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Well established scientific concensus. If you're referring to anything related to Covid there's no well-established scientific consensus it literally just happ

Well established scientific concensus. If you're referring to anything related to Covid there's no well-established scientific consensus it literally just happened around year and a half ago it's impossible to have scientific consensus. Even the most respected scientists are saying they don't know about a lot of things related to covid. also well-established scientific consensus is not an ideal goal post . Galileo was excommunicated. Labotomies won the Nobel prize. Nothing is certain in life when human beings are involved no matter how comforting that thought is. There is only a narrative of certainty.

KittenInABox 5y ago
> also well-established scientific consensus is not an ideal goal post Genuinely asking, how should I evaluate truth in a subject matter that I myself don't have a doctorate in if the standard of "what is general consensus among the people with doctorates in the subject" isn't reasonable?
- Zuider 5y ago
  What evidence is there that a general consensus on a thesis indicates that it is necessarily true? Is it rational simply to accept a consensus, effectively taking something on faith?
  - silverspoonin 5y ago
    That was not an answer to his question, and I am really curious for an answer to it because I think it's a valid and reasonable point. Also, as to whether believing scientific general consensus should count as "faith" or not, I invite you to read Issac Asimov's short essay "The Relativity of Wrong".
    - nickthemagicman 5y ago
      Scientific consensus is just religious consensus with more advanced instruments of measurements. You're still prodding into the infinite. CERN and Yerkes Observatory are just peeling off the surface layer of the onion. To claim anything is objective truth is also claiming you know the universe in it's entirety.
    - Zuider 5y ago
      OP's question appears to invert the burden of proof in assuming that a consensus, even of experts, ought to be believed unless there are compelling reasons not to accept it. Where is the evidence that a consensus is a good metric for the truth of a matter? Has there been any work done to establish such a correspondence? Asimov seems to be arguing that there are degrees of wrongness, and one can become less wrong by a process of rational error elimination and criticism. How does the mere fact of a consensus have any bearing on this process?
      - silverspoonin 5y ago
        > OP's question appears to invert the burden of proof in assuming that a consensus, even of experts, ought to be believed unless there are compelling reasons not to accept it. Again, I pose the question, what is a reasonable alternative? >Asimov seems to be arguing that there are degrees of wrongness, and one can become less wrong by a process of rational error elimination and criticism. How does the mere fact of a consensus have any bearing on this process? The scientific process IS a process of rational error elimination and criticism. Scientific consensus is the result of the majority of experts in a field using the scientific process to agree on the "least wrong" information possible given the data available at that time. If you claim not to see the bearing on this process, you're being dishonestly obtuse. > Where is the evidence that a consensus is a good metric for the truth of a matter? Has there been any work done to establish such a correspondence? I think you have the causal chain backwards; the evidence of a good metric for the truth of a matter is what builds consensus. If the evidence is incompatible with consensus, and it holds up to scrutiny & reproduction, then the consensus changes to match. Either way, the end result is that consensus is an improving approximation to "the truth". If you have a better way of obtaining "the truth", I would be very glad to learn about it.
        Zuider 5y ago
        >Again, I pose the question, what is a reasonable alternative? Again, this inverts the burden of proof. There is no obligation to provide any alternative, and no obligation to defer to a consensus in the absence of one. >Scientific consensus is the result of the majority of experts in a field using the scientific process to agree on the "least wrong" information possible given the data available at that time. If you claim not to see the bearing on this process, you're being dishonestly obtuse. I see no evidence that this narrative is generally true, and it is a very weak argument for taking consensus as a metric of truthfulness. >If you have a better way of obtaining "the truth", I would be very glad to learn about it. One does not require a better way of obtaining the truth in order to avoid committing oneself to accepting unjustified claims. Again, such a requirement inverts the burden of proof.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  A lot of parts of science and math are very different from the 60's while a lot of remains the same! How do you make sense of all of this and wrangle objective truth from the chaos? That's an epistomological question people have been asking since the dawn of mankind. IS there even objective truth that our limited monkey/human mind can grasp? I don't know the answer!...but I know censoring a multitude of opinions and claiming a monopoly on objective truth in an infinite world of chaos is not the way to do it.
  - atleta 5y ago
