Scientific Consensus Quotes

If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. 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. What is relevant is reproducible results. 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. Period.

I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. 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.

The disjunction between scientific consensus and public opinion on the topic of GMOs is disturbing, to say the least.

people with strong “egalitarian” and “communitarian” worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality, and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Conversely, those with strong “hierarchical” and “individualistic” worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry, and a belief that we all pretty much get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.

Even now, after overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, we are still discussing the issue as if it were a belief, not a fact.

I have blogged previously about the dangerous and deadly effects of science denialism, from the innocent babies unnecessarily exposed to deadly diseases by other kids whose parents are anti-vaxxers, to the frequent examples of how acceptance of evolution helps us stop diseases and pests (and in the case of Baby Fae, rejection of evolution was fatal), to the long-term effects of climate denial to the future of the planet we all depend upon. But one of the strangest forms of denialism is the weird coalition of people who refuse to accept the medical fact that the HIV virus causes AIDS. What the heck? Didn’t we resolve this issue in the 1980s when the AIDS condition first became epidemic and the HIV virus was discovered and linked to AIDS? Yes, we did—but for people who want to deny scientific reality, it doesn’t matter how many studies have been done, or how strong the scientific consensus is. There are a significant number of people out there (especially among countries and communities with high rates of AIDS infections) that refuse to accept medical reality. I described all of these at greater length in my new book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten our Future.

We cannot criticise global warming sceptics for denying the scientific consensus on climate when we ignore the same consensus on both the safety and the beneficial uses of nuclear power and genetic engineering.

In thinking about these questions I have been stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture... by the defenders of intelligent design. Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen C. Meyer are motivated at least in part by their religious beliefs, the empirical arguments they offer against the likelihood that the origin of life and its evolutionary history can be fully explained by physics and chemistry are of great interest in themselves. Another skeptic, David Berlinski, has brought out these problems vividly without reference to the design inference. Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems that these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair.

Take Ron Paul. He appeals to a lot of progressives. He said on Fox, 'The greatest hoax I think that has been around for many, many years if not hundreds of years has been this hoax on the environment and global warming.' He doesn't provide any argument or evidence as to why he disregards the scientific consensus--just, I say so, period. With that attitude, you really are approaching the edge.

Yet it is unassailably true that so long as we lack omniscience and do not know all of the future, all our generalizations are fallible or only probable. And the history of human error shows that a general consensus, or widespread and unquestioned feeling of certainty, does not preclude the possibility that the future may show us to be in error.

One of the difficulties in raising public concern over the very severe threats of global warming is that 40 percent of the US population does not see why it is a problem, since Christ is returning in a few decades. About the same percentage believe that the world was created a few thousand years ago. If science conflicts with the Bible, so much the worse for science. It would be hard to find an analogue in other societies.

It is my opinion that education is a key component to peace and progress. Despite their arrogant claims to have all the answers, world religions cannot account for recent insights and discoveries about the natural world and human history. In this, the most tantalizing argument against religious faith comes forth in the way of science and reason. An ever-growing scientific consensus has resulted in the ever-shrinking populous of religious relevance.

The theory of phlogiston was an inversion of the true nature of combustion. Removing phlogiston was in reality adding oxygen, while adding phlogiston was actually removing oxygen. The theory was a total misrepresentation of reality. Phlogiston did not even exist, and yet its existence was firmly believed and the theory adhered to rigidly for nearly one hundred years throughout the eighteenth century. ... As experimentation continued the properties of phlogiston became more bizarre and contradictory. But instead of questioning the existence of this mysterious substance it was made to serve more comprehensive purposes. ... For the skeptic or indeed to anyone prepared to step out of the circle of Darwinian belief, it is not hard to find inversions of common sense in modern evolutionary thought which are strikingly reminiscent of the mental gymnastics of the phlogiston chemists or the medieval astronomers. To the skeptic, the proposition that the genetic programmes of higher organisms, consisting of something close to a thousand million bits of information, equivalent to the sequence of letters in a small library of one thousand volumes, containing in encoded form countless thousands of intricate algorithms controlling, specifying and ordering the growth and development of billions and billions of cells into the form of a complex organism, were composed by a purely random process is simply an affront to reason. But to the Darwinist the idea is accepted without a ripple of doubt - the paradigm takes precedence!

Despite the clear scientific consensus, a veritable brigade of self-proclaimed, underinformed armchair experts lurk on comment threads the world over, eager to pour scorn on climate science. Barrages of ad hominem attacks all too often await both the scientists working in climate research and journalists who communicate the research findings.

But maybe it won’t. Maybe it will take on a role like the TCP protocol, where it becomes a piece of infrastructure on which other things are built, and has the inertia of consensus.

Pseudoscience is almost always recognizable from a distance, and easy to confirm on close examination. Science is, however, not immune from hubris, and bad science can be tougher to spot. Those of us who make a living from science or science media must display scientific integrity. We must constantly test our assumptions and fight the siren song of consensus when our data tells us to be contrarian. We must remain independent of political or religious bias in evaluating our work. We must admit when we are wrong, and remain willing to evolve when verifiable data demands change. We must admit when we are uncertain, remain humble in advances, and offer courageous and independent advice grounded in science.

The most fact-oriented people are those willing to check self-proclaimed "fact-checkers", the most scientifically-minded people are those willing to question every so-called "scientific consensus", and the most virtue-driven people are those willing to expose "virtue signallers".

Perhaps a physicist would know at once why this whole idea was absurd. But then, perhaps a physicist would be so locked into the consensus of his scientific community that it would be harder for him to accept an idea that transformed the meaning of everything he knew. Even if it were true.

The very desire to preserve animals was a subjective sentiment of fail in the animal's intrinsic worth. It was a feeling possessed by most of the scientists there, who regarded the wildebeeste migration with the same awe that others feel for the Mona Lisa, but they would not admit this sentiment into their arguments because it could not be backed up by facts; the right and worng of aesthetics being imponderables not open to scientific analysis. At the end of the meeting there was a consensus of opinion on only one fact, that there was an urgent need for research before taking any hasty action.

