thoroughly investigated. Do your research. When you research, it’s not plagiarism.
and
Truth itself depends on plagiar-cism, yes? A common philosophical definition of truth is “correspondence theory,” meaning that a statement is true if it matches the world. And what is it to match, if not to be cis? Let’s give a better name to “correspondence theory”: plagiar-cism theory.
and
I do not plagiar-cise myself, except insofar as we are all plagiar-cisms of our parents, and perhaps we are plagiar-cisms of other concealed givens and revealed expectations. Do I plagiar-cise myself? Very well, then, I plagiar-cise myself.
and
I think to myself: “Todo lo que no es autobiografía es plagio,” said Pío Baroja. Apart from autobiography, everything is a plagiarism.
My novel also discusses metafiction: fiction that deliberately draws attention to how it is constructed as fiction, i.e., its frame and its content.
A word like "cryptomnesia" is exactly the sort of word one knows but forgets that one knows until one is reminded that one used it in one's own metafictional novel. In underperforming itself in memory, then breaking out of the memory cage, the word performs its meaning.
"I see. You desire a catalog of all imaginary creatures from the dawn of time until the present day. From the ancient Greeks with their Minotaur to the Norsemen's All-Father." Dr. Flowers smiled, cherishing the absurdity of the request. "From the Fair Folk to the leprechauns. From the mermaids of the deep to the vampires of Serbia — "
— T. Baggins. Soulless. 2013.
“In the realm of language, the opposite of a monster is a catalogue.”
— Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar. Monster Portraits. Brookline, Mass.: Rose Metal Press, 2018.
“Encyclopedias provide factual information, but they, like all texts, are authored, constructed so that subjects become captured. Things can be held under a magnifying glass one entry at a time, forever. Does that permanence give them a sort of truth that they are still existing? How, I wonder, does a writer account for the ways time is written into entries? Surely, definitions shift. Things change, and therefore so do meanings—but on the page, the words are impervious to adaptation, to learning. Maybe I can gain something from that sort of cataloguing now. After all, it was those books I went to so often back then, when I wanted to understand something.”
— Kristin Keane. An Encyclopedia of Bending Time. Baltimore: Barrelhouse, 2022. p. 33.
"We as a culture have been content to analyze melancholy and intellectualize depression since we had the words for either, and likely even before this walls were strewn with highbrow marks about some hunter’s lost prey. Not being above that, there is doubtless some desire to utilize academic means or the analytical part of me to understand why my brain seems to want to set itself on fire. However, knowing mere analysis will only lead to further analysis, some dimension had to present itself to disrupt that tendency. Thus, much of the work here has been rewritten, and unwritten in an atypical approach to nonfiction. I don’t think that I believe in nonfiction. Language is as subjective and impossible as depression itself, so I have not attempted to reach anything like objective truth. I've sought a means of transmission, and what remains of it in reception seems beyond my grasp. I have warped old journals and papers and rewritten them because that is depression to me, that is anxiety and addiction and the only true means I’ve found of escape is through, as the old poem goes. So through the documents, the feelings, the intellectualizing and not, the anger, the sorrow, the misery, the piss, the blood, the wasted days and weeks and months and lives in seas of ugly rotting sentiment, or sediment, the only means that seemed to make any sense was total inclusion, and abjection in turn."
— Grant Maierhofer. Peripatet. Inside the Castle, 2019. pp. 295 – 296 of PDF
"Ecologists have reoriented their field as a 'crisis discipline,' a field of study that’s not just about learning things but about saving them. We technologists need to do the same."
— We Need To Rewild The Internet: The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists. Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon, Noema, April 16, 2024
If these ideas interest you, you may want to know that I wrote a biography of a man with encyclopedia-writing tendencies. The book is Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty.
Recently I became aware that Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine, is anti-transgender. (See his tweets.) I looked up more about him, and discovered that he'd co-authored a book with Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (University of California Press, 2000).
The subtitle was more or less what I wanted to ask him: why do people say anti-transgender things?
So I bought a copy of the book. One of my takeaways is how he structured it.
Part I discusses "free speech and the nature of history." This includes chapters on "the freedom of speech that must be considered when dealing with Holocaust denial, and why we need to respond" and "the nature of history, the difference between history and pseudohistory, and ways of knowing that anything in the past happened," as well as whether it's possible to say that any statement about real-world events is more true than another.
Part II examines "the denial movement" itself, including "personalities and organizations" and "ideological and political motives and the larger social context" as well as "the flaws, fallacies, and failings in their arguments".
Part III looks specifically at "the three major foundations upon which Holocaust denial rests" while refuting those claims with "historical facts" and "show[ing] how we know that the Holocaust happened." One chapter is allocated to each of these false claims. They are "the claim that gas chambers and crematoria were used not for mass extermination but rather for delousing clothing and disposing of people who died of disease and overwork"; "the claim that the six million figure is an exaggeration by an order of magnitude"; and "the claim that there was no intention on the part of the Nazis to exterminate European Jewry and that the Holocaust was nothing more than an unfortunate by-product of the vicissitudes of war."
Part IV is a reframe. There, "we pull back to look at the bigger picture of Holocaust studies." Historians and the public do engage in "'history wars' in various fields," and these dialogues aren't the same as "what the Holocaust deniers are doing."
Hypothetically, if someone wanted to write a book about why people say anti-transgender things, this would be one way to organize it, yes? Maybe I'll do so. Or maybe you, dear reader, will do it first.
"The trans and nonbinary is the rejection of gender as an organizing apparatus for one's subjectivity. It is the refusal to be required to show up in the world on gendered grounds in order to show up in the world at all." (Dr. Marquis Bey, 19:37–19:50)
"Epistemological violence occurs when a researcher or somebody else interprets empirical results in a way that devalues, pathologizes or harms a marginalized group, even though there are equally good or better explanations for the same data. Science is always “under-determined,” a technical term that basically means there are always multiple possible ways to interpret a set of data. That’s where a lot of misinformation and oversimplification comes from, in that gap that's left. The idea of epistemological violence is that it's wrong to interpret data in a way that punches down on marginalized people. We should try to interpret the data in a way that's compatible with their inclusion and well-being, if that's an equally good interpretation. We shouldn't be cherry-picking the data to support prejudice and biased points."
