Agnotology

I came across this new word via Barry Ritholz’s blog The Big Picture, which I am starting to read regularly. The word comes from a Wired Magazine article by Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge. Ritholz summarizes the article in the following definition:

Agnotology: Culturally constructed ignorance, purposefully created by special interest groups working hard to create confusion and suppress the truth.

He uses this to describe how the “disgraced meme” that Fannie and Freddie created the housing mess keeps coming up in the media.

2 comments to Agnotology

Leave a Reply

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>