Since no one can know everything, and most people know almost nothing, rationality consists of outsourcing knowledge to institutions that specialize in creating and sharing it, primarily academia, public and private research units, and the press. That trust is a precious resource which should not be squandered. Though confidence in science has remained steady for decades, confidence in universities is sinking. A major reason for the mistrust is the universities’ suffocating left-wing monoculture, with its punishment of students and professors who question dogmas on gender, race, culture, genetics, colonialism, and sexual identity and orientation. Universities have turned themselves into laughingstocks for their assaults on common sense (as when a professor was recently suspended for mentioning the Chinese pause word ne ga because it reminded some students of the racial slur). On several occasions correspondents have asked me why they should trust the scientific consensus on climate change, since it comes out of institutions that brook no dissent. That is why universities have a responsibility to secure the credibility of science and scholarship by committing themselves to viewpoint diversity, free inquiry, critical thinking, and active open-mindedness.

My skepticism is not based on religious belief, or on a belief in any definite alternative. It is just a belief that the available scientific evidence, in spite of the consensus of scientific opinion, does not in this matter rationally require us to subordinate the incredulity of common sense. That is especially true with regard to the origin of life.

Study after study shows that diverse teams perform better. In a 2014 report for Scientific American, Columbia professor Katherine W. Phillips examined a broad cross section of research related to diversity and organizational performance. And over and over, she found that the simple act of interacting in a diverse group improves performance, because it “forces group members to prepare better, to anticipate alternative viewpoints and to expect that reaching consensus will take effort.

It’s very hard for us to believe that people who loved us would intentionally hurt us, so we feel the need to excuse their behavior. But repressing that pain just makes us more likely to hit our own children. If you were willing to reach deep inside and really feel again the hurt you felt when you were physically punished as a child, you would never consider inflicting that pain on your own child. And the pain does not end in childhood, even if we repress and deny it. The scientific consensus of hundreds of studies shows that corporal punishment during childhood is associated with negative behaviors in adults, even when the adult says that the spanking did not affect them badly. Even a few instances of being hit as a child are associated with more depressive symptoms as an adult. While most of us who were spanked “turned out okay,” it is clear that not being spanked would have helped us turn out to be healthier. I suspect that one contributing factor to the epidemic of anxiety and depression among adults in our culture is that so many of us grew up with parents who hurt us.

One of the most interesting histories of what comes of rejecting science we may see in Islam, which in the beginning received, accepted, and even developed the classical legacy. For some five or six rich centuries there is an impressive Islamic record of scientific thought, experiment, and research, particularly in medicine. But then, alas! the authority of the general community, the Sunna, the consensus—which Mohammed the Prophet had declared would always be right—cracked down. The Word of God in the Koran was the only source and vehicle of truth. Scientific thought led to 'loss of belief in the origin of the world and in the Creator.' And so it was that, just when the light of Greek learning was beginning to be carried from Islam to Europe—from circa 1100 onward—Islamic science and medicine came to a standstill and went dead....

ExxonMobil and its corporate cousins in the fossil fuel industry have concrete interests to defend: they fear “stranded assets”—oil and gas in the ground that would be unmarketable or less valuable if limits were imposed on fossil fuel production. In service to profitability, they have tried to shape public policy by distorting the public’s understanding of the threat posed by climate change. They are engaged in an intentional misinformation campaign. They understand the scientific consensus but are trying to obscure it. They do not have a compromised relation to reality; they are corrupt.

Some of us give most or more authority to meditative experiences; some to logic; some to intuitive hunches and intimations; some to sources outside of ourselves – scriptural or scientific, for instance; and some to the overwhelming human consensus – of ‘common sense’ and unexamined everyday perceptions.

Other evidence suggests that the 1918 virus might have mutated within pigs (which are uniquely susceptible to both human and bird viruses) or even in human populations for a time before reaching the deadly virtuosity of its final version. We cannot be sure. What we can be sure of is that there is scientific consensus that new viruses, which move between farmed animals and humans, will be a major global health threat into the foreseeable future. The concern is not only bird flu or swine flu or whatever-comes-next, but the entire class of “zoonotic” (animal-to-human or vice versa) pathogens — especially viruses that move between humans, chickens, turkeys, and pigs.

AMONG TODAY’S CONSERVATIVE “Luntzspeak” practitioners, few have the lingo down better than the honorable James Inhofe, senator from Oklahoma. Recall from the previous chapter Luntz’s advice for tor from Oklahoma. Recall from the previous chapter Luntz’s advice for dealing with the issue of global warming, which includes the following precepts: (1) emphasize your commitment to “sound science”; (2) seize the remaining “window of opportunity” to challenge and dispute the scientific consensus; and (3) find experts “sympathetic to your view” and make them “part of your message.” It’s a cunning strategy, provided that you are not ashamed of following in the footsteps of the tobacco industry, and Inhofe doesn’t appear to have much shame.

All humanity needs, is to be reminded that there has always existed a human consensus on all common human needs and desires (extremely long life in perfect health, abundance, well-being), and that now, transgressing the religious option, he has achieved the scientific option of working for all of them, and for much more. His rationality, guided by both his ambition and inspiration, will do the rest. WHATEVER RELIGION PROMISES, SCIENCE WILL DELIVER.

