At Arstechnica, they say:
Fiction author Michael Crichton probably started the backlash against the idea of consensus in science. Crichton was rather notable for doubting the conclusions of climate scientists—he wrote an entire book in which they were the villains—so it’s fair to say he wasn’t thrilled when the field reached a consensus.
Still, it’s worth looking at what he said, if only because it’s so painfully misguided:
‘Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus.’
…
In physics, where particles either exist or don’t, five standard deviations are required.
While that makes the standards of evidence sound completely rational, they’re also deeply empirical. Physicists found that signals that were three standard deviations from the expected value came and went all the time, which is why they increased their standard. Biologists haven’t had such problems, but other problems have popped up as new technology enabled them to do tests that covered tens of thousands of genes instead of only a handful. Suddenly, spurious results were cropping up at a staggering pace. For these experiments, biologists agreed to a different standard of evidence.
It’s not like they got together and had a formal vote on it. Instead, there were a few editorials that highlighted the problem, and those pieces started to sway the opinions of not only scientists but journal editors and the people who fund grants. In other words, the field reached a consensus.
Consensus is the business of politics.
Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.'” As a STEM major, I am somewhat biased toward “strong” evidence side of the argument. However, the more I read literature from other, somewhat-related fields (i.e. psychology, economics and climate science), the more I felt they have little opportunity to repeat experiments, similar to counterparts in traditional hard science fields. Their accepted theories are based on limited historical occurrences and consensus among the scholars.
Given the situation, it’s important to understand what “consensus” really means.
Full story here
h/t to nerdyalien
Here is a consensus case in point: The book Hundert Autoren Gegen Einstein (A Hundred Authors Against Einstein), is a collection of criticisms of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Published in 1931, it contains short essays from 28 authors, and published excerpts from 19 more. The rest of the 100 against Einstein was a list of 53 people who were also opposed to his theory of relativity for various reasons. 
When asked about this book, Einstein retorted with this:
“Why 100 authors? If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!”
In the case of the ‘Skeptic Science’ claimed ’97 percent’, we have at least three.
Surely that must be enough, unless of course this isn’t about science at all, but about the politics of power, oh, and money.
The only consensus that is relevant to science is the consensus that the scientific method should trump consensus.
My own scientific upbringing tells me that when I hear that there is a consensus is the best indicator that a particular question or field is full of unanswered questions and is as far from “settled” as it gets.
hunter said: “And as to consensus, Feynman, Einstein, and other pseudo-scientists all promote the idea that consensus is bad science.”
It is true that Richard Feynman was a maverick and near-iconoclast, who liked to break new ground in fields where he thought he could make a new contribution – even when a lot of people had already been working there.
But at the same time, he had a definite respect for the work of others, even when he tried to find an alternative approach: He didn’t scorn the consensus. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1965, titled “The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics,” he said (emphasis added):
“If every individual student follows the same current fashion in expressing and thinking about electrodynamics or field theory, then the variety of hypotheses being generated to understand strong interactions, say, is limited. Perhaps rightly so, for possibly the chance is high that the truth lies in the fashionable direction. But, on the off-chance that it is in another direction – a direction obvious from an unfashionable view of field theory – who will find it? Only someone who has sacrificed himself by teaching himself quantum electrodynamics from a peculiar and unusual point of view; one that he may have to invent for himself. I say sacrificed himself because he most likely will get nothing from it, because the truth may lie in another direction, perhaps even the fashionable one.”
[You can find a free complete copy of this lecture by googling with the expression:
Richard P. Feynman – Nobel Lecture – Nobelprize.org, “The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics” ]
It’s also worth noting that Feynmann got a the Nobel Prize in Physics 1965 , not the bogus Nobel Peace Prize, which is a politically based honour, not an order of sceintific merit.
The IPCC and those working for it or promoting its politics like to pretend that the fact they won a Nobel Prize means the Nobel committee recognised their outstanding contribution to science.
This is false. They did not win a Noble prize for their scientific work. Indeed the IPCC does not do scientific work and clearly states that on their web site.
The IPCC is an intergovernmental political body.
The Nobel peace prize is given because the committee members think your politics are cool.
The other big difference is that the Peace prise is not given for achievements but as encouragement. Obama was given the peace prize just for winning an election, in an attempt to “oblige” him to earn it.
Along with their other lies and misrepresentations supporters of the false “consensus” pretend that the Nobel Prize endorses the science of the global warming hypothesis.
