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>Anyone can be a scientist simply by following the scientific method and collecting data in good faith; That's like saying anyone can be a classic car collecto

>Anyone can be a scientist simply by following the scientific method and collecting data in good faith; That's like saying anyone can be a classic car collector by buying classic cars. It ignores people who are missing certain prerequisites. Many people do not have the resources (namely money) to do so. Many scientific experiments have a large cost to produce, and cannot be done by the average person. Many do not have the time to reach the level of knowledge needed to apply the statistics correctly. And science is driven by consensus. It doesn't make it right, but it does make it science. If 85% of science think X, then that is what is presented as science. It may take a generation before the majority of scientist move on to Y and that becomes science. Thankfully the consensus changes faster than that in most cases. A lone outsider who is ignored won't change anything. The beauty is that scientists tend to look at the new data and give it fair weight, and respond accordingly. Even then most don't buy into it immediately but wait for replication. And I've found in some fields (namely soft sciences), things are far less driven by even new data, with many scientist making the data fit the theory (seems easier to do with research on people than research on inanimate matter/energy).

ColanR 9y ago
> If 85% of science think X, then that is what is presented as science. "Science" is a process [1], not consensus. It uses the scientific method, which is a "body of techniques" for investigation [2]. That is exactly what parent said - if you are "following the scientific method and collecting data in good faith" you are "doing science" - i.e, you are a scientist. [1] a "systematic enterprise" (wikipedia.org/wiki/Science) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method EDIT: bad formatting.

ColanR 9y ago

> If 85% of science think X, then that is what is presented as science. "Science" is a process [1], not consensus. It uses the scientific method, which is a "body of techniques" for investigation [2]. That is exactly what parent said - if you are "following the scientific method and collecting data in good faith" you are "doing science" - i.e, you are a scientist. [1] a "systematic enterprise" (wikipedia.org/wiki/Science) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method EDIT: bad formatting.