Quote of the Week – Consensus

It seems our friends at the PBS NewsHour have basic comprehension problems with the concept:
“PBS NewsHour: Against scientific consensus before they were for it” http://junkscience.com/2012/09/28/pbs-newshour-against-scientific-consensus-before-they-were-for-it/#more-31736

“Some psychology researchers argue that a scientific culture that too heavily favors new and counterintuitive ideas over the confirmation of existing results has led to too many findings that are striking for their novelty and published in respected journals—but are nonetheless false.”
“Some researchers are optimistic that many published findings will be replicated. But others are concerned that if the project confirms few studies, it could unfairly indict psychology. Indeed, the prospect of exposing psychology’s foibles has upset some scientists.”
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6076/1558.summary
Oh dear, the poor little darlings!
“The most startling thing about the latest scandal to hit social psychology isn’t the alleged violation of scientific ethics itself, scientists say, or the fact that it happened in the Netherlands, the home of fallen research star and serial fraudster Diederik Stapel, whose case shook the field to its core less than a year ago. Instead, what fascinates them most is how the new case, which led to the resignation of psychologist Dirk Smeesters of Erasmus University Rotterdam and the requested retraction of two of his papers by his school, came to light: through an unpublished statistical method to detect data fraud.
“If it proves valid, Simonsohn’s technique might find other possible cases of misconduct lurking in the vast body of scientific literature.
“Simonsohn already created a stir last year with a paper in Psychological Science showing that it’s “unacceptably easy” to prove almost anything using common ways to massage data and suggesting that a large proportion of papers in the field may be false positives.”
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/07/fraud-detection-tool-could-shake.html
There is a consensus among psychologists that their work may be exposed as “cases of misconduct lurking in the vast body of scientific literature.” I wonder what other body of scientific literature this method of detecting data fraud could be applied to?

Wiki definition: Consensus decision-making is a group decision making process that seeks the consent [within the group]
Business Dictionary: Consensus depends on participants having shared values and goals, [within the group.]
So long as the consensus operation and agreement stays within the group it is entirely valid.
A problem arises when the group then proceeds to operate as though the consensus is valid outside the group, outside the domain of their group’s shared values and goals. When a group making the consensus sought consent within the group, then ignores, stifles, and overrules dissent from those outside the group, it ceases to be consensus and becomes mob rule.

“Consent of the governed” is a phrase synonymous with a political theory wherein a government’s legitimacy and moral right to use state power is only justified and legal when derived from the people or society over which that political power is exercised.

What is the legitimate link between the group consensus and consent of the governed? The only consensus with legitimacy to use state power is the elected Legislative branch of government. All other groups must take their consensus to that elected group to earn the elected body’s consent.

The term ‘consensus science’ is a self-contradiction, except when Ravetz et al are involved in re-defining science.
John

One of the most useful concepts I took from business management studies was the Comfortable Clone Syndrome (h/t Harvard Business Review).
Generally, managers have two responses to this phenomenon. On the one hand, managers who dislike conflict—or value only their own approach—actively avoid the clash of ideas. They hire and reward people of a particular stripe, usually people like themselves. Their organizations fall victim to what we call the comfortable clone syndrome: coworkers share similar interests and training; everyone thinks alike. Because all ideas pass through similar cognitive screens, only familiar ones survive. For example, a new-business development group formed entirely of employees with the same disciplinary background and set of experiences will assess every idea with an unvarying set of assumptions and analytical tools. Such a group will struggle to innovate, often in vain.
My personal observations are that pro-AGW folks seem more likely to fall foul of this than the anti-AGW crowd.

Consensus can be the most dangerous thing for any science. It stifles curiosity and questioning – the very source of discovery and invention. Without skepticism we would still be hanging witches.

” I have a red pencil box”
Benny Hill

LOL! Reminds of a story by Uncle Miltie & Aunty Rose (from Free to Choose, I think):
A Chemist, a Physicist & and an Economist are stranded on a desert island. Between them, they have a pocket knife, a few cans of baked beans and a small plastic tarp. The Chemist & Physicist are pretty confident that by carving a quick awl & divit fire starter, and pooling their shoelaces for a bow string, they can get a small driftwood fire going. The Chemist offers that he can approximate the boiling point of the beans from first principles & his knowledge of the boiling point of water at sea level. The Physicist continues, saying that she can calculate the pressure inside the cans at boiling point, and if they can weaken the perimiter of the can top, she can calculate the velocity of the beans as they explode from the cans, and then by using ballistics, determine where they should place the tarp to collect them.
Why all the fuss?, asks the Economist. Let’s just assume we have a can opener.

Recently, listening to a TV news broadcast, a NASA spokeswoman announced that Curiosity had enabled the identification of Martian geology consistent with past sedimentary deposition in water, in this case an ancient stream bed. She waxed lyrical that the ‘consensus’ of scientists agreeing that Mars once had flowing water.
In post-modern science consensus drives the validity of the conclusion. Evidence is a side-show. In this case, the geological evidence of past fluvial processes on Mars, present day glacial flow and neutron spectrometry – all garnered from orbit, have provided the evidence that demonstrates the presence of water on Mars, ever before Curiosity arrived at Gale Crater, yet it was the consensus that was cited as the clincher, not the evidence, spun around the recent publicity surrounding NASA’s Curiosity.
The Concept of Consensus is unrelated to evidence. Second hand smoke demonstrates that nicely.
In a real sense, consensus is ‘group-think’ or ‘collectivist thinking’. It is thinking by ‘committee’. And therein lies the catch, well described by the words Robert Heinlein once wrote that, ‘the intelligence of a committee is inversely proportional to its number’.

Curious, with all the consensus, has anyone gone back and checked what the old climate models have said that the temperature would be like for this past decade. I read this blog every so often it is nice to read intelligent people having decent arguments over science.