“Follow the data.” – Leif Svalgaard
Be careful – because data needs interpreting. 🙂 Some fundamentalist conservative Christians say that they don’t interpret the Bible, they “just read it.”
But no text can be merely read. For to understand a text is to interpret it first. And sometimes the paradigm you use to interpret the text or the data is the wrong one.
Sometimes the exact same data tells different stories because different paradigms were used.
Those are my opinions, anyway.
“Data needs interpreting”
That is precisely what scientists are trained to do, so appropriate caution is exercised and checked by peer review. It is a mistake to think that scientists are morons.
“It is a mistake to think that scientists are morons.”
Just as it is a mistake for ‘trained scientists’ to continually behave as if they have an exclusive monopoly on ratiocination.
In re: ‘scientific consensus,’ I will only remind that “Eppur si muove!”
We can all run a 100 meter dash, but Usain Bolt does it better…
People obsessed with consensus are ignorant of science. If you do not understand science, either you are lazy in not trying to learn or you are dumb, the subject is beyond your intelligence. For these people, their only hope is the consensus. They have no knowledge of science. They have to rely on what others say.
Plea to consensus = ignorance
In appeals to “consensus” we can see the phenomenon that Thomas Kuhn described in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where leading scientists exert great effort to maintain the ruling paradigm by enforcing the practice of “normal science” based on “consensus” and by suppressing innovation.
Unfortunately, Kuhn’s description of the history of science has been confounded by others as a prescription for how science ought to be conducted.
Unfortunately we have lost the insights we once gained from the rejection of continental drift, the precursor of plate tectonics. Enforcing consensus at the expense of new knowledge delayed the acceptance of plate tectonics,
Naomi Oreskes concluded her study of the rejection of continental drift with a warming about enforcement of consensus in science,.
“And we are placing responsibility for making new knowledge in the hands of those who have the most old knowledge to unmake. The recognition of scientific expertise — the very stuff that enables scientists to build on prior results — at the same time makes scientific judgments inescapably personal and historical, undermining our deepest wishes for knowledge that might somehow be transcendent.”
Naomi Oreskes, The Rejection of Continental Drift, Oxford U Press,1999, p.318.
Excellent catch Fred!
Oreskes is not the only one to have forgotten Kuhnian insights of paradigm battles in science. All this consensus talk has certainly confused too many scientist from the realities of chainging paradigms in science. Consensus meme has become a new tactic for those who adher the mainstreamed paradigm to protect their investments in the paradigm, some of them will never surrender, others will have to go through a fundamental reevaluation of everything they took for granted. Most likely we will need a new generation of climate scientist willing and eager to question the wisdom of the old guard, before a new paradigm can be established.
Isn’t consensus bad for funding ?
Pethefin:
The anti-consensus minority are so non-consensus oriented that they cannot even agree among themselves about what they believe is actually happening with climate – except that they’re sure that whatever it is has nothing to do with the greenhouse effect.
It would be interesting to see an alternative textbook of climate created by a set (more than 2) of the anti-consensus folks. I don’t think they could do it.
nealjking
You say
Well, of the many such texts I commend the Reports by the Non-Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).
The NIPCC Reports are linked from its homepage which is
http://climatechangereconsidered.org/about-nipcc/
and where it says
It will take you some weeks to study all of the NIPCC Reports and I hope you enjoy them. Clearly, your posts here indicate that your study of the NIPCC Reports will remove much ignorance and misunderstanding.
Richard
Nealjking, You definitely are unaware of what Skeptics are skeptical about.
I define myself as “climate agnostic”, in that I don’t believe that ANYONE has a lock on Climate. But I do know that CO2 does NOT drive climate. This is beyond merely obvious, since the CO2 levels in the atmosphere continue to rise despite a 17 year 11 month period of no warming. I also think that explaining the MWP and LIA are extremely important, and yet billions of dollars spent on “climate research” can’t figure it out. It wasn’t CO2.
Most skeptics that I know don’t argue about the greenhouse effect, except to the extent that above a certain level CO2 effects are saturated, and any possible increase is more than offset by other atmospheric things like simple convection and thunderstorms.
I also laugh at reports that climate or weather is in ANY way out of the normal range. In fact, we’ve been at a historically calm era in weather events, while being told that EVERYTHING, even normal hail, snow, and tornadoes, are “extreme” weather and “unprecedented”. I can’t even use hurricanes in that list, since there are so few in the last 10 years that we can’t even count them. Most of the most vocal climate crusaders were in elementary school when Katrina hit.
