comments from Skepticblog » What Is a Consensus?
Skepticblog » What Is a Consensus?
So there is this magnificent speech from someone who has changed his mind about genetically modified foods: http://www.marklynas.org/2013/01/lecture-to-oxford-farming-conference-3-january-2013/In the comments section, someone says: “The problem is, consensus is a tool of politics. It has no role in science, none whatsoever. Scientific truth is not, ever, under any circumstances, decided by consensus. To argue on the basis of consensus is to argue on the basis of politics, and politics has no role in determining scientific truth either. What we get when politics is given a role is Lysenkoism, and a field of study stuffed sideways for decades. The only basis for argument in science is the data. If you can’t argue from the data then you have no argument at all. To argue on the basis of consensus is to argue from authority, and that is about as contra science as it gets.” Being a lay observer is hard.
Exactly, but some scientists fail to see this difference, and when they collectively come to a conclusion from the same unstated premise (e.g. ideological affiliation), then we have a problem. In the AGW case, the obvious one is assuming that a global governmental solution is the only acceptable policy — this certainly didn’t come from the climate data. “Something must be done” does not equal “something must be done by X”, which BTW limits and hampers possible solutions and exclude many relevant actors. It’s like using the ‘consensus’ [1] based on oberved data that many people starve in the world to conclude that governments should collect our food and send to them. [1] I actually don’t like this word, consensus for me is related to a centroid, or a center of mass.