According to Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project, for example, one’s “cultural worldview”—that would be political leanings or ideological outlook to the rest of us—explains “individuals’ beliefs about global warming more powerfully than any other individual characteristic.”16 More powerfully, that is, than age, ethnicity, education, or party affiliation. The Yale researchers explain that people with strong “egalitarian” and “communitarian” worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality, and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Conversely, those with strong “hierarchical” and “individualistic” worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry, and a belief that we all pretty much get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.17 The evidence is striking. Among the segment of the U.S. population that displays the strongest “hierarchical” views, only 11 percent rate climate change as a “high risk,” compared with 69 percent of the segment displaying the strongest “egalitarian” views.18 Yale law professor Dan Kahan, the lead author on this study, attributes the tight correlation between “worldview” and acceptance of climate science to “cultural cognition,” the process by which all of us—regardless of political leanings—filter new information in ways that will protect our “preferred vision of the good society.” If new information seems to confirm that vision, we welcome it and integrate it easily. If it poses a threat to our belief system, then our brain immediately gets to work producing intellectual antibodies designed to repel the unwelcome invasion.19 As Kahan explained in Nature, “People find it disconcerting to believe that behavior that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behavior that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.” In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today. Furthermore, leftists are equally capable of denying inconvenient scientific evidence. If conservatives are inherent system justifiers, and therefore bridle before facts that call the dominant economic system into question, then most leftists are inherent system questioners, and therefore prone to skepticism about facts that come from corporations and government. This can lapse into the kind of fact resistance we see among those who are convinced that multinational drug companies have covered up the link between childhood vaccines and autism. No matter what evidence is marshaled to disprove their theories, it doesn’t matter to these crusaders—it’s just the system covering up for itself.20 This kind of defensive reasoning helps explain the rise of emotional intensity that surrounds the climate issue today. As

The suspicion that something is structurally wrong with the vision of homo faber is common to a growing minority in capitalist, communist, and "underdeveloped" countries alike. This suspicion is the shared characteristic of a new elite. To it belong people of all classes, incomes, faiths, and civilizations. They have become wary of the myths of the majority: of scientific utopias, of ideological diabolism, and of the expectation of the distribution of goods and services with some degree of equality. They share with the majority the awareness that most new policies adopted by broad consensus consistently lead to results which are glaringly opposed to their stated aims. Yet whereas the Promethean majority of would-be spacemen still evades the structural issue, the emergent minority is critical of the scientific deus ex machina, the ideological panacea, and the hunt for devils and witches. This minority begins to formulate its suspicion that our constant deceptions tie us to contemporary institutions as the chains bound Prometheus to his rock. Hopeful trust and classical irony must conspire to expose the Promethean fallacy.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the Renaissance continued, and I began to see the full scope of the Second Insight. The power of the church to define reality was diminishing, and Europeans were feeling as though they were awakening to look at life anew. Through the courage of countless individuals, all inspired by their intuitive memories, the scientific method was embraced as a democratic process of exploring and coming to understand the world in which humans found themselves. This method—exploring some aspect of the natural world, drawing conclusions, then offering this view to others—was thought of as the consensus-building process through which we would be able, finally, to understand mankind’s real situation on this planet, including our spiritual nature. But those in the church, entrenched in Fear, sought to squelch this new science. As political forces lined up on both sides, a compromise was reached. Science would be free to explore the outer, material world, but must leave spiritual phenomena to the dictates of the still-influential churchmen. The entire inner world of experience—our higher perceptual states of beauty and love, intuitions, coincidences, interpersonal phenomena, even dreams—all were, at first, off limits to the new science. Despite these restrictions, science began to map out and describe the operation of the physical world, providing information rich in ways to increase trade and utilize natural resources. Human economic security increased, and slowly we began to lose our sense of mystery and our heartfelt questions about the purpose of life. We decided it was purposeful enough just to survive and build a better, more secure world for ourselves and our children. Gradually we entered the consensus trance that denied the reality of death and created the illusion that the world was explained and ordinary and devoid of mystery. In spite of our rhetoric, our once-strong intuition of a spiritual source was being pushed farther into the background. In this growing materialism, God could only be viewed as a distant Deist’s God, a God who merely pushed the universe into being and then stood back to let it run in a mechanical sense, like a predictable machine, with every effect having a cause, and unconnected events happening only at random, by chance alone.

Until now, human organization could only be based upon something negative which could not be conquered: SCARCITY, and something false: PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY... No wonder instead of producing stability, it produced the exact opposite. The current human organization based upon dealing with the consequences of scarcity and being considered responsible for our individual characteristics which we could never have chosen (our nature, our nurture, our “soul”, and all the choices they engender), will always lead to an irrational, hence unstable human organization causing perpetual conflicts, which is no organization at all. Today, we have the luxury to initiate a rational self-organization based upon two positives: -our HUMAN CONSENSUS; our common desires shared by all, and -the SCIENTIFIC PROJECT to achieve them.

This terrifying experiment has already been set in motion. Unlike nuclear war—which is a future potential—climate change is a present reality. There is a scientific consensus that human activities, in particular the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, are causing the earth’s climate to change at a frightening rate.7 Nobody knows exactly how much carbon dioxide we can continue to pump into the atmosphere without triggering an irreversible cataclysm. But our best scientific estimates indicate that unless we dramatically cut the emission of greenhouse gases in the next twenty years, average global temperatures will increase by more than 3.6ºF, resulting in expanding deserts, disappearing ice caps, rising oceans and more frequent extreme weather events such as hurricanes and typhoons.8 These changes in turn will disrupt agricultural production, inundate cities, make much of the world uninhabitable, and send hundreds of millions of refugees in search of new homes.9 Moreover, we are rapidly approaching a number of tipping points, beyond which even a dramatic drop in greenhouse gas emissions will not be enough to reverse the trend and avoid a worldwide tragedy. For example, as global warming melts the polar ice sheets, less sunlight is reflected back from planet Earth to outer space. This means that the planet absorbs more heat, temperatures rise even higher, and the ice melts even faster. Once this feedback loop crosses a critical threshold it will gather an unstoppable momentum, and all the ice in the polar regions will melt even if humans stop burning coal, oil, and gas. Therefore it is not enough that we recognize the danger we face. It is critical that we actually do something about it now. Unfortunately, as of 2018, instead of a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the global emission rate is still increasing. Humanity has very little time left to wean itself from fossil fuels. We need to enter rehab today. Not next year or next month, but today. “Hello, I am Homo sapiens, and I am a fossil-fuel addict.