I agree that you should read what richardscourtney linked you to. It’s important.
I don’t have to agree with anyone. And i don’t believe anything special is happening with climate.
My contention is that we don’t have knowledge, tools – technological and theoretical and data – including historical- to know to explain changes in temperature of 0,x degrees.
—-
Of course your guilty conscience nealjking forces you to have an explanation.
I’m sorry Peter, it is you who has failed this most basic test. (but then so too have 97% of the climastrologists you chose to believe without empirically verifying their claims for yourself).
71% of our planets surface is ocean. So the critical question is “given 1 bar pressure, is the net effect of the atmosphere over the oceans warming or cooling of the oceans?”
This could also be rephrased “how hot could the sun drive our oceans in the absence of atmospheric cooling and DWLWIR?”
To the first question the high priests of the Church of Radiative Climastrology say “warming” and to the second they say “-18C”. Both answers are utterly wrong. The correct answer to the first is “cooling” and the second “+80C or beyond”
How did climastrologists get it so unbelievably* wrong? They claimed the oceans were a “near blackbody” instead of a “selective surface”.
What’s the difference between a near blackbody and a selective surface and why does it matter? Build these very simple experiment, expose each to a few hours or direct sunlight and you will learn –
http://oi61.tinypic.com/or5rv9.jpg
http://oi62.tinypic.com/zn7a4y.jpg
– in both experiments the samples have equal ability to absorb SW and emit LWIR, yet dramatic temperature differentials occur. Do the equations in the “basic physics” of the “settled science” cover this? No. A minor effect to be easily dismissed? Think again. That’s a 40C differential in experiment 1. For climastrologists that’s a fist-biting mistake. Magnitude 11. Wincing while biting your fist so hard you find you have swallowed your eyes and you are missing fingers. That bad. And you fell for their snivelling idiocy? So sad, too bad.
The basics of climate on our planet, planet ocean, are simple –
– the sun heats the ocean.
– the atmosphere cools the ocean.
– radiative gases cool the atmosphere.
Anyone who says different is a fool or a liar.
But, but, but what about DWLWIR slowing the cooling of the oceans? You can forget that –
http://i42.tinypic.com/2h6rsoz.jpg
– incident LWIR has no effect on water that is free to evaporatively cool.
Empirical experiment says 97% of climastrologists are my bitches. Got any empirical challenge to that Peter? No, of course you don’t, you’re an AGW believer. You don’t need empirical experiment do you? You’ve “manufactured consensus”…the rotting albatross of Moaning Noam is strung around your neck, now and forever, like it or not.
*Unbelievably? Do you think a 98C error is too great to be plausible? You would do well to remember that the assumptions used by climastrologist in “basic physics” of the “settled science” were out by 90C for the lunar regolith when compared to Diviner mission empirical results.
“In the case of the ‘Skeptic Science’ claimed ’97 percent’, we have at least three. Surely that must be enough…”
////////////////
With respect that is a silly argument. Consensus is simply opinion, and accordingly,.Consensus proves nothing; the fact that 97% of ‘scientists’ may have consensus on a point does not prove that point to be correct. Time and again, history establishes that what was once the consensus, is in fact wrong (once we gain more knowledge and understanding).
Likewise the lack of consensus proves nothing; the fact that 3% of ‘scientists’ may not accept (or even disagree) with the consensus on any given point does not prove that point is incorrect. Einstein was taliking about proof, not opinion.
Consensus is little more than a fashion statement, people go along with the flow, it creates its own momentum as long as it remains fashionable, but in time, a change almost invariably takes place.
I suspect when claimate science is revisited in 20 or 30 years time, the present day consensus will be seen to be so yeaterday.
Someone needs to explain something to me.
“The models also produced the observed pattern of stronger trade winds”
Can they make up their damned minds!!!?? Is it WEAKER or STRONGER???
Because depending on what year or what study… Trade winds have become stronger, or weaker… but reality CANT BE BOTH!!!
Don’t they have measurements for this stuff??
They can’t measure or agree which way the wind blows… it’s pathetic.
Examples.