— Florence Ashley, explaining the term epistemological violence to OpenMind, April 2024
Ashley continues:
"There is so much noise and misinformation that it's just hard to know even the most basic of facts. And because the problem of epistemological violence, it's not only difficult to find what the science says in terms of data, it’s difficult to interpret it on your own. We need journalists to do a better job and probe some of the basics of what people are saying. They’re legitimating a lot of anti-trans voice without really questioning the basis of their opinions, notably around claims that youth are being fast-tracked through medical transition. There's the other implied claim that if we take things slower, it's going to prevent potential regrets. We just published a review article in Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity where we find that there's no empirical or theoretical basis for that claim. The New York Times has been a particularly bad offender in that regard. For individuals, try to get information from a trans person who actually knows these issues."
On definitions:
Lyn Hejinian's "The Rejection of Closure" was a talk she gave in San Francisco in 1983 and later revised to publish as an essay. "A 'closed text,'" she suggests, "is one in which all the elements of the work are directed toward a single reading of it. Each element confirms that reading and delivers the text from any lurking ambiguity. In the 'open text,' meanwhile, all the elements of the work are maximally excited; here it is because ideas and things exceed (without deserting) argument that they have taken into the dimension of the work." Whether a text has formal structure isn't the same as whether its meaning is open or closed. In fact, certain kinds of structures may help to open up the text.
Hejinian says:
"Language discovers what one might know, which in turn is always less than what language might say. We encounter some limitations of this relationship early, as children. Anything with limits can be imagined (correctly or incorrectly) as an object, by analogy with other objects—balls and rivers. Children objectify language when they render it their plaything, in jokes, puns, and riddles, or in glossolaliac chants and rhymes. They discover that words are not equal to the world, that a blur of displacement, a type of parallax, exists in the relation between things (events, ideas, objects) and the words for them—a displacement producing a gap.
* * *
Because we have language we find ourselves in a special and peculiar relationship to the objects, events, and situations which constitute what we imagine of the world. Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual conditions. Indeed, it nearly is our psychological condition."
Hil Malatino's Trans Care (2020): "I will never argue against the importance of articulating gender identity... But frustration persists, because whenever I articulate the spectrum, I brush up against the ineffable. ... The identities we claim, no matter how complex our list of modifiers, always seem to say both much more and much less than I'd like."
Something else I'd add to a book on transgender epistemology is why cis people feel entitled to know facts about transgender people, including whether a specific person is trans at all.
"Complete and total strangers, acquaintances, and even friends don’t have a 'right' to know if someone is trans any more than they have a 'right' to know if someone has an 'innie' bellybutton or an 'outie' bellybutton, whether they have webbed feet, or whether they’re circumcised. These are personal matters that can be shared on a need-to-know basis. Are there situations where someone probably should tell another person that they’re trans? Absolutely. I can think of several. But 'you happen to work in the same office' is not one of them."
From a cisgenderist epistemological perspective, one might jump to asking: What are those hypothetical situations in which a trans person is obligated to disclose their identity to a cis person, or in which the cis person might be harmed if they don't?
But from a trans perspective, I'd dwell a bit more on the vastly greater number of situations in which no one has a right to know if you're trans, your transness doesn't hurt them, and you don't have to tell them.
Moving toward transgender epistemology is about making that shift in perspective, framing, and emphasis.
Moreover, why cis people should consider themselves experts:
There is, Julia Serano writes, a "false impression that cissexual 'experts' (whether academic or clinical) are capable of understanding transsexuality better than transsexuals themselves — an idea that is as problematic as suggesting that male 'experts' can understand womanhood better than women, or that heterosexual 'experts' can understand homosexuality better than gays and lesbians."
(Julia Serano, Whipping Girl, "Chapter 7: Pathological Science," first published 2007, 3rd edition published 2024.)
In the following chapter (Chapter 8: Dismantling Cissexual Privilege), Serano also notes that many cis people "assume that they are infallible in their ability to assign genders to other people," and so they "develop an overactive sense of cissexual gender entitlement. This goes beyond a sense of self-ownership regarding their own gender, and broaches territory in which they consider themselves to be the ultimate arbiters of which people are allowed to call themselves women or men."
Or, as Rachel Saunders wrote: "Gender critical beliefs are predicated on the notion that gender critics get to decide who is and is not worthy of womanhood...the whole gender critical project is the dismantling of the intersectional project using the patriarchal tools available to them." — Throwing down the gauntlet to gender critics, March 5, 2025
Add systems thinking too: seeing systems rather than the individuals within the systems.
Also, speaking of how we study the historical archive:
"How do we care for these traces of past lives that haunt us in ways that are loving, insofar as they offer a balm through providing evidence of past trans flourishing and joy, and terrifying, because they testify to the conditions of intensive violence that these subjects lived within and through? How do we care for these ghosts that take such care of us?"
— Hil Malatino (Trans Care, University of Minnesota Press, 2020)
Also: "We need to address what constrains care, what marks certain bodies and subjectivities as (un)deserving of it, and call attention to the epistemologies, systems, and technologies that contribute to such unjust apportioning, even as we must navigate them in order to get (some of) our needs met." (Malatino)
Also:
"Four principles to create a life-serving economy
* * *
#1: Be clear on the changes we seek
* * *
#2: Be accountable to someone else
* * *
#3: Find your people (human and otherwise)
* * *
#4: Move towards the light"
— from a March 22, 2024 email sent by B. Lorraine Smith
In that essay, she recommends B. George and Stacey Goguen's paper "Hermeneutical Backlash: Trans Youth Panics as Epistemic Injustice."
On what trans feminist philosophy can do, Ding says:
"to critique how we organize society and relate to each other"
"to imagine a better possibility of how we can live and flourish together"
"to articulate a way to get us there, and along the ride"
"to illuminate, affirm, and uplift lived trans and queer lives on our own terms, against political and social forces that seek to eradicate every last trace of our being."
For this formulation, Ding credits the work of Talia Mae Bettcher, Alison Jaggar, and Iris Marion Young.
"A surprise of being around police is how much they touch you. * * * The purpose of touching by police is to make persons touchable." — Mark Greif, "Seeing Through Police: The donut is equivocal," n+1, Issue 22 : Conviction, Spring 2015
Similarly, the purpose of debating trans people is to make trans people debatable.
On racism and epistemology
Charles Mills's 1997 "The Racial Contract" coins the term "epistemology of ignorance" to describe the way white supremacy structures (white, classically liberal) epistemology
"And not just the op-ed writers, but also regular [New York] Times reporters and even its investigative journalists who are usually held to a higher standard also struggled with the facts... As journalism, this was shocking for its ignorance. Not factual ignorance, where a reporter doesn't know something, or even object ignorance, where they were misinformed about it. It was what scholar Charles Mills (speaking of racism) termed epistemic ignorance: a deliberate not-knowing of freely available facts because to recognize them was politically inconvenient." — Riki Wilchins, Burn the Binary!, Vol 2
'Perpetual self-interrogation'
"Transition and detransition both present a kind of epistemic crisis. We accrete ideas of ourselves: of who we are, of how we exist in relation to the world, of the manners in which we behave, of the social groups within which we belong. To begin to question your gender (either assigned or asserted) is to feel the solid ground beneath you turn itself into quicksand, frantically scrambling for anything against which you can reorient and restabilize yourself. Internal transition is essentially a process of perpetual self-interrogation, as your psyche learns to metabolize the structures it’s been forced into adopting and develop a new self from the wreckage."