The overwhelming consensus is that egalitarian social organization is the de-facto system for foraging societies in all environments. In fact, no other system could work for foraging societies. Compulsory sharing is simply the best way to distribute risk to everyone’s benefit: participation mandatory. Pragmatic? Yes. Noble? Hardly. We believe this sharing behavior extended to sex as well. A great deal of research from primatology, anthropology, anatomy, and psychology points to the same fundamental conclusion: human beings and our hominid ancestors have spent almost all of the past few million years or so in small, intimate bands in which most adults had several sexual relationships at any given time. This approach to sexuality probably persisted until the rise of agriculture and private property no more than ten thousand years ago. In addition to voluminous scientific evidence, many explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists support this view, having penned accounts rich with tales of orgiastic rituals, unflinching mate sharing, and an open sexuality unencumbered by guilt or shame.

The two hit it off well, because de Broglie was trying, like Einstein, to see if there were ways that the causality and certainty of classical physics could be saved. He had been working on what he called “the theory of the double solution,” which he hoped would provide a classical basis for wave mechanics. “The indeterminist school, whose adherents were mainly young and intransigent, met my theory with cold disapproval,” de Broglie recalled. Einstein, on the other hand, appreciated de Broglie’s efforts, and he rode the train with him to Paris on his way back to Berlin. At the Gare du Nord they had a farewell talk on the platform. Einstein told de Broglie that all scientific theories, leaving aside their mathematical expressions, ought to lend themselves to so simple a description “that even a child could understand them.” And what could be less simple, Einstein continued, than the purely statistical interpretation of wave mechanics! “Carry on,” he told de Broglie as they parted at the station. “You are on the right track!” But he wasn’t. By 1928, a consensus had formed that quantum mechanics was correct, and de Broglie relented and adopted that view. “Einstein, however, stuck to his guns and continued to insist that the purely statistical interpretation of wave mechanics could not possibly be complete,” de Broglie recalled, with some reverence, years later.

There is little to be learned from those historians of morality (especially Englishmen): The usual error in their premises is their insistence on a certain consensus among human beings, at least among civilised human beings, with regard to certain propositions of morality, from thence they conclude that these propositions are absolutely binding even upon you and me; or reversely, they come to the conclusion that no morality is binding, after the truth has dawned upon them that among different peoples moral valuations are necessarily different: both of which conclusions are equally childish follies. The error of the more subtle amongst them is that they discover and criticise the probably foolish opinions of a people about its own morality, or the opinions of mankind about human morality generally (they treat accordingly of its origin, its religious sanctions, the superstition of free will, and such matters), and they think that just by so doing they have criticised the morality itself. But the worth of a precept, "Thou shalt," is fundamentally different from and independent of such opinions about it, and must be distinguished from the weeds of error with which it has perhaps been overgrown: just as the worth of a medicine to a sick person is altogether independent of the question whether he has a scientific opinion about medicine, or merely thinks about it as an old wife would do.

Changing what we think is always a sticky process, especially when it comes to religion. When new information becomes available, we cringe under an orthodox mindset, particularly when we challenge ideas and beliefs that have been “set in stone” for decades. Thomas Kuhn coined the term paradigm shift to represent this often-painful transition to a new way of thinking in science. He argued that “normal science” represented a consensus of thought among scientists when certain precepts were taken as truths during a given period. He believed that when new information emerges, old ideas clash with new ones, causing a crisis. Once the basic truths are challenged, the crisis ends in either revolution (where the information provides new understanding) or dismissal (where the information is rejected as unsound). The information age that we live in today has likely surprised all of us as members of the LDS Church at one time or another as we encounter new ideas that revise or even contradict our previous understanding of various aspects of Church history and teachings. This experience is similar to that of the Copernican Revolution, which Kuhn uses as one of his primary examples to illustrate how a paradigm shift works. Using similar instruments and comparable celestial data as those before them, Copernicus and others revolutionized the heavens by describing the earth as orbiting the sun (heliocentric) rather than the sun as orbiting the earth (geocentric). Because the geocentric model was so ingrained in the popular (and scientific!) understanding, the new, heliocentric idea was almost impossible to grasp. Paradigm shifts also occur in religion and particularly within Mormonism. One major difference between Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shift and the changes that occur within Mormonism lies in the fact that Mormonism privileges personal revelation, which is something that cannot be institutionally implemented or decreed (unlike a scientific law). Regular members have varying degrees of religious experience, knowledge, and understanding dependent upon many factors (but, importantly, not “faithfulness” or “worthiness,” or so forth). When members are faced with new information, the experience of processing that information may occur only privately. As such, different members can have distinct experiences with and reactions to the new information they receive. This short preface uses the example of seer stones to examine the idea of how new information enters into the lives of average Mormons. We have all seen or know of friends or family who experience a crisis of faith upon learning new information about the Church, its members, and our history. Perhaps there are those reading who have undergone this difficult and unsettling experience. Anyone who has felt overwhelmed at the continual emergence of new information understands the gravity of these massive paradigm shifts and the potentially significant impact they can have on our lives. By looking at just one example, this preface will provide a helpful way to think about new information and how to deal with it when it arrives.

There is little to be learned from those historians of morality (especially Englishmen): The usual error in their premises is their insistence on a certain consensus among human beings, at least among civilised human beings, with regard to certain propositions of morality, from thence they conclude that these propositions are absolutely binding even upon you and me; or reversely, they come to the conclusion that no morality is binding, after the truth has dawned upon them that among different peoples moral valuations are necessarily different: both of which conclusions are equally childish follies. The error of the more subtle amongst them is that they discover and criticise the probably foolish opinions of a people about its own morality, or the opinions of mankind about human morality generally (they treat accordingly of its origin, its religious sanctions, the superstition of free will, and such matters), and they think that just by so doing they have criticised the morality itself. But the worth of a precept, "Thou shalt," is fundamentally different from and independent of such opinions about it, and must be distinguished from the weeds of error with which it has perhaps been overgrown: just as the worth of a medicine to a sick person is altogether independent of the question whether he has a scientific opinion about medicine, or merely thinks about it as an old wife would do. A morality could even have grown out of an error: but with this knowledge the problem of its worth would not even be touched. - Thus, no one hitherto has tested the value of that most celebrated of all medicines, called morality: for which purpose it is first of all necessary for one to call it in question. Well, that is just our work.