Stronger:
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/atlantic-warming-causing-stronger-pacific-trade-winds-20140803-zzwl8.html
http://www.enn.com/climate/article/47663
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/atlantic-warming-causing-stronger-pacific-trade-winds-20140803-zzwl8.html
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-02/15/no-hiatus
Weaker:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110206132902.htm
http://www.livescience.com/729-global-warming-weakens-trade-winds.html
http://www.bitsofscience.org/atlantic-trade-winds-926/
http://www.bitsofscience.org/trade-winds-weakening-pacific-el-nino-6437/
When asked about this book [critique about his theory of relativity] , Einstein retorted with this: “Why 100 authors? If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!”
Got to remember that one.
Unfortunately John Timmer needs to remove his head from his posterior for a second or two and look beyond his political motivations, biases, and thrill for the lawerly argument. If he does he’ll come to understand that consensus in methodolgy is not the same as proven scientific theory. Even then scientific theory is not completely static, but evolves over time or can be superceded by a better theory.
“…but a variety of studies have suggested that over 95 percent of the scientists with the relevant expertise are on the same page about the general outlines of climate change. – John Timmer
Another meaningless ambigous statement purported to support any Climate Science claim. “On the same page about the general outlines of climate change” is laughable to the extreme; what is this general outline, what is this relevant expertise, is it that even idiots agree that climate changes?
I don’t object to a consensus. What I object to is saying a consensus on one thing means something else. I believe there is a consensus that a portion of global warming was man-made. But that does not mean the planet is burning up.
Peter,
Using U.S. definitions of the terms, conservatives, in general, are skeptical of major changes and require conclusive data to change course. Their analysis of the data may not always go along with the scientific consensus because the conservatives value strongly the continuity of society and their way of life. They will weigh the science against its social impact and sometimes reject valid science as too expensive in this regard.
There is a cost-benefit equation that has to be justified to a conservative, and certain “political remedies” put forth by the consensus scientists have crossed just about every red line a conservative would have. To the conservative the cost of doing nothing is far better then any benefit which may be derived from removing yet more freedom of action from the individual.(which to a conservative is a cost far worse)
On the consensus side, most are not traditional liberals, but one-world socialists somewhere to the left of the traditional liberals. The traditional liberals I know are split on the issue. They are mostly willing to go where the data leads. Some were easily swayed with some really flimsy arguments, others are skeptical because the evidence in support is a little suspect.
It appears that we are having no luck at forming a consensus on consensus.
– – – – – – – –
In our open and free modern culture of course it is normal that scientists voluntarily form intellectual relationships and associate with any other scientists that they choose. If the basis of the relationship and association is agreement with each other then it is their right to do so; their choice; there is no professional integrity issue in that. Is that what is fundamentally at the root of the concept of consensus? If it is then it does not have any relevance to the concept of science. Science is not agreement among scientists, it is not consensus. Science is systemic accumulation of independent and corroborated observations of reality assessed against the theories / hypotheses of those involved in pursuit of understanding reality.
I am disappointed in and extremely critical of the strategy adopted by Ridley and Montford recently where they are explicitly promoting that consensus has scientific merit on a not insignificant level in processes, assessments, dialog and deciding what reality is.
John
If the basis of the relationship and association is agreement with each other then it is their right to do so; their choice; there is no professional integrity issue in that.
================
on the contrary. say I get a job in a company. then I recommend a bunch of my friends for jobs and help them get hired. only I don’t say they are my friends – we keep that secret. then we all agree to talk down everyone we are competing with in the company except each other.
we continue to bad mouth and undermine the competition until they get fired. after all, if 10 of us say X is bad, then X must be bad. The idea that 10 of us would conspire is silly, the fantasy of conspiracy nuts. X is bad and must go.
in this fashion we eliminate those that stand in our way and rise to the top of the company. eventually our group controls the top of the company and prevents all others from seeking high office. our view and our view alone is what gets published.
in this fashion many small groups have taken control of large organizations. be it companies, organizations, universities or political parties.
ferd berple says:
September 10, 2014 at 10:24 am
– – – – – – – – –
ferd berple,
In the community of science (just like in our general modern culture), freedom of association of those who agree with each other is a reasonable thing to expect, whether their critics like what they agree on or not. If you have a professional integrity issue with that, then please advise.
It just is not a factor in whether a given theory or hypothesis (or whole categories of theories and hypotheses) are valid understandings of reality. In science it is only whether a person’s applied reasoning in a theory or a hypothesis when tested against independent and corroborated observations of reality that determines what are valid understandings of reality The existence of any agreeing or disagreeing majority of scientists in associations do not cognitively have relevance to scientific process and method.
John
Everyone seems to be discussing consensus as if it was a singularity.