    It's not about censoring the opinions in general. Again, it's about censoring fake news on social media. Nobody wants to censor research (I know it's more complicated, because of what gets funded and what not) or publishing in peer reviewed papers. Heck, as a result of the pandemic, peer reviews got even quicker and a lot of research gets publicity when they get on pre-print servers (i.e. pre-review)! That doesn't sound like claiming monopoly on the truth to me. You could argue that social media is an important outlet for new scientific ideas, results and discoveries but then you'd have to prove that not censoring there and letting the fakes run wild adds more value than the harm caused by the fakes. And the we know that the latter effect exists. I'd say that even if there is added value here (TBH, I don't see it at all), it's overwhelmed by the harm. Any scientifically valuable contribution that is only spread through the social media will be lost in the noise of nonsense.
    - nickthemagicman 5y ago
      Did you ever think to yourself maybe the reason so many people are anti-(Covid)-vaxxers is not that they're brainwashed? Its that the anti-vaxx people may have a point? Many major scientific breakthroughs were made outside of the 'institution of science' and peer reviewed papers. Joseph Lister discovered antiseptic theory during routine medical practice and was mocked at first by other doctors who didn't want to switch instruments between surgurys. Galileo was excommunicated for going against mainstream science. But both of their ideas won out in the end. If you need censorship and coercion of any sort to force your ideas on people, if to need to limit the avenues which ideas are shared .. you need better ideas.
- kuraudo 5y ago
  Try to understand as much as possible and make your call that way. Most of the scientific questions in this world don't require you to have an opinion (I don't much care which rocket fuel is better; I'll let others argue over that). Covid and Climate Change are interesting because certain conclusions related to them have a direct impact on you and I. The ruling class would certainly like you to believe one conclusion over all the others and that conclusion might even be 'correct' in terms of being beneficial to you or humans as a whole, but asking people to believe that conclusion because of some 'consensus' is fraught with both logical and mortal peril as history has shown us time and time again.
silverspoonin 5y ago
"Well-established scientific consensus" may not be perfect, but may I challenge you to provide an alternative with a better track record? It generally takes in new information and self-corrects over time. As I mentioned to someone else in this threat, Issac Asimov's essay "The Relativity of Wrong" may be old but it's still very relevant today.
- furgooswft13 5y ago
  > Well-established scientific consensus" may not be perfect, but may I challenge you to provide an alternative with a better track record? The Scientific Method, rigorous debate and freedom of speech and association. "Scientific consensus" is just a media invention.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  There is so much data involved with even the smallest thing in this world we're barely even scratching the surface with science. An expert may have a PhD and know 5000% more than you about a subject but compared to the amount of knowledge required to understand how the universe or any scientific subject works...their knowledge is smaller than a rounding error..and our current knowledge as a human race is too. Experts are poking at the world just as much as the rest of us, they just have bigger sticks, and are wrong ALL the time. But being wrong is the first step to being right. Elon had the worlds most highly trained and advanced rocket scientists working for him at SpaceX and they still crashed a bunch of rockets. You get a second opinion even though medial doctors have many years of education, don't you? The problem is not science or education, it's how humans understand truth. I could be wearing a red and black flannel shirt and one expert would say the shirt is red and another expert say the shirt is black and both would be telling the truth, but neither is correct. Now pretend that flannel shirt has trillions to infinite numbers of colors and you have science. Scientific consensus is data with strong statistical significance that all scientists agree on. The shirt is clearly red! But it's only a small subset of data among infinite amounts of data in this world much of which we don't even know about and the human race probably never will. So while a scientific theory may be true, it may not be correct. And highly informed scientists can see just one part of the whole and claim it's the truth. And it's hubris to claim otherwise, especially looking at how often scientific consensus has been on the wrong side of human history, with Mengele, Galileo, Labotomies, etc. Thalidomide, the drug, would calm morning sickness and the scientific consensus was that it was a good drug from the limited amount of data they knew about at the time...until more data came in....and the scientific consensus changed on a dime. The problem is humans have a desperate need to provide some sort of order to this absolute chaos we live in because the world is scary and we're going to die and people want immediate answers they can rely on to make sense of it all. So they create narratives like religion, or scientific consensus, or political party and claim those are the one true answers and justify their success with the rain dance working or scientific data curing an illness or how cheap they made gas prices..ad infinitum. Scientific consensus, religion, politics, are all merely single narratives to explain this insanely complex world. And while all are important to listen to and can be very informative, they should only be SINGLE data points in your own critical thinking. There is no single source of truth. And there is no shortcut to the truth. Anyone who claims to have the objective 'truth' in a world as infinitely complex as ours is a religion person, and if you follow them unskeptically you are an acolyte, and if you censor people who are questioning you, you fall into an inquisition type situation.