With any issue that comes up, when we have an emergent scientific truth, we can't just sit back and watch people debate a scientific truth -- they should be debating the politics that would follow from the emergent scientific truth. That’s really what the debates should be about, but they haven’t been. And I’m disturbed by that, because I don’t know what kind of democracy that is, if you’re gonna run around cherry-picking the results of science, of emergent scientific consensus because it conflicts with your philosophy and you want to be responsible for the governance of the nation, which involves thoughtful planning for the future of our health and our wealth, the state of the economy, all of the above.

Very few scientists now defend the idea that depression is simply caused by low levels of serotonin, but the debate about whether chemical antidepressants work—for some other reason we don’t fully understand—is still ongoing. There is no scientific consensus. Many distinguished scientists agree with Irving Kirsch; many agree with Peter Kramer.

To this end, industry think tanks recruited a handful of scientists to serve as climate skeptics and paid them to travel around the country to give speeches and press interviews that challenged the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. As investigators discovered, ExxonMobil helped underwrite “the most sophisticated and most successful disinformation campaign” waged since the tobacco days. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, between 1998 and 2005, ExxonMobil funneled $16 million “to a network of ideological and advocacy organizations that manufacture uncertainty on the issue.” The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) became particularly active.

After more than three decades and many hundreds of studies, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that GMO foods are safe to eat. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine commissioned a comprehensive study of the science, and in 2016 their report declared GMOs both safe to eat and environmentally benign. Of the scientists in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 88 percent think it’s safe to eat GMO foods. This is almost exactly the same percentage of those scientists who say climate change is real and man-made, the latter a data point regularly used to demonstrate right-wing antiscience craziness.

DSM largely lacks what in the world of science is known as “reliability”—the ability to produce consistent, replicable results. In other words, it lacks scientific validity. Oddly, the lack of reliability and validity did not keep the DSM-V from meeting its deadline for publication, despite the near-universal consensus that it represented no improvement over the previous diagnostic system. 29 Could the fact that the APA had earned $ 100 million on the DSM-IV and is slated to take in a similar amount with the DSM-V (because all mental health practitioners, many lawyers, and other professionals will be obliged to purchase the latest edition)

There is no consensus amongst philosophers about what the word "rationality" even means. According to one tradition, for instance, rationality is the application of logic, of pure thought untempered by emotions; this pure, objective thought is then seen as the basis of scientific inquiry. This has attained a great deal of popular purchase, but there's a fundamental problem: scientific inquiry itself has proved it cannot possibly be true. Cognitive psychologists have demonstrated again and again that there is no such thing as pure thought divorced from emotions; a human being without emotions would not be able to think at all. (p. 165)

However, the most interesting property of your spacetime tube isn't its bulk shape, but its internal structure, which is remarkably complex. Whereas the particles that constitute the Moon are stuck together in a rather static arrangement, many of your particles are in constant motion relative to one another. Consider, for example, the particles that make up your red blood cells. As your blood circulates through your body to deliver the oxygen you need, each red blood cell traces out its own unique tube shape through spacetime, corresponding to a complex itinerary through your arteries, capillaries and veins with regular returns to your heart and lungs. These spacetime tubes of different red blood cells are intertwined to form a braid pattern (Figure 11.4, middle panel) which is more elaborate than anything you'll ever see in a hair salon: whereas a classic braid consists of three strands with perhaps thirty thousand hairs each, intertwined in a simple repeating pattern, this spacetime braid consists of trillions of strands (one for each red blood cell), each composed of trillions of hairlike elementary-particle trajectories, intertwined in a complex pattern that never repeats. In other words, if you imagine spending a year giving a friend a truly crazy hairdo, braiding his hair by separately intertwining not strands but all the individual hairs, the pattern you'd get would still be very simple in comparison. Yet the complexity of all this pales in comparison to the patterns of information processing in your brain. As we discussed in Chapter 8 and illustrated in Figure 8.7, your roughly hundred billion neurons are constantly generating electric signals ("firing"), which involves shuffling around billions of trillions of atoms, notably sodium, potassium and calcium ions. The trajectories of these atoms form an extremely elaborate braid through spacetime, whose complex intertwining corresponds to storing and processing information in a way that somehow gives rise to our familiar sensation of self-awareness. There's broad consensus in the scientific community that we still don't understand how this works, so it's fair to say that we humans don't yet fully understand what we are. However, in broad brushstrokes, we might say this: You're a pattern in spacetime. A mathematical pattern. Specifically, you're a braid in spacetime-indeed one of the most elaborate braids known.

Dr. James Baker, former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in 2005, “There’s a better scientific consensus on this than on any issue I know—except maybe Newton’s second law of [thermo]dynamics.” Nonetheless,

The Boomers were the first modern generation to harbor really negative feelings about reality and science, and their success in undermining these goods has been tremendous. And by reposing ultimate truth solely in feelings’ subjective dominion, the Boomers were able to discount and dismiss the entire concept of expertise, scientific consensus, and elite opinion, previously a source of restraint on impulse gratification.

