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Man this comments section is a cesspool. The reality is that consensus does play a part in science, this is because intuition also plays a large part - both in

by jpgvm 5y ago

Man this comments section is a cesspool. The reality is that consensus does play a part in science, this is because intuition also plays a large part - both in guiding experimentation but also in interpreting findings. Consensus is the mechanism used to translate scientific findings into actionable advice/recommendations/engineering. Without it nothing would ever happen. Science is always full of unknowns, consensus allows us to move forward in absence of complete information (because such a thing often doesn't exist). The means by which scientists and engineers reach consensus are very different from politicians and other soft studies. Because of the role peer review plays in the scientific community consensus is built up over time, not through discussion but rather through experimental results and verified data. Consensus is less "we sat around and decided X is true" but rather "there is an overwhelming amount of data that suggests this is true". This is often translated into models which spur further experiments to attempt to verify or disprove these models (for instance the LHC and the Higgs boson as a high profile example). So no. 99% consensus in science isn't that uncommon and no it's generally not a bad thing. A big difference is also that in science it only takes a single very compelling counter-point to significantly disrupt consensus. See here Einstein's photo electric effect or his theory of relativity - both disrupted fairly intrenched consensus. This latter point is very important because unlike scientists soft fields often struggle to break consensus even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Everyone feels like they should get an "opinion" and that scientists are just voicing "opinions". This leads to people equating the voice of relatively uninformed individuals with that of scientists. I don't know this can be resolved but if it could be it would allow society to move forward at a much faster rate.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
> Consensus is the mechanism used to translate scientific findings into actionable advice/recommendations/engineering. Without it nothing would ever happen. Science is always full of unknowns, consensus allows us to move forward in absence of complete information (because such a thing often doesn't exist) FWIW, my experiences have been the precise opposite. My colleagues never seem to have consensus about anything. But companies move forward with our recommendations, both because we're more likely to be right, and if our recommendations happen to serve the company's goals. I'm sure a bunch of people will read into this comment, but I am speaking purely about my experiences as an ML scientist. It would be valid to say that ML represents a very small fraction of the global scientific apparatus, and I certainly don't claim to know what it's like to work at CERN. It surprised me, though, how often you were right -- there often is consensus, in the sense that everyone reads about a certain technique in papers and automatically assumes it's applicable to their own situation. For example, everyone in language modeling almost universally agrees that "lower loss is better," ("loss" is a specific ML term,"). But that's only true for general language models trained on large quantities of data. If you're fine-tuning a language model, you almost never want the steepest loss slope, because it means your learning rate is too high and you'll destroy the existing knowledge. I would say that experience matters, and each situation is different. It's super tricky to make an argument that consensus is both universally common and universally good.
- jpgvm 5y ago
  ML has gone through a significant enough transformation in the last few years that it's velocity essentially makes it very difficult to form consensus about anything right now as everything feels up for replacement in short order.
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    That's probably true, which is why I love it so much. :) You're right that it might not be the best example. Still... in particle physics, for example, I've heard that there was consensus in favor of certain particles existing, even to the extent of "multiple experiments have achieved an N-sigma result showing that this particle exists," for some fairly high N. And then a later experiment showed that the particle simply didn't exist, and that the previous results were experimental error. (Specifically, experimental bias – they were expecting to see certain results, and so they were probably subconsciously combing the data for such results.) My knowledge on that subject comes from Veritasium, not from reading physics papers or following along with experimental breakthroughs. But I've seen similar things happen in ML, where people are pretty convinced a certain technique is good (hello, style mixing in StyleGAN) and no one ever bothers to check whether it's true in reality (style mixing is what prevents StyleGAN from being as cohesive as BigGAN). I guess I broadly agree with your point. There is consensus that black holes exist, and that we've even observed one, so it's pretty likely that if you were to travel there, you'd find a black hole. But given how much science itself has changed throughout history, alarm bells start going off when hearing things like "Consensus is extremely common, and it's almost universally a good thing."
