>What seems like a ton of consensus at cruising altitude is actually much more divisive as you approach ground level. I think there's a sense in which that's t

>What seems like a ton of consensus at cruising altitude is actually much more divisive as you approach ground level. I think there's a sense in which that's true (I've especially heard it with respect to the foundations of maths), but I worry about that way of thinking. There absolutely are places where we have consensus, even on subjects of extreme complexity. And the fact that we really do have consensus can be one of the things that's most important to understand. I don't want people doubting our knowledge that, say, too much sugar is bad, that sunscreen is good, that vaccines are real and so on. A lot of what passes for nuanced decoding of the social and institutional contexts where science really happens, looks to outsiders like "yeah, so everything's fake!" And when the job of communicating these nuances falls into the hands of people who don't think it's important to draw that distinction, I think that contributes to an erroneous loss of faith in institutional knowledge.