Doubt merchants aren’t pushing for knowledge, they’re practicing what Proctor has dubbed “agnogenesis” — the intentional manufacture of ignorance.

In the case of GMO and climate change concerns, opponents often twist facts, stressed two presenters. Erik Conway, co-author of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, noted that there's even a word (which he did not coin) for manufacturing of fake knowledge—"agnogenesis."

The beauty is that the economics profession as a corporate entity need not consciously will the resulting manufacture of doubt. Just add the reflex conservatism which kicks in with cognitive dissonance, and we have a perfect prescription for agnogenesis.

Tobacco Institute President Horace Kornegay in a 1972 article in the Institute's Newsletter claimed it was "impossible 'to separate evidence from evangelism' in the cigarette controversy". Historians have been employed to elaborate on this confusion, to make it seem real, by certifying as honest the endurance of doubts that the industry itself was busily helping to produce. I call this agnogenesis, the deliberate production of ignorance or doubt, the proper study of which is agnotology.