> The first statement should usually raise eyebrows, as science is almost never "settled". The first and second laws of thermodynamics are pretty solid. For mos

> The first statement should usually raise eyebrows, as science is almost never "settled". The first and second laws of thermodynamics are pretty solid. For most other things we can entertain some skepticism. One of my good friends is a particle physicist and he assures me that he and his peers very much hope the science isn't settled, despite agreeing pretty well with experiment, because the Standard Model is a hideous kludge. The heuristic I use is judging based on my estimate of the statement's Shannon entropy. And most of the time the "follow the science" crowd's statements contain absolutely no entropy. I've already heard it verbatim from CNN or some other usually low expertise source. Furthermore, it's annoying to have people lecture me about PCR tests when they don't even know what a restriction endonuclease is. Note that high entropy doesn't mean correct, but to me it does mean more interesting. Now there are plenty of people out there who demonstrably do not want me to have access to high entropy sources, because they believe them to be wrong. They're certainly entitled to their beliefs, but I dislike the idea of someone else deciding what I'm allowed to read. On the subject of Shannon entropy, I've observed that on technical subjects that readers here have expertise in, like programming, the high entropy comments tend to get upvoted. On the other hand any topic where the crowd here believes "the science is settled" you see the exact opposite effect: high entropy comments are consistently massively disapproved of, while clever restatements of the conventional wisdom with minimal entropy get voted to the top.