Fair enough, I don't think it's a good way to convince people to simply claim your excellence however. I'm not interested in arguments from authority. If there'

Fair enough, I don't think it's a good way to convince people to simply claim your excellence however. I'm not interested in arguments from authority. If there's a big spat in a scientific field, usually you get this distribution. It's hard to be a skeptic in science, but that's where all the action is. Typically useful scientific fields are based in the hard sciences where this doesn't happen, I guess. How can you even know what the consensus is?