— Sam Barrett, Detrans Solidarity, or: Why The Damage Must Be Irreversible, eerie undertow, 07 Feb 2025
Standpoints may not be the most important consideration, but they do matter
"the entire culture around the bar, academia and the inherent design of the judiciary," says Vapor Wayve, shows that what we call the justice system, aka the injustice system, is "foundationally flawed/invalid".
People shouldn't go into jobs because they want to be rich and powerful.
Like if you've invented a job that most people who want it want on the basis that they want to be rich and powerful, you've invented a job that doesn't work even before you get into how judges are epistemological atrocities
I'm sorry but the rich do not actually have the suite of lived experience to possibly achieve a deontological outcome in the question of “should these poor people go into the slavery-and-tacitly-sanctioned-retributionary-rape box?” by consulting their case law and playing a solid game of word Tetris
I don't usually hold standpoint epistemology as a principle above all
But judges definitionally have the *worst* possible standpoints with which to be making decisions as judges, *if* we assume the intended output from this system is purely deontological outcomes
January 2025: Government deleting science from government sites is epistemicide. Talia Bhatt, Bluesky
"We read sentences in a single flow of information, like a song played on a wind instrument, but life is layered, like a symphony. A faithful textual simulation of existence would require at least ten synchronous columns of scrolling text—one for emotions, one or two for conscious and subconscious thoughts, five for the main senses, and so on. When we convert experiences into words, we omit most of life, jumping between the parallel columns."
— Tao Lin, Substack note, Feb 19, 2025
Charles W. Mills in The Racial Contract describes "an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made." There is widespread "white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception on matters related to race." The Racial Contract "requires a certain schedule of structured blindnesses and opacities in order to establish and maintain the white polity."
"...we could even minimize the distinction between word and object. Classical Hebrew makes no distinction between object, name, and idea. For example, the term for ‘word’ (dabar) can mean, at the same time, word, thing, matter, affair, action, deed, event, and so on. ... If there is no difference between the physical body of a dog, the word ‘dog’, and our mental image of a dog, the way we use the word ‘dog’ will necessarily have a huge impact on what a dog is." (Matt Fujimoto, A Rose By Any Other Name, Medium, Feb 16, 2025)
"Scientific consensus" is a "model." It has a "shared foundation," so it "exists for a reason." Yet we don't let it "harden into orthodoxy." We "doubt," and "it evolves." (Anna Dorn, Medium newsletter, April 24, 2025)
"A preschooler was placed in a room with a marshmallow and given a choice: eat it now, or wait a few minutes and receive two marshmallows instead...A child’s willingness to wait turned out to have less to do with innate self-control and more to do with trust. Kids who believed adults would keep their promises were more likely to wait. Kids from less stable backgrounds often took what they could while it was available. Choosing the marshmallow wasn’t a failure of character. It was a rational response to uncertainty shaped by experience...people are better able to summon self-control when they feel a sense of autonomy, interest, or purpose. Rather than a fixed trait or a limited resource, self-control may work more like a dynamic feedback system, helping us navigate shifting priorities and mental energy...What if self-control came less from trying harder, and more from designing lives that work with our natural drives?" — Anna Dorn, Medium Newsletter, May 1, 2025
Blake Shapiro uses Gatsby to talk about "a question about how reality and media work...the effect of over-saturation on our relationship to reality...our society is so inundated with representations that we can now only relate to the idea of things, rather than to the things themselves...even the most violent representations lose their force." This "goes back at least as far as Jacques Lacan — who, in Écrits, writes about the imago: that we relate to the idea of something, not the thing itself." [People who've never met a trans person relate to their idea of a trans person, not an actual trans person, and that is why they're anxious about trans kids, because they don't know one.] Also, consider "what Jacques Derrida calls ‘iterability’ — essentially a sophisticated version of the idea that, once a person says something, their words can be taken out of context." ["Trans women are women," perhaps.] "the ‘idea’ of Gatsby calcifies, and it becomes harder and harder not to butt up against it when we try to connect to the novel...this happens, to some extent, with all ‘classics’ — but Gatsby is the ur-case. The result of this distance between us and the text, is that the accepted meaning of Gatsby becomes vaguer and vaguer — approaching what is sometimes termed an ‘empty signifier.’" ['Trans' becomes an ur-case of a word that means whatever you want it to mean.] It's "the potential fate of any and every concept...The easier it becomes to hang concepts like ‘capitalism’ and ‘democracy’ in a gallery of machine-generated memes, the harder it becomes to have a rigorous and genuine engagement with them." [When you who are not trans and do not know a trans person are meming about 'trans', the very act of your meming will make it harder to have a rigorous engagement.] ‘The Great Gatsby’ turns 100: How old is our mass-cultural crisis? Blake Shapiro, Medium, May 3, 2025
"... to have a mental model (or ‘schema’) of a person in our minds we have to know them. ... If we don’t know the person at all, it [what fills the blank in our knowledge] is probably all stereotype, which is unlikely to be particularly useful.
* * *
But let’s take a breath and think about precisely what it is they’re objecting to: They are objecting to a lens by which another group of human beings can be perceived as human beings. Bigotry, including transphobia, is characterised by the intransigent belief that people’s lived reality is subordinate to the bigot’s assumptions about them."
— Catriona Faolain, Trans People are Hard to Understand: What’s this empathy thing all about?, Medium, August 2, 2025
Anita Naidu asks:
"Who frames the narrative?
Who gets trusted to define the crisis?
And whose knowledge is seen as explanatory—not just illustrative?
"...Eagleton looks at both micro and macro issues of criticism. The first chapter looks at opening lines, paragraphs, scenes on the micro-level: ambiguities of language, sounds, syntax, word choice, etc. After this introduction, he zooms out to the macro level spending a chapter each on Character, Narrative, Interpretation and Value." — a review of How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton
"Seneca believed...arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the mind's weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style."
Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy, Vintage Books, 2000. p 92.
"The magic of words still remains for me. I prefer them to ideas."