    - jpgvm 5y ago
      "Consensus is extremely common, and it's almost universally a good thing." isn't about saying things are assumed when they are not, just that the community is able to quickly adapt to changes in fundamental theory in order to explore the new ground opened up as a result. Take your example about StyleGAN vs BigGan, I assume once it became clear that the latter was superior to the former that likely resulted in changes to existing architectures that then found additional improvements. This change in consensus is what enables that and is a good thing. I think the problem here is conflating consensus with faith, that is assuming truth in absence of data. Consensus is easily changed with the introduction of new data, faith hangs on no matter how much evidence is put forward that it's horseshit.
ehsankia 5y ago
Consensus is basically what Peer Review is. Having a bunch of other scientists look at your methodology and data to see if they come to the same conclusion you did, or if there was a mistake you overlooked. This 99% is basically like a meta-peer-review of all peer reviewed papers.
x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
We have to acknowledge the fact that the denialism concerning climate change extends from it being strongly linked politically. That's the reason we see so much effort in this thread concerning "valuing other opinions" or "people believed the earth was flat". Since the naysayers aren't interested in coming up with legitimate alternative models, the only refuge is to downplay "consensus" and fight to have uninformed individuals on the same level of discourse as the climatology community. So while the science is solid, you aren't going to get someone to believe something they are against from the onset.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > Since the naysayers aren't interested in coming up with legitimate alternative models, the only refuge is to downplay "consensus" It's important to note that this pattern plays out for many issues. It's reactionary politics and rhetoric, which is simply against things and for nothing - to deny: climate change, covid, racism, etc.
  - paisawalla 5y ago
    It's important to note that this pattern plays out for many issues. It's progressive politics and rhetoric, which is simply for any change and refuses to admit that anything is ever good enough, has natural causes, or is a completed process - to blindly accept claims of: climate change, covid, racism, etc.
    - cannabis_sam 5y ago
      “Non-movement is the same and as valid as movement!” Sure, good luck with that, but why impose it on others?
    - KennyBlanken 5y ago
      Strange that both the coal and oil industries (independently) produced internal documents in the mid 1960's agreeing that climate change science was sound and thus it was a particularly serious threat to their business.
addicted 5y ago
Thank you. But in reality science is 100% consensus. Nothing else. There isn’t a single scientific “fact” that is anything more than high degrees of consensus. The commenters who seem to believe that consensus is anti-science have no clue what they are talking about.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  not really , science is about building 100% bulletproof but falsifiable theories that are constantly being attacked by non-consenters and still win. No such thing as "fixed" scientific truth
- proc0 5y ago
  Consensus is just people agreeing on something. Science depends on tests passing, which does not depend on anyone agreeing on their results. Indeed, the point of tests is to remove the human from the 'equation' so to speak, therefore consensus isn't even possible. If consensus is needed, it's probably because rigorous science cannot be done for whatever reason, like maybe not having enough fossil evidence.
cblconfederate 5y ago
> not through discussion but rather through experimental results and verified data Like the LHC or einstein's predictions, consensus was built for them when after high precision predictions of their models became observed in the real world. That established that correlation was causation. Climate scientists can convince skeptics if they make such detailed predictions. But to be fair, the scientific message is muffled by popular scaremongering.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  It's very well possible to have the right conclusion ('climate change is man made') while working with imprecise data and models. High precision is not required for consensus about cause and effect to be established, merely that within the boundary of error no other explanation is viable.
- adrianN 5y ago
  With global warming, the problem is that if you wait for the 6° warming by 2100 predictions to come true, billions are already dead.
  - lovecg 5y ago