atleta 5y ago
Yeah, the social media and the internet is full of these claims and I see how these are pretty easy to believe when told with enough confidence. Which was an interesting revelation for me. Since the average person doesn't know much about the background (me included!) and since a similar claim takes a lot of knowledge to disprove it just sounds plausible by default. Because if someone makes a more specific claim, like "this is how sars-cov-2 enters the cells" or "this drug works" (or doesn't work) that's easy to check and then, if not true, disprove with published papers. The "we don't know this" is harder. Even if you pull up a paper, the goal post indeed will be moved ever so slightly and if the claim is more broad then you need to be a knowledgable expert to be able to say where the gaps are in the knowledge and how likely, when discovered/understood that new knowledge would change the field substantially. Since I became interested, I started learning a bit of virology online. Vincent Racaniello, a professor of virology at Columbia has an online course on youtube. This semester he teaches it directly with a focus on the average layperson [1]. Each session is 2 hours long and you can ask questions which he answers. It's not about covid, it's about virology in general but he does include the relevant pieces of information abour sars-cov-2 into every lesson/topic. He actually has his previous courses taught to undergrad (or graduate?) students online as well. Those seem to be just 1 hour long each, but based on a quick look at the slides the content is identical. Now what it teaches to everyone interested is that they know a lot. They have astonishingly detailed knowledge about how viruses work in general and they have learned a lot about sars-cov-2 very quickly. But given the general virology knowledge, you won't be surprised at the things they looked at first. [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGhmZX2NKiNnVlm_lAvk50Qy_wWh_7tPL https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGhmZX2NKiNnVlm_lAvk5...
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  My undergrad is in biology and I got it many years ago. I can only imagine how much has changed since then. Does anyone think that in the infinite complexity of the human body and the immune system that we think we have 'figured covid out' by discovering a single spike protein? There's such an endless possibility of how Covid can interact with the body. We are just touching the surface of how the body works. They just discovered a new organelle in cells this year. So for any single group to claim a monopoly on truth and censor other views, especially with only a year and a half of study... is a major problem.
atleta 5y ago
> also well-established scientific consensus is not an ideal goal post . It indeed is. As a layperson who knows nothing about a field, not even a closely related field your best bet is to accept the scientific consensus. And by best bet I mean that that that is the choice that will give you the highest expected value of success. People keep pointing at the cases from the past (sometimes from the very far past, like with Galileo) trying to disprove this strategy. There are at least two fatal flaws with this logic: 1. science has evolved a lot since then. And it doesn't just mean that we know more about those specific subjects (be it astronomy or neuroscience) but more importantly, the scientific method has evolved too. I.e. when we think we know something today, is very different from what it was a 100 or 500 years ago. 2. Of course, scientists can be wrong. Even en masse (i.e. the scientific consensus). (If it wasn't so, we may not need research any more after all because we'd know everything.) But going completely wrong is pretty rare and what is exactly your other option? Listening to lunatics? Because every lunatic will say "yeah, but the scientists are wrong all the time, so..." and go on with their 100% unfounded claims. No, it's not that they do research because they don't accept the consensus. That would be totally OK. They just make claims that they support with this very vague critique. "Lobotomy won a Nobel prize, which we know don't work, so who is to tell me that I'm wrong with my claims that I have nothing to support." > Nothing is certain in life when human beings are involved no matter how comforting that thought is. There is only a narrative of certainty. Nobody said it was. This is a big fat strawman. But just because (almost) nothing is 100% certain, it doesn't mean that we don't have more probable and less probable answers.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- iammisc 5y ago
  > science has evolved a lot since then. Given that there is no way to measure absolute scientific progress, this is a meaningless and baseless claim. At the time of Galileo, scientists had, after many centuries, perfected their means of calculating geocentric orbits. Thee equations worked extremely well. Experts at the time would have told you that science had progressed significantly since the time of Aristotle. Yet it had progressed in a completely wrong direction. There is no reason to believe science is somehow progressed perfectly today in every arena.