Chicago newspaperman Ben Hecht, quoted by Ron Powers, in The Beast, the Eunuch, and the Glass-Eyed Child. New York: Anchor Books, 1990. p xvii.
"Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in the types and images. It (the world) will not receive it in any other fashion."
Gospel of Philip
"I realized that only in music could I find the answer I was seeking to the questions of the previous evening. Argument I could follow, it weighed with me, yet I could decide nothing from it. "
Fred Hoyle. October the First is Too Late. Connecticut: Fawcett, 1966, 1968. p 156.
"Walking is the clearest way for me to participate in life, I think, and that’s the best I can do."
Lizzy Stewart, Walking Distance, Avery Publishing, 2019. Excerpted as
An Ode to Women Who Walk,
From Virginia Woolf to Greta Gerwig on LitHub, November 21, 2019.
"But I think everyone should have a little philosophy, Thomas said. It helps, a little. It helps. It is good. It is about half as good as music."
Donald Barthelme. The Dead Father. New York: Pocket Books, 1975. p 76.
If you'd like to learn more about my work, read my books.
Actual cathedrals of learning
“Oxford made me,” Jan Morris says in her memoir Conundrum, speaking of her first boarding school, her undergraduate years, and adult home. She is speaking of transcendent purpose embodied in a physical place. “I know its fault too well,” she admits, but “it remains for me nevertheless, in its frayed and battered integrity, an image of what I admire most in the world: a presence so old and true that it absorbs time and change like light into a prism, only enriching itself by the process, and finding nothing alien except intolerance.” She adds: “For near the heart of the Oxford ethos lies the grand and comforting truth that there is no norm. We are all different; none of us is entirely wrong; to understand is to forgive.”
She was brought as a child to “the cathedral of Christ Church, Oxford.” She says:
“Every day for five years, holidays apart, I went to service there, and its combination of architecture, music, pageantry, literature, suggestion, association, and sanctity powerfully affected my introspections. I knew that building almost as I knew my own home…An ancient holy building is conducive to secrets, and my secret became so intermingled with the shapes, sounds, and patterns of the cathedral that to this day, when I go back there to evensong, I feel an air of complicity.”
Similarly, Judith Shulevitz:
"He [Paul de Man] and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the critics of the Yale School (Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hills Miller, Harold Bloom) had revealed the volatile core of instability and indeterminacy lurking underneath every philosophical assertion, every scientific method, every work of literature. Nothing we’d learned (we learned) meant what it claimed to mean. All texts were allegories of their own blindness. They glossed over the unthinkable. Our job was to think it for them. We would turn rhetoric against literature and literature against everything else, and come up with something cold and pure and undeluded.
All this gave me an unusually palpable sense of purpose. I was a mole burrowing under the foundations of the tottering edifice of Knowledge. I hung out in the underground undergraduate library, so much uglier and friendlier than the classics library, all bright lights and stale air and soft-cushioned sectional sofas, and read the authors of the new canon: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rousseau, Freud, Baudelaire."
"Universities have a fondness for these structures, which sometimes, as with the University of London's Senate House, impractically and overheatingly house libraries. Berkeley's Sather Tower, a campanile whose carillon still plays regularly, houses fossils of animals retrieved from the tar pits of California, as though to figure the transformation of life into stone and then stone into the second life of knowing. When I first visited the University of Pittsburgh I thought the name 'Cathedral of Learning' given to the 160-metre (535-ft) structure that dominates the campus must be an affectionate joke. But that indeed has been its official name since the first class was held in it in 1931. It is in fact only the fourth tallest educational building in the world, after the main building of the Moscow State University, the Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower in Tokyo (so named because its curved shape, resembling a bud, seed or pair of praying hands, suggests a nurturing structure for those it contains) and the helical Mode Gakuen Spiral Towers in Nagoya."
Differentiating "women's knowledge" from the default knowledge that men have
A comment by Ursula LeGuin.
"So I began to think: If I’m a woman, why am I writing books in which men are at the center and primary, and women are marginal and secondary — as if I were a man?
Because editors expect me to, reviewers expect me to.
* * *
I didn’t know how. It took me a while to learn. And it was other women who taught me. The feminist writers of the sixties and seventies. The women authors of older generations, who’d been buried by the masculinist literary establishment and were rediscovered, celebrated, reborn in books like The Norton Anthology of Women Writers. And my fellow fiction writers, mostly younger than I, women writing as women, about women, in defiance of the literary old guard and the genre old guard too. I learned courage from them.
But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior — women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light.
But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?
* * *
We’ve lived long enough in the dark. We have an equal right to daylight, an equal right to learn and teach reason, science, art, and all the rest."
Edward Said wrote in Orientalism: "Flaubert felt in the Orient, first, that ‘the more you concentrate on it [in detail] the less you grasp the whole,’ and then, second, that ‘the pieces fall into place of themselves.’ …this was an epistemological difficulty for which, of course, the discipline of Orientalism existed."
Reification
Saskia Vogel:
A book as an object seems so absolute, so fixed, hallowed and concrete. I’ve come to think of this as a sort of intrusive thought. I acknowledge it, and hope the thought will leave me alone. I prefer to think of a text as a transmission and a book as something that pulps in water.
The idea of the hallowed book has its origin in my early education and perhaps in my early years as a reader, in awe of books and what they hold. Perhaps also in my writing ambitions: how does a person write a book good enough for it to be published? For a long time, these questions ran alongside ideas of 'perfection.' But nothing is perfect. And the more I think about literature, the less I need it to meet any sort of ideal or expectation. I’m most interested in how a book will spring to life inside a reader, how they will carry it with them and pass it on. The life the book lives without me."
"The female fig wasp burrows into the male fig, called the caprifig, and the process, in turn, is called caprification, when she lays eggs and those eggs hatch. The hatchlings are blind, flightless males and young females. They have incestuous sex. The now pregnant female wasps, the ones Aristotle and Theophrastus call psenes, burst out of the skin of the caprifig and go off to burrow anew into other figs. Both erroneously thought this was a kind of spontaneous wasp generation, but to be fair the actual mechanism is hard to discern such that the biology of it is still a topic now.
The female fig needs to be pollinated to fruit. Bees can’t do this, nor wind, because the inverted flower is sealed up inside itself. So sometimes a female wasp doesn’t crawl into a male fig, where she can lay eggs. Sometimes she crawls into a female fig, where she starves and dies, but in the process pollinates the inverted flower, which can then fruit. The body of the wasp is absorbed by the growing flesh of the fig. You do eat it, in a sense, but you wouldn’t know if I hadn’t told you.