In a last-ditch effort, some readers may pathetically attack the scientific method, claiming that all subjective perspective is flawed and cannot be trusted, no matter the empirical evidence or broad consensus. By this tremendously stupid standard, none of the thousands of Jews who witnessed the events of Matan Torah at Har Sinai could, in good conscience, accept their subjective experience as fact. Kal vachomer, no Jew living today should at all trust the game of broken telephone that has carried the mesorah of this experience. Take this to its logical result, and any consistent thinker will soon end up with a mind totally emptied of all axioms and convictions. Then again, not all thinkers are consistent, and too many seem oddly comfortable with such cognitive dissonance, no matter how glaring. This worldview gives rise to severe chilulei HaShem, and anyone brazen enough to offer this doublethink as legitimate belief should be ashamed of themselves. Refusal to follow the evidence is an insult to the God who put it there.

Just as the availability of vast computational power drives the implementation of global surveillance, so its logic has come to dictate how we respond to it, and to other existential threats to our cognitive and physical well-being. The demand for some piece of evidence that will allow us to assert some hypothesis with 100 per cent certainty overrides our ability to act in the present. Consensus - such as the broad scientific agreement around the urgency of the climate crisis - is disregarded in the face of the smallest quantum of uncertainty. We find ourselves locked in a kind of stasis, demanding that Zeno's arrow hit the target even as the atmosphere before it warms and thickens. The insistence upon some ever-insufficient confirmation creates the deep strangeness of the present moment: everybody knows what's going on, and nobody can do anything about it. Reliance on the computational logics of surveillance to derive truth about the world leaves us in a fundamentally precarious and paradoxical position. Computational knowing requires surveillance, because it can only produce its truth from the data available to it directly. In turn, all knowing is reduced to that which is computationally knowable, so all knowing becomes a form of surveillance. Thus computational logic denies our ability to think the situation, and to act rationally in the absence of certainty. It is also purely reactive, permitting action only after sufficient evidence has been gathered and forbidding action in the present when it is most needed. The operation of surveillance, and our complicity in it, is one of the most fundamental characteristics of the new dark age, because it insists on a kind of blind vision: everything is illuminated, but nothing is seen. We have become convinced that throwing light upon the subject is the same thing as thinking it, and thus having agency over it. But the light of computation just as easily renders us powerless - either through information overload, or a false sense of security. It is a lie we have been sold by the seductive power of computational thinking. Our vision is increasingly universal, but our agency is ever more reduced. We know more and more about the world, while being less and less able to do anything about it. The resulting sense of helplessness, rather than giving us pause to reconsider our assumptions, seems to be driving us deeper into paranoia and social disintegration: more surveillance, more distrust, an ever-greater insistence on the power of images and computation to rectify a situation that is produced by our unquestioning belief in their authority. Surveillance does not work, and neither does righteous exposure. There is no final argument to be made on either side, no clinching statement that will ease our conscience and change the minds of our opponents. There is no smoking gun, no total confirmation or clear denial. The Glomar response, rather than the dead words of a heedless bureaucracy, turns out to be the truest description of the world that we can articulate.

Des résultats qui apparaissent pour la première fois dans des rapports ou des livres, même à gros tirage, n'ont aucune fiabilité. Tout simplement parce que ces publications n'ont pas passé le filtre du contrôle par les pairs. Les éditeurs n'ont évidemment pas la capacité d'expertise du monde académique et leur premier souci est plus de s'assurer du potentiel de vente d'un livre que de la parfaite légitimité scientifique des arguments que l'on y trouve. Par ailleurs, un livre qui se glorifie de présenter des résultats s'opposant au consensus, ou à la pensée unique ou à l'idéologie dominante, a toutes les chances d'être une imposture scientifique.

·        Rather than rely exclusively on IPCC for scientific advice, policymakers should seek out advice from independent, nongovernment organizations and scientists who are free of financial and political conflicts of interest.

GCMs systematically over-estimate the sensitivity of climate to carbon dioxide

There is a key difference between a “scientific consensus” and a “consensus of scientists.

The facts have been piling up for decades. They become more elaborate, and more concerning, with each passing year. And yet for some reason we have been unable to change course. The past half-century is littered with milestones of inaction. A scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change first began to form in the mid-1970s. The first international climate summit was held in 1979, three years before I was born. The NASA climate scientist James Hansen gave his landmark testimony to the US Congress in 1988, explaining how the combustion of fossil fuels was driving climate breakdown. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted in 1992 to set non-binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions. International climate summits – the UN Congress of Parties – have been held annually since 1995 to negotiate plans for emissions reductions. The UN framework has been extended three times, with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the Copenhagen Accord in 2009, and the Paris Agreement in 2015. And yet global CO2 emissions continue to rise year after year, while ecosystems unravel at a deadly pace. Even though we have known for nearly half a century that human civilisation itself is at stake, there has been no progress in arresting ecological breakdown. None. It is an extraordinary paradox. Future generations will look back on us and marvel at how we could have known exactly what was going on, in excruciating detail, and yet failed to solve the problem.

We must redefine and come to a consensus on what God (Creator) is and what creation and recreating is. When we do this, we may make the gap between believers and atheists smaller, and we may realize that faith and atheism are compatible. The major incompatibility comes from the preprogrammed thinking and concepts based on religious books. Most of these concepts humanity accepted without real consideration and analysis, betting on the idea of a God that I call the stolen God. A stolen God is not a “real” God and cannot be used against the “real” God if it exists. The idea of a stolen God gains most of its power from the fear of millions or billions of human beings belonging to the major monotheistic religions.