There is a large consensus among scientists that CO2 causes catastrophic warming of the planet.
There is likewise a large consensus among skeptical scientists that warming causes the increase in CO2 and it is merely incidental to change in a parameter (T) of the gas laws.
Which consensus is false has not yet been determined yet! However, the empirical evidence of no temperature rise despite increases in atmospheric CO2 over 19 years does seem to indicate the “writing on the wall”. GK
In the first course in my scientific education I learnt about logical fallacies. The consensus fallacy was one of these fallacies:
In argumentation theory, an argumentum ad populum (Latin for “appeal to the people”) is a fallacious argument that concludes a proposition to be true because many or most people believe it. In other words, the basic idea of the argument is: “If many believe so, it is so.”
This type of argument is known by several names,[1] including appeal to the masses, appeal to belief, appeal to the majority, appeal to democracy, appeal to popularity, argument by consensus, consensus fallacy, authority of the many, and bandwagon fallacy, and in Latin as argumentum ad numerum (“appeal to the number”), and consensus gentium (“agreement of the clans”).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
I thought all scientists learned about about logic and fallacies.
This believe has clearly been demonstrated to be wrong.
CAGW is special pleading, with or without the leading C.
Peter, the most “authoritative” word on the “97%” might be this:
http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/cooking-stove-use-housing-associations-white-males-and-the-97
and this
http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/the-art-of-evasion
Duarte is a psychologist. He examines the methods, sources, and arguments of Cook and Co. I won’t go into to detail, since it is impossible to do it justice in a short comment. Anthony posted about his commentary on Cook et al. earlier. He concludes that there is not even any social science in Cook’s work. Not even the sources used appear to be properly legitimate. He concludes that what Cook and Co. produced was simply bad social science, it was appallingly bad social science. This is all done without Duarte taking ANY kind of stand on where he thinks the weather is headed. The critique is soley based on his own expertise in his own field.
How do we define science? According to Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, the definition of science is “knowledge attained through study or practice,” or “knowledge covering general truths of the operation of general laws, esp. as obtained and tested through scientific method [and] concerned with the physical world.”
What does that really mean? Science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge. This system uses observation and experimentation to describe and explain natural phenomena.
The term science also refers to the organized body of knowledge people have gained using that system. Less formally, the word science often describes any systematic field of study or the knowledge gained from it.
What is the purpose of science? Perhaps the most general description is that the purpose of science is to produce useful models of reality.
—
1.
a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws.The word science comes from the Latin “scientia,” meaning knowledge.
2.
systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.
3.
any of the branches of natural or physical science.
4.
systematized knowledge in general.
5.
knowledge, as of facts or principles; knowledge gained by systematic study.
6.
a particular branch of knowledge.
7.
skill, especially reflecting a precise application of facts or principles; proficiency.
—————————
Any conclusion or consensus can be deemed or accepted as scientific only when (if) it does not contradict and does not violate the definition and the meaning of the science and its purpose, otherwise will be just a consensus of people…… and no matter how many people or from what backgrownd and what a group or of what percentige in consensus reached , it still will not be deemed as a scientific consensus or a scientific conclusion.
A scientific consensus is about the science and not about the number of the scientists been in one or the other group and blatantly claiming the majority as the criteria on how something can be deemed as scientific.
I think is more about ‘criteria meeting the purpose’ than anything else.
But then again is no surprise while someone can claim anything he thinks-up or makes-up as scientific, especially while some 100 or so scientists accept willingly and with so much readiness to support by allowing to be played as caricature puppet-muppets.
science. noun
scientific. adjective
cheers
Science needs some form of widespread agreement or consensus in order to function. In essence, we have to have a working paradigm to actually do research. It’s where we draw the line between signal and noise. Because experiments give plenty of crazy anomalies just off of random error, one experiment will not overthrow a theory. Challenging the ruling paradigm requires precise technique and fine-tuning of experiments to show that your explanation for observations is solid.
Science needs to be able to argue freely over the consensus, or the consensus becomes a straightjacket. Consensus enforced by the authorities is bad science. Climate change is just the area where the fight is most fierce. The evolution debate and various paranormal studies have become completely polarized – dissenters are viewed as non-scientific no matter what they say.
I support skeptical inquiry, as opposed to dogmatism. There was once a scientific consensus that bacteria could not survive in the stomach to cause ulcers, that a land bridge connected the continents instead of continental drift, and more. Consensus can be wrong, and the only way to keep the consensus correct is to carefully examine those who challenge the official line. Some are going to be cranks or promoting their own dogma, but reviewing them and rejecting them on the basis of evidence, rather than an official statement of consensus, makes the consensus stronger.
