2.3.1 How Power Decides What Counts as Knowledge Notes

Power Influences What Knowledge Is Valued, Suppressed, or Promoted

1. Power determines which facts get shared and which methods for determining truth get treated as legitimate.
2. The difference is that some communities have institutional power to make their knowledge standards the default for everyone else.

Controlling the Knowledge Pipeline

1. Power shapes knowledge by controlling what questions get asked in the first place.
2. When pharmaceutical companies spend billions researching patentable medicines but almost nothing on whether eating vegetables prevents disease, this doesn't mean the knowledge they produce is false but more so that it's just incomplete by design.
3. This creates opportunity cost in knowledge production.
4. Every dollar spent researching profitable pills is a dollar not spent researching free interventions.

Example

• Climate change research funding fluctuates based on political control.
• During administrations skeptical of climate science, funding shifts toward adaptation research and economic impact studies rather than emissions reduction and renewable energy development.
• Same scientific methods, but different political priorities create different knowledge emphasis.

Establishing What Counts as Credible

Credibility systems create their own blindness.

1. The better a field gets at filtering out bad ideas, the worse it becomes at recognizing revolutionary ones.
2. This happens because the same experts who maintain quality also maintain the status quo.

Example

• When Barbara McClintock discovered jumping genes in the 1940s, the genetics community ignored her work for 30 years, not because it was wrong, but because it was too right too early.
• The field's credibility system was optimized for consistency, not breakthrough insights.

Controlling How People Think

1. The most subtle power operates by controlling not what people think, but how they think.
2. This works by establishing frames, underlying assumptions that make some questions seem reasonable and others irrelevant.
3. Climate change got framed as a debate between "believers" and "skeptics," which treated scientific consensus as personal faith rather than risk management.

The Citation Economy

1. Academic knowledge operates like a financial market where citations function as currency.
2. More citations create more credibility, which creates compound returns for those who start with advantages.
3. Researchers at prestigious universities get more visibility.
4. More visibility leads to more citations. More citations increase credibility, leading to better jobs, more funding, and even more visibility.
5. Success breeds success through positive feedback loops.
6. This means knowledge competes not just on merit but on network, your institution's reputation, and your access to publication channels.
7. Two equally good studies can have completely different impacts based on factors unrelated to scientific quality.

Power Controls Information Flow

1. Beyond research funding, power shapes knowledge through direct information control.
2. Censorship remains a blunt but effective tool, governments restrict access to certain information to shape public perception and maintain control.
3. When historical records get altered or suppressed, citizens lose access to alternative narratives.
4. Educational systems provide more subtle control, what you learn in school for example is a carefully curated selection that reflects power relationships in your communities.
5. North Korean textbooks emphasize the achievements of the Kim family while omitting critical perspectives, but every education system does this to some degree.

The Recursive Problem

1. So right now you're learning about how power shapes knowledge through educational institutions that are themselves shaped by power.
2. The IB curriculum exists because certain authorities decided this knowledge was worth transmitting.
3. This creates a recursive problem: using potentially biased systems to understand bias. Yet this doesn't invalidate the analysis, it means being aware of your perspective as a knower, and how that fits into the wider communities you are part of.