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Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results
by TedShiller 4y ago
Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant.
The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus.
Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.
- 8note 4y agoScience relies heavily on a consensus of observations and a consensus on the analysis of those observations. Reproduction is creating aa consensus Plenty of scientists have broken with consensus without a new consensus forming around their models. "Scientists have consensus about X" is something science communicators say. It's about how easy it is to describe the evidence to laypeople than what the evidence is.