This is called commensalism, a form of parasitism in which the parasite doesn’t actively harm the host. More properly, it’s even a mutualism, dead wasps and male fig husks aside, because the fig and the wasp need each other to reproduce." (pp. 5–6)
It goes on:
"Criticism is a mutualism as parasites like me go, or at least a commensalism, pollinating novels to make more novels; Winckelmann’s halls of beautiful young men in Greek sculpture making the hot breath of living beautiful young men into bildungsroman, which in turn end up in marble of their own. The critical gaze is tearing apart, clawing into the soft central flesh of the tree bud. (p. 7)
It’s a sexual reproductive process, yet “somehow queer. Criticism, too, is queer in this way, generative outside the two-gendered model, outside the matrimonial light of day way of reproducing people, wasps, figs, or knowledge." (p. 7)
To reveal the reason why I'm referencing this metaphor here, I must show this comment too:
"You don’t become a fig wasp on the flanks of the neoclassical tradition without having inhabited it, parasitized it yourself first as practice. This is an education. You tell yourself you are Achilles (or sometimes, Patroclus), you rationalize your world with these models, themselves parasitic on a tradition that you did not yourself make. You learn to be by being them, by pushing into them and unfolding your wet wings." (p. 8)
Otherwise, you might find yourself not the parasite, but the host:
"This is what happens when you get too close to art, undiluted, when criticism isn’t there. It lays its eggs in you. It breeds. It becomes your first kiss, your first lover, your first experience of everything before you even open your eyes. It is there, coursing along in your blood like a pleasing contaminate you can’t ever filter out. ... You contemplate, at some point, if you are merely somebody else’s, a dead author’s perhaps, a psen, laid in the fig of a book." (p. 12)
The Outside Folds In
Erik Davis in High Weirdness:
...psychogenic networks stage the 'production of interiorities,' and they do so precisely by crossing inside and outside. In his account of indigenous spiritual beings, Latour declares that such entities 'are no longer representations, imaginings, phantasms projected from the inside toward the outside; they unquestionably come from elsewhere, they impose themselves.' Here the 'inside' of subjectivity appear as an uncanny fold of the outside, a site where the exteriority of signs and of a-signifying forces impress themselves within.
Lacan coined a marvelous term for this fold: extimacy (extimité), a portmanteau of exterior and intimacy. Extimacy is the intimate other, the unconscious that intrudes from the outside.
Omnology
One might want to study everything broadly. Howard Bloom calls it "'omnology,' a field dedicated to the most zoomed-out cross-disciplinary search for knowledge." For most people, however, this is generally not a reasonable or useful goal. You can't build a beautiful cathedral out of Anything and Everything.
Megalogue
Veering in another direction, one might have a hyperfocused interest in just one subject and hope that everyone else wants to discuss the same thing. Amitai Etzioni calls this a "megalogue." Among "moral megalogues," as he wrote in 2009, "Recent issues have included the legitimacy of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and whether gay couples can legally marry. In earlier decades, women's rights and minority rights were topics of such discussions. Megalogues involve millions of members of a society exchanging views with one another at workplaces, during family gatherings, in the media, and at public events. They are often contentious and passionate, and, while they have no clear beginning or endpoint, they tend to lead to changes in a society's culture and its members' behavior." James M. Gustafson said that "participation in a serious moral dialogue moving toward consensus is more important than the consensus itself...[because] participation in moral discourse deepens, broadens, and extends [people's] capacity to make responsible moral judgments."
Data bank
A more modern idea is that a giant data trove of beliefs and thoughts could be used to reconstruct a human personality and give it life inside a robot. This is a bit different from the idea of a cathedral, because, while a building designed for worship pays homage to a larger tradition, a personality data bank pays homage only to oneself.
Architecture as attitude
"...I tell people what they don’t want to hear with a hood punk doll aesthetic. When I think about my aesthetic, I think about architecture. In some ways, when it comes to my personal style, architecture inspires me almost as much as music does. When I think about what I want to communicate through my style, I think about open concept spaces. I think expansive, liberated, present and I’m drawn to wear things that make me feel big, expanded, and beyond societal expectations that fit within a container to make people most comfortable." — Bunny McKensie Mack, quoted in "Everything And More: On the Makings of Bunny McKensie Mack," by Tempestt Hazel, May 18, 2022, Sixty Inches From Center
Another association with 'cathedral'
"Longtime readers will be familiar with Curtis Yarvin, who blogged for years as Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin founded neoreactionism AKA the Dark Enlightenment, a political movement popular among certain tech circles. Neoreactionism calls for the fall of democracies and a return to monarchy and aristocracy. Shockingly, neoreactionaries believe that new aristocracy should come from tech and business. Yarvin's writing fixates on the power of the so-called 'Cathedrals': media, academia, and government institutions which he and his followers believe shape public opinion and rule America. (It's worth noting that Yarvin's parents were government civil servants.)"
— Vance-Thiel-Yarvin 2024: The Neoreactionary Dream Team. From JD Vance to Project 2025, how Peter Thiel and a guy who wants the US to be a monarchy (really!) are driving Trump’s MAGA agenda. Melissa Ryan. July 21, 2024.
A. V. Marraccini. We The Parasites. Seattle, Wash.: Sublunary Editions, 2023.
Erik Davis. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. London: Strange Attractor Press, 2019. 2.3.0: Experiments.
"Grand Inquisitor" by Nando Pelusi, on the work of Howard Bloom, author of The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain. Psychology Today, January/February 2008, p. 41.
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
"Get Rich Now." Amitai Etzioni. Excerpted from The New Republic (June 17, 2009). Reprinted in UTNE Reader (Jan-Feb 2010), p. 41.
James M. Gustafson. "The Church: A Community of Moral Discourse." in The Church as Moral Decision-Maker (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1970), pp. 83-95. Quoted in James Calvin Davis. In Defense of Civility: How Religion Can Unite America on Seven Moral Issues that Divide Us. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. pp. 168-169.
"America is the only country where a significant proportion of the population believes," or so comedian David Letterman suggests we already know, "that professional wrestling is real but the moon landing was faked."
People avoid knowledge
Information avoidance, according to several authors in a 2010 paper published in the Review of General Psychology, is "any behavior designed to prevent or delay the acquisition of available but potentially unwanted information."