KittenInABox 5y ago

> also well-established scientific consensus is not an ideal goal post Genuinely asking, how should I evaluate truth in a subject matter that I myself don't have a doctorate in if the standard of "what is general consensus among the people with doctorates in the subject" isn't reasonable?

Zuider 5y ago
What evidence is there that a general consensus on a thesis indicates that it is necessarily true? Is it rational simply to accept a consensus, effectively taking something on faith?
- silverspoonin 5y ago
  That was not an answer to his question, and I am really curious for an answer to it because I think it's a valid and reasonable point. Also, as to whether believing scientific general consensus should count as "faith" or not, I invite you to read Issac Asimov's short essay "The Relativity of Wrong".
  - nickthemagicman 5y ago
    Scientific consensus is just religious consensus with more advanced instruments of measurements. You're still prodding into the infinite. CERN and Yerkes Observatory are just peeling off the surface layer of the onion. To claim anything is objective truth is also claiming you know the universe in it's entirety.
  - Zuider 5y ago
    OP's question appears to invert the burden of proof in assuming that a consensus, even of experts, ought to be believed unless there are compelling reasons not to accept it. Where is the evidence that a consensus is a good metric for the truth of a matter? Has there been any work done to establish such a correspondence? Asimov seems to be arguing that there are degrees of wrongness, and one can become less wrong by a process of rational error elimination and criticism. How does the mere fact of a consensus have any bearing on this process?
    - silverspoonin 5y ago
      > OP's question appears to invert the burden of proof in assuming that a consensus, even of experts, ought to be believed unless there are compelling reasons not to accept it. Again, I pose the question, what is a reasonable alternative? >Asimov seems to be arguing that there are degrees of wrongness, and one can become less wrong by a process of rational error elimination and criticism. How does the mere fact of a consensus have any bearing on this process? The scientific process IS a process of rational error elimination and criticism. Scientific consensus is the result of the majority of experts in a field using the scientific process to agree on the "least wrong" information possible given the data available at that time. If you claim not to see the bearing on this process, you're being dishonestly obtuse. > Where is the evidence that a consensus is a good metric for the truth of a matter? Has there been any work done to establish such a correspondence? I think you have the causal chain backwards; the evidence of a good metric for the truth of a matter is what builds consensus. If the evidence is incompatible with consensus, and it holds up to scrutiny & reproduction, then the consensus changes to match. Either way, the end result is that consensus is an improving approximation to "the truth". If you have a better way of obtaining "the truth", I would be very glad to learn about it.
      - Zuider 5y ago
        >Again, I pose the question, what is a reasonable alternative? Again, this inverts the burden of proof. There is no obligation to provide any alternative, and no obligation to defer to a consensus in the absence of one. >Scientific consensus is the result of the majority of experts in a field using the scientific process to agree on the "least wrong" information possible given the data available at that time. If you claim not to see the bearing on this process, you're being dishonestly obtuse. I see no evidence that this narrative is generally true, and it is a very weak argument for taking consensus as a metric of truthfulness. >If you have a better way of obtaining "the truth", I would be very glad to learn about it. One does not require a better way of obtaining the truth in order to avoid committing oneself to accepting unjustified claims. Again, such a requirement inverts the burden of proof.
nickthemagicman 5y ago
A lot of parts of science and math are very different from the 60's while a lot of remains the same! How do you make sense of all of this and wrangle objective truth from the chaos? That's an epistomological question people have been asking since the dawn of mankind. IS there even objective truth that our limited monkey/human mind can grasp? I don't know the answer!...but I know censoring a multitude of opinions and claiming a monopoly on objective truth in an infinite world of chaos is not the way to do it.
- atleta 5y ago
  It's not about censoring the opinions in general. Again, it's about censoring fake news on social media. Nobody wants to censor research (I know it's more complicated, because of what gets funded and what not) or publishing in peer reviewed papers. Heck, as a result of the pandemic, peer reviews got even quicker and a lot of research gets publicity when they get on pre-print servers (i.e. pre-review)! That doesn't sound like claiming monopoly on the truth to me. You could argue that social media is an important outlet for new scientific ideas, results and discoveries but then you'd have to prove that not censoring there and letting the fakes run wild adds more value than the harm caused by the fakes. And the we know that the latter effect exists. I'd say that even if there is added value here (TBH, I don't see it at all), it's overwhelmed by the harm. Any scientifically valuable contribution that is only spread through the social media will be lost in the noise of nonsense.
  - nickthemagicman 5y ago
    Did you ever think to yourself maybe the reason so many people are anti-(Covid)-vaxxers is not that they're brainwashed? Its that the anti-vaxx people may have a point? Many major scientific breakthroughs were made outside of the 'institution of science' and peer reviewed papers. Joseph Lister discovered antiseptic theory during routine medical practice and was mocked at first by other doctors who didn't want to switch instruments between surgurys. Galileo was excommunicated for going against mainstream science. But both of their ideas won out in the end. If you need censorship and coercion of any sort to force your ideas on people, if to need to limit the avenues which ideas are shared .. you need better ideas.
kuraudo 5y ago
Try to understand as much as possible and make your call that way. Most of the scientific questions in this world don't require you to have an opinion (I don't much care which rocket fuel is better; I'll let others argue over that). Covid and Climate Change are interesting because certain conclusions related to them have a direct impact on you and I. The ruling class would certainly like you to believe one conclusion over all the others and that conclusion might even be 'correct' in terms of being beneficial to you or humans as a whole, but asking people to believe that conclusion because of some 'consensus' is fraught with both logical and mortal peril as history has shown us time and time again.

