[bdowling]

My favorite term like that was “scientific consensus”. I used to point out that up until the 17th century the scientific consensus was that the Sun revolved around the Earth. I would get nothing but blank stares in response. It turns out that people who talk about “scientific consensus” typically don’t know whether the Earth revolves around the Sun, or vice-versa.

[o_____________o]

I'm staring blankly too. The idea is to forever invalidate consensus because people were wrong in the past?

[bdowling]

Consensus means that people agree; it doesn’t mean that they are right.

[o_____________o]

Yeah, but it means they're far more likely to be correct. Iconoclast / Galileo gambit outliers are near nil.

We collectively know more about everything every year, science has generally given us a self-correcting living corpus.

The argument you're making is the same made by anti-intellectuals: don't trust institutional knowledge and consensus because it's been wrong in the past, look at mistake X. It's something like a systemic ad hominem.

[brutusborn]

They are not near nil. Every idea ever conceived has either been rejected or altered to match new observations.

That means that most ideas will end up being wrong in some way. The smoking-gun laws of nature are few and far between.

If you consider what % of ideas throughout history were plain wrong, it’s hard to believe that we have finally figured it all out and the consensus finally reflects reality most of the time.

[o_____________o]

We're talking about wrong as in Galileo, as in radically upending, not modifications or normal gradients of wrongness. Knowledge is generally accretive, but we pay a lot of emotional and categorical attention to perspectives that break dogma. The vast majority absolutely do not, and they fade innumerably into the background of the industry they support.

It's easy (and trite) to cite the extremely limited pool of successful dogma-contrarians over time. Try making a list of the failed contrarians, and then another of all the knowledge (and its contributors) that didn't need fundamental reconsideration at some point in modernity.

[brutusborn]

The critical point is that contrarians are always necessary for science. If we always ignored dissenters then we would never make any progress. Even if most are wrong, contrarians are essential.

Thus deferring to the ‘consensus’ and implicitly ignoring contrarian views stops science in its tracks.

I don’t understand what you mean in your first paragraph, and I don’t support dogmatic positions so I’m not sure why you refer to ‘dogma-contarians.’ Contrarians are usually anti-dogmatic.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Unreasonable contrarians are generally annoying but essential.

[jeegsy]

> Yeah, but it means they're far more likely to be correct

I know what this means from a statistical perspective but I dont know what it means with regard to practical day to day decision making.

> The argument you're making is the same made by anti-intellectuals Isn't there some sort of fallacy that you are yourself deploying here?

[brutusborn]

The fallacy is assuming that consensus = probably true.

This is only correct when we have good evidence and good methods. That is why consensus breaks (like heliocentrism) occur during technological changes (development of telescope).

The critical point the parent is missing is that many fields have terrible data and terrible methods so the ‘consensus’ isn’t likely to be true (eg smoking is good for the nerves, butter is bad for you, the globe is too big for humans to cause changes)

It takes a lot of intellectual integrity to admit that many disciplines are not generating anything resembling ‘truth’. It’s easier to ignore and say: but the consensus is the best we have! Sometimes the heterodox view is the best.

[DontchaKnowit]

It is especially frustrating when scientific ideas are applied to moral dilemmas. I see this from the far left wing frequently. The irony is that this same mindset is what led to the proliferation of eugenics apologists in the 1800s. The scientific consensus had absolutely no objections to eugenics on scientific grounds. In fact, "science" would seem to support it. Yet it is widely agreed that this practice is morally reprehensible nowadays, because humans were able to put aside their hubris and apply their moral reasoning.

[rnk]

Plenty of people realized that eugenics was unacceptable who were in the scientific world then, just like plenty of people understood that slavery was wrong. Which doesn't take away from the fact that plenty of terrible policies came out because leaders did have those views. I don't know what left wing ideas you've seen that are wrong, I'm sure that I've seen some left wing ideas that are wrong. I'm more worried about what do the leaders and the effective speakers in groups promote. Saying that I'm making you more free by taking away your choice of library books, or your choice about medical care, that's not an extreme view that only 1% of people have. It's pretty much the consensus leadership view of Republicans.