The Positive School is characterized by a consensus perspective. All the theories developed under its mantle assume the existence of a core set of values in society that can be used to determine and treat deviance. Positivists did not question the validity of their categories of harmful acts or the desirability of treating people. In fact, their assumption of consensus was so strong that they rarely ever questioned their own actions, even when “exterminating” groups of people designated as socially harmful. Other than the consensus perspective, the wide range of positivist theories makes any attempt at categorizing them very difficult. Positivist theories can be either structural or processual, so no definitive classification is possible. However, we can state that sociological theories have, as a rule, been structurally oriented and macrotheoretical, while biological and psychological theories have been processual and microtheoretical. Summary The work of the Positive School, diverse as it was, represented the first real concern with studying the behavior of the criminal. As Rafter (2006) explains, before Lombroso, crime was studied only by metaphysicians, moralists, and penologists. His work turned the field into a truly biosocial science. Embracing the scientific method, positivists took a deterministic stance toward behavior and left behind the Classical School’s insistence that humans are rational beings with free will. In the process, the notion of punishment for deterrence began to make less sense. If an individual’s behavior was not predicated on rational decisions, then how could that individual be deterred? The thing to do, obviously, was to find those factors that cause the criminal behavior and remove (or treat) them. Further, the ability to predict which individuals would be likely to become criminal and to treat them before they could harm themselves and society would be valuable in creating a better society.

claSSIfIcatIon of the School The Positive School is characterized by a consensus perspective. All the theories developed under its mantle assume the existence of a core set of values in society that can be used to determine and treat deviance. Positivists did not question the validity of their categories of harmful acts or the desirability of treating people. In fact, their assumption of consensus was so strong that they rarely ever questioned their own actions, even when “exterminating” groups of people designated as socially harmful. Other than the consensus perspective, the wide range of positivist theories makes any attempt at categorizing them very difficult. Positivist theories can be either structural or processual, so no definitive classification is possible. However, we can state that sociological theories have, as a rule, been structurally oriented and macrotheoretical, while biological and psychological theories have been processual and microtheoretical. Summary The work of the Positive School, diverse as it was, represented the first real concern with studying the behavior of the criminal. As Rafter (2006) explains, before Lombroso, crime was studied only by metaphysicians, moralists, and penologists. His work turned the field into a truly biosocial science. Embracing the scientific method, positivists took a deterministic stance toward behavior and left behind the Classical School’s insistence that humans are rational beings with free will. In the process, the notion of punishment for deterrence began to make less sense. If an individual’s behavior was not predicated on rational decisions, then how could that individual be deterred? The thing to do, obviously, was to find those factors that cause the criminal behavior and remove (or treat) them. Further, the ability to predict which individuals would be likely to become criminal and to treat them before they could harm themselves and society would be valuable in creating a better society.

Chapter 3•The Positive School claSSIfIcatIon of the School The Positive School is characterized by a consensus perspective. All the theories developed under its mantle assume the existence of a core set of values in society that can be used to determine and treat deviance. Positivists did not question the validity of their categories of harmful acts or the desirability of treating people. In fact, their assumption of consensus was so strong that they rarely ever questioned their own actions, even when “exterminating” groups of people designated as socially harmful. Other than the consensus perspective, the wide range of positivist theories makes any attempt at categorizing them very difficult. Positivist theories can be either structural or processual, so no definitive classification is possible. However, we can state that sociological theories have, as a rule, been structurally oriented and macrotheoretical, while biological and psychological theories have been processual and microtheoretical. Summary The work of the Positive School, diverse as it was, represented the first real concern with studying the behavior of the criminal. As Rafter (2006) explains, before Lombroso, crime was studied only by metaphysicians, moralists, and penologists. His work turned the field into a truly biosocial science. Embracing the scientific method, positivists took a deterministic stance toward behavior and left behind the Classical School’s insistence that humans are rational beings with free will. In the process, the notion of punishment for deterrence began to make less sense. If an individual’s behavior was not predicated on rational decisions, then how could that individual be deterred? The thing to do, obviously, was to find those factors that cause the criminal behavior and remove (or treat) them. Further, the ability to predict which individuals would be likely to become criminal and to treat them before they could harm themselves and society would be valuable in creating a better society.

The good news, as a senior scientist at the Center for Alzheimer’s Research entitled a review article, is that “Alzheimer’s Disease Is Incurable but Preventable.”61 Diet and lifestyle changes could potentially prevent millions of cases a year.62 How? There is an emerging consensus that “what is good for our hearts is also good for our heads,”63 because clogging of the arteries inside of the brain with atherosclerotic plaque is thought to play a pivotal role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.64 It is not surprising, then, that the dietary centerpiece of the 2014 “Dietary and Lifestyle Guidelines for the Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease,” published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, was: “Vegetables, legumes (beans, peas, and lentils), fruits, and whole grains should replace meats and dairy products as primary staples of the diet.”65

doubts about the reductionist account of life go against the dominant scientific consensus, but that consensus faces problems of probability that I believe are not taken seriously enough, both with respect to the evolution of life forms through accidental mutation and natural selection and with respect to the formation from dead matter of physical systems capable of such evolution. The more we learn about the intricacy of the genetic code and its control of the chemical processes of life, the harder those problems seem.

If the scientific community has been asked to judge a matter—(as the National Academy of Sciences routinely is)—or if they have self-organized to do so (as in the Ozone Trends Panel or the IPCC), then it makes sense to take the results of their investigations very seriously. These are the title searches of modern science and public policy. It does not make sense to dismiss them just because some person, somewhere, doesn’t agree. And it especially does not make sense to dismiss the consensus of experts if the dissenter is superannuated, disgruntled, a habitual contrarian, or in the pay of a group with an obvious ideological agenda or vested political or economic interest. Or in some cases, all of the above.

Two thousand scientists in a hundred countries, engaged in the most elaborate, well-organized scientific collaboration in the history of humankind, have long since produced a consensus that we will face a string of terrible catastrophes unless we act to prepare ourselves and deal with the underlying causes of global warming.

