Criticism
In some cases, corporate interests have found it useful to create "think tanks." For example, The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition was formed in the mid 1990s to dispute research finding a link between second-hand smoke and cancer. According to an internal memo from Philip Morris referring to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), "the credibility of the EPA is defeatable, but not on the basis of ETS (environmental tobacco smoke) alone. It must be part of a larger mosaic that concentrates all the EPA's enemies against it at one time."
According to the progressive non-government organization Fair.org, right-wing think tanks are often quoted and rarely labeled. The result is that sometimes think tank "experts" are depicted as neutral sources without any ideological predispositions when, in fact, they represent a particular perspective. In the field of education, think tank publications are subjected to expert review by the National Education Policy Center's "Think Twice" think tank review project.
A think tank is often a "tank", in the intellectual sense: discussion only in a closed circle protected from outside influence isolates the participants, subjects them to several cognitive biases (groupthink, confirmation bias) and fosters members' existing beliefs. This leads to surprisingly radical and even unfeasible ideas being published. Many think tanks, however, purposefully attempt to alleviate this problem by selecting members from diverse backgrounds.
Read more about this topic: Think Tank
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)