    Let’s not be hyperbolic. Without even getting into the futility of predicting something as complex as future mortality rates, the worst case projections go into tens of millions additional deaths due to climate change over the century (if that sounds like a lot, global deaths per _year_ are on the order of 50 million, so this is a few percent increase). https://impactlab.org/research/valuing-the-global-mortality-consequences-of-climate-change-accounting-for-adaptation-costs-and-benefits/ https://impactlab.org/research/valuing-the-global-mortality-... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24487-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24487-w
    - adrianN 5y ago
      I expect many wars caused by famine and mass migrations. India and Pakistan will fight over water and they both have nuclear weapons.
koonsolo 5y ago
> So no. 99% consensus in science isn't that uncommon and no it's generally not a bad thing. To put things in perspective, there is a 97% consensus on evolution theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution#:~:text=Nearly%20all%20(around%2097%25),proposed%20by%20intelligent%20design%20proponents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution.... That basically means we are more certain about the cause of climate change than about evolution.
- Proven 5y ago
  No, that doesn't put things in perspective at all. To put things in perspective, a 97% consensus on evolution theory doesn't impact me any way. I can choose whatever I prefer or even refuse to take a position. The globalist-climatist agenda steals from me via taxation and restricts my freedom, regardless of what I think. And as I noted in another comment, the consensus is totally irrelevant to begin with because the question isn't whether there are changes or who or what causes them. The manufactured consensus that matters is that undoing the supposed changes is possible and can be forced in a way that doesn't leave me poorer - both of those assumumptions are unproven and very likely false. Put that in your perspective.
lettergram 5y ago
I think the larger issue is the lack of credibility. Having read many of the papers, been involved in some research myself, etc. I thoroughly believe the field has no credibility. We simply don't know and it's unknowable depending on what we are attempting to measure, predict, etc. Here are the criticisms I have seen and share myself: 1. Define "climate change" 2. Funding tends to be provided to those who agree politically 3. Funding is typically tied to particular research objectives. Because of that, outcomes are often per-determined, particularly when we're looking at trend lines in particular predictable ways. For instance, we are likely funding research into "what are the human causes of climate change" -- which implies an outcome. 4. While there may be consensus that it's human caused, that doesn't necessarily mean there's consensus on the reasons, outcomes, scale, etc. 5. Journals / Reviewers actively block publication of counter points. 6. There's significant evidence climate change will benefit humanity, aka the characterization from politicians misrepresents the actual data. This reduces the credibility of the field and influences desired outcomes. 7. Many of the predictions from scientists in the field have been wildly off. If you go through old papers you can see there were predictions of an apocalypse every few years, which never comes. This makes it seem like a giant grift. 8. There's a MAJOR sampling issue. Where are the data samples taken to determine "warming", there are many papers cherry picking data. Certain regions are getting cooler, others warmer, etc. Additionally, we only have data reliably for a hundred years and we're exiting an ice age. We see correlations at that scale, causation are not discoverable; at least for what most people consider climate change (global temperature change & weather patterns). 9. Obvious counter examples exist. Per-industrialization, North Africa went fro a lush land to a desert. It wasn't human industrialization that did that. North America was covered in a sheet of ice a mile thick 20,000 years ago. These events are rarely considered in papers examining human influence.
- igorkraw 5y ago
  On a quick glance I see numbers 1 ,43,44,48,90,96, of the climate change deniers list (1), and that's just from a 30 second skim. You are doing the classical playbook of "just asking questions" which either can't be settled (but what really is climate change?) or have been settled and you are willfully ignoring them (the IPCC has a clear definition of climate change, anthropogenic climate change etc.), in order to make it appear that the debate is ongoing and there is substantial doubt. There isn't. Like a sister comment pointed out, there is more consensus on climate change than on evolution. I expect you to wine about being downvoted and "silenced" as the next move of this playbook 1. https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php
lanevorockz 5y ago
So many word for so little content. We are mostly scientists here so you don’t need to be so condescending. Problem is that your words are just opinion with no basis in reality, no consensus get to 99% without some manipulation.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  I am very confident that HN posters are not "mostly scientists." This community is largely skeptical of even undergraduate degrees, let alone PhDs and academic publication. What percentage of posters do you think have published a scientific paper? 2% would strike me as high.

