The artificial formation of scientific consensus
"The dissident’s role is to provide a check against epistemically detrimental and artificial consensus formation."
Hat tip to
for pointing out this August 10, 2023 essay from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Well worth the read. It explores the concept of scientific consensus, starting from the seminal story of Ignaz Semmelweis and leading on to the so-called “lab-leak” hypothesis for the origins of SARS CoV-2.
Sometimes, a scientific consensus is established because vested interests have diligently and purposefully transformed a situation of profound uncertainty into one in which there appears to be overwhelming evidence for what becomes the consensus view. When a scientific consensus emerges via this accelerated process, the role of the scientific dissident is not, like Semmelweis, to carry out revolutionary science. The dissident’s role is to provide a check against epistemically detrimental and artificial consensus formation.
Throughout the pandemic, any scientific heterodoxy, but especially heterodoxy about the virus’s origin, was treated as a mark of affiliation with a set of unsavory political views associated with the supporters of Donald Trump. But few people in the world had a better claim not to be affiliated with the Trumpist right than Jon Stewart. Nevertheless, the condemnatory response was swift and severe. Colbert immediately asked Stewart how long he had been working for Republican Sen. Ron Johnson. “The two things that came out of it were,” Stewart later said, “I’m racist against Asian people, and how dare I align myself with the alt-right.” He added, “The larger problem with all of this is the inability to discuss things that are within the realm of possibility without falling into absolutes and litmus-testing each other for our political allegiances as it arose from that.”
Very important point. And those with a vested interest in censoring the opposing view(s) because they have financial ties to the outcome they promote are, as we have seen with the global warming "climate change" issue, more than willing to flat-out LIE about there being concensus even when there is none. Remember their "97% of scientists agree" that climate change was "caused" by humans burning fossil fuels? A totally made-up-out-of-thin-air number when not even remotely that percentage "agreed". And they enforced their position by making sure that almost no articles got published by real climate scientists who had facts that disputed their politically-driven narrative. And by now lots of evidence has emerged of their suppression of the truth about "climate change", and their collusion to alter data and hide evidence in order to promote their wrong position that carbon dioxide is a "dangerous pollutant" that is causing global warming, and that fossil fuels are at fault! When the world's most wealthy and powerful people have an agenda that benefits only themselves, as we have seen, they will stop at nothing to further their goals.
>Scientific dissidents will never be popular. We associate them with crazy views like “climate change is a hoax” and “childhood vaccines cause autism.”
And there it is.
Into the trash it goes. I utterly reject this crap and do not need lukewarm approval from people who want to kill me.