The author of the Arstechnica article states “….consensus is part of a process”. I would agree with that statement. But the process that “consensus” is part of is not a scientific one.
When you say “consensus is good” – for me you are saying something like: we humans are herd animals and we can’t do without consensus for that reason. OK, but…
In biology, when you look at the process of evolution, what you see is that “marginal” organisms – deviations if you like – are an essential ingredient in evolutionary dynamics.
So then you should realize consensus – or fitting in the herd – has its pro’s, but a healthy ecosystem cannot do without the variations and the “deviants”. So consensus has its limitations and in itself is not enough.
My intuition tells me this also applies on a mental level. So like it or not, for metal evolution or progress we probably can’t do without all these “irrelevant nonsensical” ideas. They are there for a good reason.
There are just too many nonsensical ideas and some are more nonsense than others. The consensus and in particular the evidence on which it is built is the yardstick with which we measure the nonsense.
Consensus and nonsense are not mutually exclusive. Just because you can get a consensus about something does not mean that that something is not itself nonsense.
There is a parallel with “junk-DNA” here. In changing circumstances parts of this DNA may become active and serve some purpose. You make look upon all the nonsense around as our mental junk-DNA. Parts of it waiting to be used when a paradigm-shift occurs.
—————–
Leif,
It seems to me that your “Yardstick” is some collective agreement of a group referring to itself as the consensus and that it does not measure reality, it only measures a quasi status quo agreement of a group of people who (through their research work) have a certain similar position on a theory or hypothesis about reality. It seems non-relevant against a view, which is my understanding, that science is only measured by a “Yardstick” consisting of a comprehensive and systemic body of independent and corroborated observations of reality; science is not measured by agreement.
Instead of saying there is a consensus on any theory or hypothesis in science on an aspect of reality, it is rather more appropriate in science to say something like “all observations to date support a theory or hypothesis so it doesn’t matter if a majority of the scientific community agrees or disagrees with that theory or hypothesis”. N’est ce pas?
John
Perhaps I was not clear enough. what I wanted to convey was that when I, personally, and I surmise most scientists as well ‘judge’ a nonsense idea [as it was called] we compare it with the evidence on which the consensus was built.
Leif Svalgaard on September 10, 2014 at 7:44 pm
– – – – – – – –
Leif,
Your clarification helped me understand your previous comments on the dialog about consensus and science. It seems now that you and I are on the same fundamental level that it is observation / evidence from reality that is the focus on any possibility of scientific merit for the concept of ‘consensus’.
I suggest that using the idea of consensus in science is very imprecise and it unfortunately implies authority fallacies. Why can’t the science community be more intellectually explicit by not referring to a consensus but instead why don’t they list with straight forward professional integrity those scientists who agree or disagree and leave it at that? That seems to me to be a very reasonable approach that removes the misleading implication of authority when using the consensus concept in science.
John
All scientists agree that ‘consensus’ does not mean appealing to authority so there is no confusion there. If lay persons are confused it is because they do not take the care to understand the issues [some don’t even want to]. That said, scientists rarely use the word ‘consensus’, but rather what consensus means: ‘general agreement’. Even when there is general agreement, some dissent is healthy and helps keep the ship on its course. There is not much we as scientists can do to educate an unwilling populace. The situation is like that with the word ‘theory’, which in science means an explanation bolstered by extensive and solid evidence, while lay persons equate the word with uncertainty and doubt: “it is only a theory [thus not for real]”
Leif Svalgaard on September 11, 2014 at 10:22 am
– – – – – – – –
Leif,
As we have extended dialog on the subject, I suggest we need to separate out who in the science venue uses of the concept of ‘consensus’ differently than others in the venue.
John
@nealjking- The bolded sentences in your excerpt from Feynman’s speech are Feynman’s way of acknowledging the validity of Occam’s Razor.
There is a definite mediocrity to the followers of the consensus of Climatology.
A mythical agreement of “learned: opinion.
That they have continuously claimed to gain credibility from this myth, leaves we convinced they have always known they have no empirical science to argue.
Appeal to authority, demonize those who doubt, these are old plays from the conmen.
CAGW bears all these hallmarks of a confidence swindle.
But if our political elites and presstitutes are as smart as they claim, how come they got swindled by such mediocrities?