by jpgvm 5y ago

sillysaurusx 5y ago

> Consensus is the mechanism used to translate scientific findings into actionable advice/recommendations/engineering. Without it nothing would ever happen. Science is always full of unknowns, consensus allows us to move forward in absence of complete information (because such a thing often doesn't exist) FWIW, my experiences have been the precise opposite. My colleagues never seem to have consensus about anything. But companies move forward with our recommendations, both because we're more likely to be right, and if our recommendations happen to serve the company's goals. I'm sure a bunch of people will read into this comment, but I am speaking purely about my experiences as an ML scientist. It would be valid to say that ML represents a very small fraction of the global scientific apparatus, and I certainly don't claim to know what it's like to work at CERN. It surprised me, though, how often you were right -- there often is consensus, in the sense that everyone reads about a certain technique in papers and automatically assumes it's applicable to their own situation. For example, everyone in language modeling almost universally agrees that "lower loss is better," ("loss" is a specific ML term,"). But that's only true for general language models trained on large quantities of data. If you're fine-tuning a language model, you almost never want the steepest loss slope, because it means your learning rate is too high and you'll destroy the existing knowledge. I would say that experience matters, and each situation is different. It's super tricky to make an argument that consensus is both universally common and universally good.

jpgvm 5y ago
ML has gone through a significant enough transformation in the last few years that it's velocity essentially makes it very difficult to form consensus about anything right now as everything feels up for replacement in short order.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  That's probably true, which is why I love it so much. :) You're right that it might not be the best example. Still... in particle physics, for example, I've heard that there was consensus in favor of certain particles existing, even to the extent of "multiple experiments have achieved an N-sigma result showing that this particle exists," for some fairly high N. And then a later experiment showed that the particle simply didn't exist, and that the previous results were experimental error. (Specifically, experimental bias – they were expecting to see certain results, and so they were probably subconsciously combing the data for such results.) My knowledge on that subject comes from Veritasium, not from reading physics papers or following along with experimental breakthroughs. But I've seen similar things happen in ML, where people are pretty convinced a certain technique is good (hello, style mixing in StyleGAN) and no one ever bothers to check whether it's true in reality (style mixing is what prevents StyleGAN from being as cohesive as BigGAN). I guess I broadly agree with your point. There is consensus that black holes exist, and that we've even observed one, so it's pretty likely that if you were to travel there, you'd find a black hole. But given how much science itself has changed throughout history, alarm bells start going off when hearing things like "Consensus is extremely common, and it's almost universally a good thing."
  - jpgvm 5y ago
    "Consensus is extremely common, and it's almost universally a good thing." isn't about saying things are assumed when they are not, just that the community is able to quickly adapt to changes in fundamental theory in order to explore the new ground opened up as a result. Take your example about StyleGAN vs BigGan, I assume once it became clear that the latter was superior to the former that likely resulted in changes to existing architectures that then found additional improvements. This change in consensus is what enables that and is a good thing. I think the problem here is conflating consensus with faith, that is assuming truth in absence of data. Consensus is easily changed with the introduction of new data, faith hangs on no matter how much evidence is put forward that it's horseshit.

ehsankia 5y ago

Consensus is basically what Peer Review is. Having a bunch of other scientists look at your methodology and data to see if they come to the same conclusion you did, or if there was a mistake you overlooked. This 99% is basically like a meta-peer-review of all peer reviewed papers.

x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago

We have to acknowledge the fact that the denialism concerning climate change extends from it being strongly linked politically. That's the reason we see so much effort in this thread concerning "valuing other opinions" or "people believed the earth was flat". Since the naysayers aren't interested in coming up with legitimate alternative models, the only refuge is to downplay "consensus" and fight to have uninformed individuals on the same level of discourse as the climatology community. So while the science is solid, you aren't going to get someone to believe something they are against from the onset.

wolverine876 5y ago
> Since the naysayers aren't interested in coming up with legitimate alternative models, the only refuge is to downplay "consensus" It's important to note that this pattern plays out for many issues. It's reactionary politics and rhetoric, which is simply against things and for nothing - to deny: climate change, covid, racism, etc.
- paisawalla 5y ago
  It's important to note that this pattern plays out for many issues. It's progressive politics and rhetoric, which is simply for any change and refuses to admit that anything is ever good enough, has natural causes, or is a completed process - to blindly accept claims of: climate change, covid, racism, etc.
  - cannabis_sam 5y ago
    “Non-movement is the same and as valid as movement!” Sure, good luck with that, but why impose it on others?
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    Strange that both the coal and oil industries (independently) produced internal documents in the mid 1960's agreeing that climate change science was sound and thus it was a particularly serious threat to their business.

addicted 5y ago

Thank you. But in reality science is 100% consensus. Nothing else. There isn’t a single scientific “fact” that is anything more than high degrees of consensus. The commenters who seem to believe that consensus is anti-science have no clue what they are talking about.

cblconfederate 5y ago
not really , science is about building 100% bulletproof but falsifiable theories that are constantly being attacked by non-consenters and still win. No such thing as "fixed" scientific truth
proc0 5y ago
Consensus is just people agreeing on something. Science depends on tests passing, which does not depend on anyone agreeing on their results. Indeed, the point of tests is to remove the human from the 'equation' so to speak, therefore consensus isn't even possible. If consensus is needed, it's probably because rigorous science cannot be done for whatever reason, like maybe not having enough fossil evidence.

cblconfederate 5y ago

> not through discussion but rather through experimental results and verified data Like the LHC or einstein's predictions, consensus was built for them when after high precision predictions of their models became observed in the real world. That established that correlation was causation. Climate scientists can convince skeptics if they make such detailed predictions. But to be fair, the scientific message is muffled by popular scaremongering.

