[pdonis]

> If you don't have time to research the subject yourself, I'd always advise taking the side of the scientist.

If you don't have time to research the subject yourself, it means you don't care about the answer anyway. So why should you take any side? Why not just accept that you don't know?

[nitrogen]

I think what's being argued here is that the probability of being right by blindly following scientific consensus is greater than the probability of being right by blindly following non-scientific anything. Nobody's saying that science is never wrong, only that it's less wrong than other sources of knowledge, has a process that makes it even less wrong over time, and when it is wrong, it's only relatively wrong in the way that is described by Asimov.

[pdonis]

Asimov wasn't talking about following scientific "consensus". He was talking about things that are nailed down by data. The roundness of the Earth wasn't a matter of scientific "consensus"; it was a matter of making observations that showed the curvature of the Earth's surface (vs. earlier observations which were consistent with flatness), then further observations that showed that the curvature varied from place to place (vs. earlier observations which were consistent with it being a perfect sphere), and so on.

The point is that what is "less wrong" is the understanding we build up by extending the range of our data and our ability to predict what new data that we haven't yet observed will look like. It's not anything we build up by "consensus". So a lay person, trying to figure out what to "blindly follow", should not be looking at "consensus"; they should be looking at what data we have, how reliable it is, what does it cover, and how well we can predict what we will see when we get further data. As you can see, I put "blindly follow" in quotes because you can't do all this blindly; you can't just ask what the "consensus" is. You have to actually look at the content.

[nitrogen]

By "consensus" I mean what you describe, the accumulation of data from multiple sources. But even a simple human consensus of scientists would be right more of the time than a simple consensus of non-scientists.

Edit: also, I was referring initially to the arguments from other comments, not to Asimov specifically.

[pdonis]

> even a simple human consensus of scientists would be right more of the time than a simple consensus of non-scientists.

This is probably true, at least in fields where we have a reasonably developed science, but you realize, I trust, that it's not a very high bar. :-)

[nitrogen]

Yes, absolutely. I don't agree fully with the statement that set off this whole flame war. It is a very low bar, but my point is that many bars are even lower.