On the topic of avoidance, Katy Montgomerie in 2023 notes a similarity in argument styles of “GC people” (i.e., so-called Gender Critical people) and “religious cultists.” Montgomerie says:
“When you find something in their worldview that's an internal contraction or that's disproved by evidence they do this thing where they avoid confronting the realisation just before they get there. Like you set them up and just before they close the loop they deflect. They do it in a way where it could only happen as consistently as it does if they were already aware of the contradiction and are just unwilling to face it.” (tweet 1, tweet 2)
One way to avoid learning: Choose leaders and authorities who don't know anything
Someone who is committed to a conspiracy theory probably spends a lot of time deep in their denialism, because they have to buttress those walls, and so they have less time to spend learning things broadly. Things they learn about the world broadly might eventually challenge their conspiracy theory on a limited topic, and they won't allow that. This amounts to a refusal to have useful knowledge of multiple kinds. When people elevate these limited knowledge conspiracy theorists to, say, political office, everyone is stuck with an incompetent leader.
Anti-trans activists make political parties lose elections. Their singular Qanon-style obsession makes them incapable of *any* sort of job, let alone political office. Hire one as a kitchen hand, they'll refuse to combine the vegetables & tell you George Soros made the plates.
Lawrence Davidson characterized the arguments in Rick Shenkman's 2008 book Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter as saying that Americans are: "(1) ignorant about major international events, (2) knew little about how their own government runs and who runs it, (3) were nonetheless willing to accept government positions and policies even though a moderate amount of critical thought suggested they were bad for the country, and (4) were readily swayed by stereotyping, simplistic solutions, irrational fears and public relations babble." Davidson then said that this is "a default position for any population," but that it is still a concern when, for example, "polls show [that] over half of American adults don’t know which country dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or that 30 percent don’t know what the Holocaust was." Such confusion isn't unique to the United States. "In the middle of March 2008," wrote Javier Cercas (translated by Anne McLean) in The Anatomy of a Moment, "I read that according to a poll published in the United Kingdom almost a quarter of Britons thought Winston Churchill was a fictional character."
In 2013, a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation (reported in The Week on May 10) found that 19 percent of Americans believed that the Affordable Care Act, known popularly as "Obamacare," had already been repealed or overturned, and another 42 percent weren't sure.
In 2014, the National Science Foundation said that only a slight majority of Americans polled were able to correctly respond that viruses can't be treated with antibiotics and that 26 percent said that the sun revolves around the Earth. Citing a prior poll by this organization on this same question, Susan Jacoby wrote in 2008 that "The problem is not just the things we do not know...it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism...The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation." Tom Nichols, commenting on Jacoby's column in his 2017 book The Death of Expertise, said: "Ordinary Americans might never have liked the educated or professional classes very much, but until recently they did not widely disdain their actual learning as a bad thing in itself. It might even be too kind to call this merely “anti-rational”; it is almost reverse evolution, away from tested knowledge and backward toward folk wisdom and myths passed by word of mouth — except with all of it now sent along at the speed of electrons."
Since 2014, a small but growing group of "Flat Earthers" has met regularly in Fort Collins, Colo., with sympathetic meetings occurring in a half-dozen other U.S. cities. A leader recalls seeing a YouTube video that promoted the idea of a flat earth. “It was interesting, but I didn’t think it was real. I started the same way as everyone else, saying, ‘Oh, I’ll just prove the earth is round.’ Nine months later, I was staring at my computer thinking, ‘I can’t prove the globe anymore.” The article in the Denver Post says of this group: "Many subscribe to the 'ice wall theory,' or the belief that the world is circumscribed by giant ice barriers, like the walls of a bowl, that then extend infinitely along a flat plane." In 2017, searching YouTube by the exact phrase "flat earth" (with quotation marks) yields three-quarters of a million videos. In 2018, CNN reported, "a YouGov survey of more than 8,000 American adults suggested last year that as many as one in six Americans are not entirely certain the world is round, while a 2019 Datafolha Institute survey of more than 2,000 Brazilian adults indicated that 7% of people in that country reject that concept, according to local media."
In 2010, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting received funding amounting to 0.00014% of the U.S. federal budget. CNN/Opinion Research found early the next year that "Forty percent of those polled believe funding the CPB receives takes up 1 to 5 percent of the budget, 30 percent believe public broadcasting takes up 5 percent or more of the budget and 7 percent of respondents believe the non-profit receives 50 percent or more of the federal budget." The final cohort of respondents who thought it was more than half of the budget may also suffer from general mathematical or political illiteracy, but it seems nonetheless fair to say that many people have false beliefs about the funding for public broadcasting. (For comparison, when a Roper poll in 2007 accurately informed participants that the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) receives funding equivalent to about $1 per American per year, half of the respondents said this amount was "too little.")
In 2019, when asked about Arabic numerals by an opinion polling firm, a majority of Americans (56 percent) said the numerals should be excluded from the curriculum in American schools. ("Arabic numerals" are the shapes we recognize as numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.) The question was designed to highlight how quickly most Americans would respond in a prejudiced manner to anything labeled "Arabic."
"There’s no shame in not knowing; there’s shame in not wanting to know. For years I’ve said this to my college students as a way of telling them that learning should never stop. But I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that, at a certain point, there should be shame in not knowing," Charles Taylor wrote in an opinion piece for the Boston Globe. He fretted over "creative-writing students who have never heard of Edith Wharton or Ralph Ellison; journalism students who can’t identify the attorney general; students who don’t know what the NAACP or the Geneva Convention are."
"The emerging narrative of this election is that Donald Trump was elected by people who are sick of being looked down on by liberal elites. The question the people pushing this narrative have not asked is this: Were the elites, based on the facts, demonstrably right?
* * *
That Trump voters chose an easily disprovable myth over readily available facts is one sign of their willful ignorance.
And still this imperviousness to fact pales next to the racism and xenophobia and misogyny — in other words, the moral ignorance — that Trump’s supporters wallowed in. All of the condescension of which liberals have been accused can’t begin to match the condescension of the current storyline that Trump voters are too disenfranchised or despised or dismissed to be held morally responsible for their choices.
* * *
The apologists for Donald Trump voters have given their imprimatur to a culture that equates knowledge and expertise with elitism, a culture ignorant of the history of the country it professes to love and contemptuous of the content of its founding documents."
It isn't clear from this brief column how Taylor thinks factual knowledge and moral knowledge might be related. Most people would say that moral knowledge depends on drawing conclusions that incorporate factual knowledge. (For example, you have to know whether someone else is threatening you before you can properly decide how to act in "self-defense." As another example, you have to know whether a crime occurred before you can express your opinion about it. Berel Lang wrote: "...the most extreme Holocaust 'revisionists' — Faurisson, Rassinier, Butz — do not deny that if the Holocaust had occurred, it would have been an enormity warranting moral reflection, judgment, and whatever else followed from these, presumably including condemnation and punishment; they deny only that it did occur.") Some would also say that moral knowledge is not merely a concatenation of ordinary beliefs and social agreements but that it exists in some separate sphere.