jacquesm 5y ago
It's very well possible to have the right conclusion ('climate change is man made') while working with imprecise data and models. High precision is not required for consensus about cause and effect to be established, merely that within the boundary of error no other explanation is viable.
adrianN 5y ago
With global warming, the problem is that if you wait for the 6° warming by 2100 predictions to come true, billions are already dead.
- lovecg 5y ago
  Let’s not be hyperbolic. Without even getting into the futility of predicting something as complex as future mortality rates, the worst case projections go into tens of millions additional deaths due to climate change over the century (if that sounds like a lot, global deaths per _year_ are on the order of 50 million, so this is a few percent increase). https://impactlab.org/research/valuing-the-global-mortality-consequences-of-climate-change-accounting-for-adaptation-costs-and-benefits/ https://impactlab.org/research/valuing-the-global-mortality-... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24487-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24487-w
  - adrianN 5y ago
    I expect many wars caused by famine and mass migrations. India and Pakistan will fight over water and they both have nuclear weapons.

koonsolo 5y ago

> So no. 99% consensus in science isn't that uncommon and no it's generally not a bad thing. To put things in perspective, there is a 97% consensus on evolution theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution#:~:text=Nearly%20all%20(around%2097%25),proposed%20by%20intelligent%20design%20proponents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution.... That basically means we are more certain about the cause of climate change than about evolution.

Proven 5y ago
No, that doesn't put things in perspective at all. To put things in perspective, a 97% consensus on evolution theory doesn't impact me any way. I can choose whatever I prefer or even refuse to take a position. The globalist-climatist agenda steals from me via taxation and restricts my freedom, regardless of what I think. And as I noted in another comment, the consensus is totally irrelevant to begin with because the question isn't whether there are changes or who or what causes them. The manufactured consensus that matters is that undoing the supposed changes is possible and can be forced in a way that doesn't leave me poorer - both of those assumumptions are unproven and very likely false. Put that in your perspective.

lettergram 5y ago

I think the larger issue is the lack of credibility. Having read many of the papers, been involved in some research myself, etc. I thoroughly believe the field has no credibility. We simply don't know and it's unknowable depending on what we are attempting to measure, predict, etc. Here are the criticisms I have seen and share myself: 1. Define "climate change" 2. Funding tends to be provided to those who agree politically 3. Funding is typically tied to particular research objectives. Because of that, outcomes are often per-determined, particularly when we're looking at trend lines in particular predictable ways. For instance, we are likely funding research into "what are the human causes of climate change" -- which implies an outcome. 4. While there may be consensus that it's human caused, that doesn't necessarily mean there's consensus on the reasons, outcomes, scale, etc. 5. Journals / Reviewers actively block publication of counter points. 6. There's significant evidence climate change will benefit humanity, aka the characterization from politicians misrepresents the actual data. This reduces the credibility of the field and influences desired outcomes. 7. Many of the predictions from scientists in the field have been wildly off. If you go through old papers you can see there were predictions of an apocalypse every few years, which never comes. This makes it seem like a giant grift. 8. There's a MAJOR sampling issue. Where are the data samples taken to determine "warming", there are many papers cherry picking data. Certain regions are getting cooler, others warmer, etc. Additionally, we only have data reliably for a hundred years and we're exiting an ice age. We see correlations at that scale, causation are not discoverable; at least for what most people consider climate change (global temperature change & weather patterns). 9. Obvious counter examples exist. Per-industrialization, North Africa went fro a lush land to a desert. It wasn't human industrialization that did that. North America was covered in a sheet of ice a mile thick 20,000 years ago. These events are rarely considered in papers examining human influence.

igorkraw 5y ago
On a quick glance I see numbers 1 ,43,44,48,90,96, of the climate change deniers list (1), and that's just from a 30 second skim. You are doing the classical playbook of "just asking questions" which either can't be settled (but what really is climate change?) or have been settled and you are willfully ignoring them (the IPCC has a clear definition of climate change, anthropogenic climate change etc.), in order to make it appear that the debate is ongoing and there is substantial doubt. There isn't. Like a sister comment pointed out, there is more consensus on climate change than on evolution. I expect you to wine about being downvoted and "silenced" as the next move of this playbook 1. https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php

lanevorockz 5y ago

So many word for so little content. We are mostly scientists here so you don’t need to be so condescending. Problem is that your words are just opinion with no basis in reality, no consensus get to 99% without some manipulation.

UncleMeat 5y ago
I am very confident that HN posters are not "mostly scientists." This community is largely skeptical of even undergraduate degrees, let alone PhDs and academic publication. What percentage of posters do you think have published a scientific paper? 2% would strike me as high.