silverspoonin 5y ago

"Well-established scientific consensus" may not be perfect, but may I challenge you to provide an alternative with a better track record? It generally takes in new information and self-corrects over time. As I mentioned to someone else in this threat, Issac Asimov's essay "The Relativity of Wrong" may be old but it's still very relevant today.

furgooswft13 5y ago
> Well-established scientific consensus" may not be perfect, but may I challenge you to provide an alternative with a better track record? The Scientific Method, rigorous debate and freedom of speech and association. "Scientific consensus" is just a media invention.
nickthemagicman 5y ago
There is so much data involved with even the smallest thing in this world we're barely even scratching the surface with science. An expert may have a PhD and know 5000% more than you about a subject but compared to the amount of knowledge required to understand how the universe or any scientific subject works...their knowledge is smaller than a rounding error..and our current knowledge as a human race is too. Experts are poking at the world just as much as the rest of us, they just have bigger sticks, and are wrong ALL the time. But being wrong is the first step to being right. Elon had the worlds most highly trained and advanced rocket scientists working for him at SpaceX and they still crashed a bunch of rockets. You get a second opinion even though medial doctors have many years of education, don't you? The problem is not science or education, it's how humans understand truth. I could be wearing a red and black flannel shirt and one expert would say the shirt is red and another expert say the shirt is black and both would be telling the truth, but neither is correct. Now pretend that flannel shirt has trillions to infinite numbers of colors and you have science. Scientific consensus is data with strong statistical significance that all scientists agree on. The shirt is clearly red! But it's only a small subset of data among infinite amounts of data in this world much of which we don't even know about and the human race probably never will. So while a scientific theory may be true, it may not be correct. And highly informed scientists can see just one part of the whole and claim it's the truth. And it's hubris to claim otherwise, especially looking at how often scientific consensus has been on the wrong side of human history, with Mengele, Galileo, Labotomies, etc. Thalidomide, the drug, would calm morning sickness and the scientific consensus was that it was a good drug from the limited amount of data they knew about at the time...until more data came in....and the scientific consensus changed on a dime. The problem is humans have a desperate need to provide some sort of order to this absolute chaos we live in because the world is scary and we're going to die and people want immediate answers they can rely on to make sense of it all. So they create narratives like religion, or scientific consensus, or political party and claim those are the one true answers and justify their success with the rain dance working or scientific data curing an illness or how cheap they made gas prices..ad infinitum. Scientific consensus, religion, politics, are all merely single narratives to explain this insanely complex world. And while all are important to listen to and can be very informative, they should only be SINGLE data points in your own critical thinking. There is no single source of truth. And there is no shortcut to the truth. Anyone who claims to have the objective 'truth' in a world as infinitely complex as ours is a religion person, and if you follow them unskeptically you are an acolyte, and if you censor people who are questioning you, you fall into an inquisition type situation.

