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:
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)