“According to a poll taken in August 2017, 47% of Republicans believe he [Trump] won the popular vote — even though he lost it to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes. Even more horrifying, 68% of Republicans mistakenly believe that millions of illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 contest. And here’s the authoritarian kicker for good measure: 52% of Republicans surveyed said that they would support postponing the 2020 presidential election if President Trump suggested that doing so was necessary to ensure that only legal citizens could vote. Democracies die when presidents can postpone elections based on the mythology of a pernicious lie.”
And in November 2020, days after Joe Biden won the popular vote by at least 4 million votes and also won the Electoral College (with the same number of electoral votes that Trump had won in 2016, incidentally), a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only 6 in 10 Republicans said Biden had won. The false belief grew more popular and stuck. An Ipsos poll conducted March 30-31, 2021 found that 6 in 10 Republicans believed that Trump was the rightful victor and that the election had been somehow stolen from him, while nearly as many believed more specifically that Biden had won due to some form of vote fraud or election rigging.
Some political choices are motivated by beliefs that are not merely incidentally false, but superstitious and, I would argue, horribly immoral. Newsweek reported in January 2018 that "many evangelical Christians believe that Trump was chosen by God to usher in a new era, a part of history called the 'end times,'" and, accordingly, this group "overwhelmingly support[s] President Donald Trump because they believe he'll cause the world to end." [Emphasis mine.]
Many Americans said in an August 2018 poll that “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior,” despite the First Amendment guaranteeing the freedom of the press. The breakdown was partisan: 12 percent of Democrats, 21 percent of Independents, and 43 percent of Republicans believed the president should be allowed to shut down newspapers.
Across various countries, in a 2019 study, about 10-30% of atheists have superstitious beliefs. Agnostics are a little more likely to be superstitious. Meanwhile, 30-70% of the general population, which includes religious believers, is superstitious. This shows that while atheism correlates with a lower likelihood of superstitious belief, it does not root out superstition entirely. Belief in God and belief in superstitions are separate things.
Truth ought to matter
More reasoning skills or relevant knowledge background does not always help someone arrive at the correct answer. If their reasoning is motivated by something other than seeking truth (see the definition of "motivated reasoning"), then their enhanced reasoning skills will only abet them in seeking their ulterior motive. Ezra Klein wrote in Why We're Polarized:
If the problem was truly that people needed to know more about science to fully appreciate the dangers of a warming climate, then their concern should've risen alongside their knowledge. But here, too, the opposite was true: among people who were already skeptical of climate change, scientific literacy made them more skeptical of climate change.
This will resonate with anyone who’s ever read the work of a serious climate change denialist. It’s filled with facts and figures, graphs and charts, studies and citations. Much of the data is wrong or irrelevant. But it feels convincing. It’s a terrific performance of scientific inquiry. And climate-change skeptics who immerse themselves in researching counterarguments end up far more confident that global warming is a hoax than people who haven’t spent much time studying the issue. This is true for all kinds of things, of course. Ever argued with a 9/11 truther? I have, and they are quite informed about the various melting points of steel. More information can help us find the right answers. But if our search is motivated by aims other than accuracy, more information can mislead us — or, more precisely, help us mislead ourselves. There’s a difference between searching for the best evidence and searching for the best evidence that proves us right.”
"Consider those who believe that the lunar landings or the Sandy Hook school shooting were unreal, government-created dramas; that Barack Obama is Muslim; that the Earth is flat; or that climate change is a hoax. In such cases, the right to believe is proclaimed as a negative right; that is, its intent is to foreclose dialogue, to deflect all challenges; to enjoin others from interfering with one’s belief-commitment. The mind is closed, not open for learning. They might be ‘true believers’, but they are not believers in the truth.
* * *
Beliefs shape attitudes and motives, guide choices and actions. Believing and knowing are formed within an epistemic community, which also bears their effects. There is an ethic of believing, of acquiring, sustaining, and relinquishing beliefs — and that ethic both generates and limits our right to believe. If some beliefs are false, or morally repugnant, or irresponsible, some beliefs are also dangerous. And to those, we have no right.”
We care more about facts when we feel good about ourselves
“The 2000 [presidential] campaign was something of a fact-free zone,” said Brendan Nyhan, who was an undergraduate at Swarthmore at the time and who subsequently founded a political fact-checking website called Spinsanity that led to a book All the President's Spin. In his doctoral program at Duke University, he moved on to ask, as Maria Konnikova put it: "If factual correction is ineffective, how can you make people change their misperceptions?"
From Konnikova's article:
"Until recently, attempts to correct false beliefs haven’t had much success. Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Bristol whose research into misinformation began around the same time as Nyhan’s, conducted a review of misperception literature through 2012. He found much speculation, but, apart from his own work and the studies that Nyhan was conducting, there was little empirical research.
* * *
One thing he learned early on is that not all errors are created equal. Not all false information goes on to become a false belief — that is, a more lasting state of incorrect knowledge — and not all false beliefs are difficult to correct.
* * *
When there’s no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs. It’s when that change contradicts something we’ve long held as important that problems occur.
In a series of studies that they’ve just submitted for publication, the Dartmouth team approached false-belief correction from a self-affirmation angle, an approach that had previously been used for fighting prejudice and low self-esteem. The theory, pioneered by Claude Steele, suggests that, when people feel their sense of self threatened by the outside world, they are strongly motivated to correct the misperception, be it by reasoning away the inconsistency or by modifying their behavior.
* * *
Normally, self-affirmation is reserved for instances in which identity is threatened in direct ways: race, gender, age, weight, and the like. Here, Nyhan decided to apply it in an unrelated context: Could recalling a time when you felt good about yourself make you more broad-minded about highly politicized issues, like the Iraq surge or global warming? As it turns out, it would."
It is also important to note the difference between actually believing something and merely claiming to believe it to maintain one's public image. Public image is more obviously related to one's identity and also to one's material interests. Alexander C. Kaufman provided this example:
"In December 2006, Exxon Mobil Corp. convened a two-day summit of environmental and ethics experts at a rural retreat near the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia....For decades, Exxon had funded far-right think tanks that seeded doubt over the scientific consensus on climate change. [The new CEO Rex] Tillerson and Ken Cohen, Exxon’s PR chief and chair of its political action committee, wanted to broaden the company’s political reach. One step was changing their messaging about climate change, moving away from the denial the company had been attacked for supporting....Not long after the summit, Exxon began to modify its public stance on climate change."