atleta 5y ago

Yeah, the social media and the internet is full of these claims and I see how these are pretty easy to believe when told with enough confidence. Which was an interesting revelation for me. Since the average person doesn't know much about the background (me included!) and since a similar claim takes a lot of knowledge to disprove it just sounds plausible by default. Because if someone makes a more specific claim, like "this is how sars-cov-2 enters the cells" or "this drug works" (or doesn't work) that's easy to check and then, if not true, disprove with published papers. The "we don't know this" is harder. Even if you pull up a paper, the goal post indeed will be moved ever so slightly and if the claim is more broad then you need to be a knowledgable expert to be able to say where the gaps are in the knowledge and how likely, when discovered/understood that new knowledge would change the field substantially. Since I became interested, I started learning a bit of virology online. Vincent Racaniello, a professor of virology at Columbia has an online course on youtube. This semester he teaches it directly with a focus on the average layperson [1]. Each session is 2 hours long and you can ask questions which he answers. It's not about covid, it's about virology in general but he does include the relevant pieces of information abour sars-cov-2 into every lesson/topic. He actually has his previous courses taught to undergrad (or graduate?) students online as well. Those seem to be just 1 hour long each, but based on a quick look at the slides the content is identical. Now what it teaches to everyone interested is that they know a lot. They have astonishingly detailed knowledge about how viruses work in general and they have learned a lot about sars-cov-2 very quickly. But given the general virology knowledge, you won't be surprised at the things they looked at first. [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGhmZX2NKiNnVlm_lAvk50Qy_wWh_7tPL https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGhmZX2NKiNnVlm_lAvk5...

nickthemagicman 5y ago
My undergrad is in biology and I got it many years ago. I can only imagine how much has changed since then. Does anyone think that in the infinite complexity of the human body and the immune system that we think we have 'figured covid out' by discovering a single spike protein? There's such an endless possibility of how Covid can interact with the body. We are just touching the surface of how the body works. They just discovered a new organelle in cells this year. So for any single group to claim a monopoly on truth and censor other views, especially with only a year and a half of study... is a major problem.

atleta 5y ago

> also well-established scientific consensus is not an ideal goal post . It indeed is. As a layperson who knows nothing about a field, not even a closely related field your best bet is to accept the scientific consensus. And by best bet I mean that that that is the choice that will give you the highest expected value of success. People keep pointing at the cases from the past (sometimes from the very far past, like with Galileo) trying to disprove this strategy. There are at least two fatal flaws with this logic: 1. science has evolved a lot since then. And it doesn't just mean that we know more about those specific subjects (be it astronomy or neuroscience) but more importantly, the scientific method has evolved too. I.e. when we think we know something today, is very different from what it was a 100 or 500 years ago. 2. Of course, scientists can be wrong. Even en masse (i.e. the scientific consensus). (If it wasn't so, we may not need research any more after all because we'd know everything.) But going completely wrong is pretty rare and what is exactly your other option? Listening to lunatics? Because every lunatic will say "yeah, but the scientists are wrong all the time, so..." and go on with their 100% unfounded claims. No, it's not that they do research because they don't accept the consensus. That would be totally OK. They just make claims that they support with this very vague critique. "Lobotomy won a Nobel prize, which we know don't work, so who is to tell me that I'm wrong with my claims that I have nothing to support." > Nothing is certain in life when human beings are involved no matter how comforting that thought is. There is only a narrative of certainty. Nobody said it was. This is a big fat strawman. But just because (almost) nothing is 100% certain, it doesn't mean that we don't have more probable and less probable answers.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
iammisc 5y ago
> science has evolved a lot since then. Given that there is no way to measure absolute scientific progress, this is a meaningless and baseless claim. At the time of Galileo, scientists had, after many centuries, perfected their means of calculating geocentric orbits. Thee equations worked extremely well. Experts at the time would have told you that science had progressed significantly since the time of Aristotle. Yet it had progressed in a completely wrong direction. There is no reason to believe science is somehow progressed perfectly today in every arena.