When a word or concept is twisted or misused to deceive, is that Orwellian?
Junk Science is dishonesty in the business of intellectual inquiry that results in bad conclusions or policy decisions.
Is outcome bias and reference to authority or consensus, born of ideology, embedded Orwellian thinking?
“May you live in interesting times” is unfortunately coming true for us but maybe for science and public policy making it should be called troublesome or difficult times. Ideology can inhibit serious science and inquiry because the preference for outcome is already known. As Joseph Schumpeter famously said, the first casualty of ideology is the truth.
Victor Davis Hanson references current political Orwellian deceits.
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/370985/print
I would give Aldous Huxley a bow for predicting what seems to be coming–a Brave New World of drug addled, dependent slackers, but Orwell’s Animal Farm, 1984 novels describe the rise of a different dystopia that impacts the professions, sciences, Academics, and intellectual life of the society.
Junk science thinking and communication in the service of the powerful totalitarian state is one of the targets of the Orwell warning. Individual intellectual integrity and liberty of thought and action is the enemy of statists. Double speak, New speak and political correctness with accompanying censorship create great distortions in intellectual and social discourse.
I can’t do the complexity of Newspeak justice. I am definitely stuck in Oldespeak.
http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns-prin.html
Pronouncements of the expert army of apparatchiks seem now to come in waves. They have so much energy, these tyrants, so much to do, so much control to exert.
Angelo Codevilla warned us about them, the white coat army of experts pushing their Cargo Cult Science, designated and then used by the state to control the citizenry. Science and intellectual inquiry, meanings of words, distorted in the service of political agendas.
Angelo called it Scientific Pretense and I applaud his insight here:
You mean using words like “climate change”?
There are those of us who thought 1984 was a warning and then there are those who thought it to be an instruction manual.