Sometimes what is claimed publicly is done to maintain relationships and make money. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky on how the American mass media operate:
"But a critical analysis of American institutions, the way they function domestically and their international operations, must meet far higher standards; in fact, standards are often imposed that can barely be met in the natural sciences. One has to work hard, to produce evidence that is credible, to construct serious arguments, to present extensive documentation — all tasks that are superfluous as long as one remains within the presuppositional framework of the doctrinal consensus. It is small wonder that few are willing to undertake the effort, quite apart from the rewards that accrue to conformity and the costs of honest dissidence."
A user writing as "Exiled Consensus" in December 2018 said that it gives "too much credit" to climate change denialists to say that they are primarily motivated by science denialism.
It is equivalent to saying that cigarette company lobbyists analyze the facts, read the studies, conclude that cigarettes do not cause lung cancer, and are happy when their children develop smoking habits. Quite simply, such analysis does not occur, as author Ari Rabin-Havt explains in Lies, Incorporated. The intention of denial is to pollute discourse and sow doubt. That alone is considered a victory as it stalls action which can harm cigarette sales, or fossil fuel production. It is not science denial; rather, it is anti-profit denial, as the science is not even considered in the first place.
Or consider that Trumpist radio host Bill Mitchell tweeted in March 2020 that the coronavirus was "climate change 2.0," his way of saying that politicians were scaremongering. Mitchell is inclined to worry neither about climate change nor pandemic — or so he publicly claims. Intentionally ignoring scientists is part of his political ideology, as "GOP Climate Change Denial Set The Stage For Trump’s Coronavirus Conspiracies" more broadly (to quote a Huffington Post headline in July 2020).
Nyhan's work, by contrast, seems to be about more privately held beliefs.
Pessimism can drive down the accuracy of our estimates, according to Steven Pinker in his book Enlightenment Now:
"In a recent survey Hans Rosling found that less than one in four Swedes guessed that it [the average global life expectancy] was that high [71.4 years in 2015], a finding consistent with the results of other multinational surveys of opinions on longevity, literacy, and poverty in what Rosling dubbed the Ignorance Project. "The logo of the project is a chimpanzee, because, as Rosling explained, 'If for each question I wrote the alternatives on bananas, and asked chimpanzees in the zoo to pick the right answers, they'd have done better than the respondents.' The respondents, including students and professors of global health, were not so much ignorant as fallaciously pessimistic."
So they say
Albert Einstein said, "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not sure about the former." Elbert Hubbard: "Everyone is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day. Wisdom consists in not exceeding that limit." George Bernard Shaw said it would be better to know that one does not know: “Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.” As hope, nonetheless, the words of Phyllis Bottome: "There is nothing final about a mistake, except its being taken as final."
Cryptids
"According to Chapman University’s Survey of American Fears, more than 20 percent of Americans believe Bigfoot is real, the same number who believe the Big Bang actually happened," William Giraldi wrote in 2019.
Animals often act smarter than us
Brian Klaas wrote in The Evolution of Stupidity (and Octopus Intelligence): What we can learn about intelligence, stupidity, and ourselves—from some of the smartest, strangest, alien-like creatures on the planet (The Garden of Forking Paths, April 23, 2024):
"Sadly, so much of our discourse around intelligence and stupidity gets hijacked by pseudoscience, racism, and debates over whether arbitrary measurements like IQ are valid. We ignore more interesting questions around intelligence and stupidity that we can learn not from ourselves, but from other species. In particular:
1. What, specifically, does it mean to be “intelligent?” What do we mean when we say that humans and chimps and dolphins and crows are intelligent?
2. Why did some species—including us—become smart, while others didn’t?
3. Why is stupidity still so widespread in humans?"
"Powell had earned his fortune as a lawyer representing the tobacco company Philip Morris, parrying the blows of critics who asserted that cigarettes were causing an epidemic of cancer in America. Though Powell and his associates fought these accusations tooth and nail, secretly they knew them to be true. ... This tactic would later be replicated by the oil industry as their own scientists confirmed that the burning of fossil fuels was beginning to endanger the environment and contributed to calamitous global climate change. By 1968 they already knew their businesses were creating 'serious world-wide environmental changes' that could lead to 'the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of oceans,' and a whole host of apocalyptic scenarios. Rather than deal with the looming crisis responsibly or ethically, the oil companies borrowed a page out of Big Tobacco’s playbook by using their resources to fund spurious science, often relying on the same individuals and companies to break consensus and inspire falsified skepticism."
Maybe everything's determined and we believe we have free will only because we haven't observed and identified why everything is happening?
"Richard Herrnstein, one of [B. F.] Skinner’s most-accomplished students, later his colleague in Harvard’s Psychology Department, and a luminary of radical behaviorism, once explained to me that any action regarded as an expression of free will is simply one for which 'the vortex of stimuli' that produced it cannot yet be adequately specified. We merely lack the means of observation and calculation."
— Shoshana Zuboff
In 2023, we're seeing the Supreme Court's "systematic discounting of, & even hostility to, the expertise of administrative agencies. It's an aggressive, assertive form of ignorance from a very powerful body", i.e., the court is embracing "populist epistemology". — Kevin Elliott on Bluesky
In reply to which, someone mentioned this paper: Populist Constitutionalism101 North Carolina Law Review 1763 (2023). Anya Bernstein and Glen Staszewski.
Also
This is one reason (among several) that it’s worth society’s trouble to fully fund a community of *full time nonsense specialists*: scholars, reporters, and communicators on misinformation, disinfo, pseudoscience, and fringe, quack, and paranormal claims (plus research on extremism, propaganda, etc)
Most working scientists are traditionally very reluctant to engage with fringe claims because it wastes time, invites abuse, and also *is not their area of expertise* (except for a few who make nonsense an additional specialty). Creationists clobbering scientists in debates is the classic example
Society has never come close to supporting skeptics, debunkers, misinfo reporters, and disinfo researchers at any level remotely approaching the scale of the problem—and even today, during the “infodemic” or “misinformation apocalypse,” there are Very Serious People who deny there’s any such need
"...Republicans are often significantly better at ignoring the policy details and focusing instead on shaping schemas within which voters perceive the world. Too many people in politics wrongly think you’ll win the argument if you have better facts. But winning the argument in politics isn’t often about finding more or better facts. It’s about perception and the cognitive shortcuts we use to process information as we sort our world into neat categories that make sense."
Brian Klaas, Schemas and the Political Brain: The neuroscience and psychology of why better facts don't make winning arguments in politics. Garden of Forking Paths, Apr 18, 2025
Javier Cercas. The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-five Minutes in History and Imagination. (2009) Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. p. 3.
