It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
– Upton Sinclair
(quoted by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth)
How much stronger does this hold for industry funded institutes or “think tanks”?
What is the difference between funding a pre-determined position (or view) and funding a line of inquiry or research? We’ll take that up shortly in another post. But simply stated, the impetus to “not understand” and the aims of obscuring the matter for others and for public decision making certainly differ in more than degree.