THE DSM-V: A VERITABLE SMORGASBORD OF “DIAGNOSES” When DSM-V was published in May 2013 it included some three hundred disorders in its 945 pages. It offers a veritable smorgasbord of possible labels for the problems associated with severe early-life trauma, including some new ones such as Disruptive Mood Regulation Disorder,26 Non-suicidal Self Injury, Intermittent Explosive Disorder, Dysregulated Social Engagement Disorder, and Disruptive Impulse Control Disorder.27 Before the late nineteenth century doctors classified illnesses according to their surface manifestations, like fevers and pustules, which was not unreasonable, given that they had little else to go on.28 This changed when scientists like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch discovered that many diseases were caused by bacteria that were invisible to the naked eye. Medicine then was transformed by its attempts to discover ways to get rid of those organisms rather than just treating the boils and the fevers that they caused. With DSM-V psychiatry firmly regressed to early-nineteenth-century medical practice. Despite the fact that we know the origin of many of the problems it identifies, its “diagnoses” describe surface phenomena that completely ignore the underlying causes. Even before DSM-V was released, the American Journal of Psychiatry published the results of validity tests of various new diagnoses, which indicated that the DSM largely lacks what in the world of science is known as “reliability”—the ability to produce consistent, replicable results. In other words, it lacks scientific validity. Oddly, the lack of reliability and validity did not keep the DSM-V from meeting its deadline for publication, despite the near-universal consensus that it represented no improvement over the previous diagnostic system.29 Could the fact that the APA had earned $100 million on the DSM-IV and is slated to take in a similar amount with the DSM-V (because all mental health practitioners, many lawyers, and other professionals will be obliged to purchase the latest edition) be the reason we have this new diagnostic system?

Research has shown that frequent viewers of Fox News, a network that writes skepticism about climate change into its scripts, are less likely to accept the scientific consensus than those who do not watch Fox News.

In a futile gesture against the overwhelming consensus, I did call a New York Times editor to complain about a damaging story portraying the AIG rescue as a backdoor bailout for Hank’s former colleagues at Goldman Sachs. I had asked Lloyd Blankfein about Goldman’s direct exposure to AIG; when he assured me Goldman’s exposures were relatively small and fully hedged, I made him send me the documentation. Still, the Times wouldn’t correct the record, and my call probably strengthened its suspicions. The same reporter later did a story portraying the entire crisis response team as servants of Goldman, accompanied by a vampire squid–like diagram with me in the middle. In the media, in the public, even in the financial community, we faced withering skepticism about our motives as well as our competence. After all, we had lent a mismanaged insurance company three years’ worth of federal spending on basic scientific research.

When posed to journalists, however, the loaded questions did the trick: they convinced people who didn’t know otherwise that there was still a lot of doubt about the whole matter. The industry had realized that you could create the impression of controversy simply by asking questions, even if you actually knew the answers and they didn’t help your case.41 And so the industry began to transmogrify emerging scientific consensus into raging scientific “debate.

The overwhelming majority of scientists in climate and related fields, therefore, remain commendably open to the possibility that some other influence—such as the sun—may be the true primum mobile of the Earth’s climate. In manipulating its selection and representation of the scientific literature on the solar influence on global mean surface temperature, the IPCC has attempted to bolster the stance of a tiny minority of scientists and then to pretend, with 95 per cent confidence, that this represents a ‘scientific consensus’. Such a consensus, even if it did exist, would be of no interest to science.

One of the most firmly entrenched commitments of western science is to value-neutrality. Value-neutrality is a familiar, widely acknowledged thesis about the practice and ideology of western science, especially in its positivist and neopositivist formations. At its simplest, it is the claim (or assumption) that science is value free, unburdened by “external” ethical and political values. Science (or science proper) enjoys a certain axiological immunity, and is unaffected by the values – ethical, social, political, and cultural – which admittedly shape those who do science. Helen Longino describes value-neutrality as a “functional myth” and a consequence of a more general view regarding the independence of science from its social context. It serves to clear the way, conceptually, for the elaboration of a particular approach to a set of phenomena once that approach has attracted the consensus of a significant portion of the relevant scientific community.6 The crucial filter, cleansing science of its “external” or “non-epistemic” values, is the scientific method, the singularity, uniformity, and immutability of which has been challenged even by mainstream philosophy of science.7

When these people come to the church expecting to find support and encouragement as they face the struggles of their workplace, too often they find that the church is suspicious of them. And worse, if they have come to accept some of the tenets of the scientific consensus that the church has traditionally disparaged, they are also marginalized in the church. The message is loud and clear: leave your scientific conclusions at the door. We are not doing a good job of ministering to these brothers and sisters. We have communicated that their commitment to Christ is subverted, their service to the church is unwanted and their very salvation is suspect. We have to do better in providing safe contexts for people in the sciences, and we would do well to learn from them. At times, however, they are confused, and it would be appropriate for the church to help them work through these difficult issues—not by making them choose (Bible or science) but by charting a path of convergence and compatibility.

you’re going to abandon in a week, and there’s no scientific consensus about how much exercise you need to do. A 2010 analysis

there is broad scientific consensus that the technology is at least as safe as all techniques we have been using. . . . There is not a single documented case of harm from the technology—I doubt that there is any technology ever with such an unprecedented safety track record.” Most

Furthermore, once created, a cultural resource generates public debates whose forms, tones, and terms differ considerably from those used by scientists involved in the production of the scientific knowledge that gave birth to this resource. The arguments used in scientific disputes (logic, verifiability, controlled experiment, disciplinary consensus, technical apparatus, negotiated and agreed upon standards of measurement and presentation, and so on) lose their convincing power and are replaced by such 'social' arguments as economic utility, political expediency, ideological conformity, traditional authority, and cultural affinity. A cultural resource acquires a life of its own, evolving in accord with its own environment (of which science per se constitutes only a small part). The transformation of scientific knowledge into a cultural resource thus undermines scientists' control over their 'products' and its applications. It opens the scientific discipline from which this cultural resource emerged to invasion by 'outsiders' - whether competing disciplinary groups or politicians - eroding its professional autonomy, disciplinary boundaries, and established scientific cultures. Yet it also helps set the agendas of future research and recruit new generations of practitioners by firing up people's imaginations with fantastic tales of scientific pursuits, be it a search for a cancer cure or a quest for immortality.

Because other mammals have expressions, does that mean they have feelings—a subjective experience of the emotional states they display? That idea was scientifically risible not so long ago. Now some emotion scientists endorse the proposition that other mammals possess emotional consciousness—that they feel. This reversal delights animal advocates eager to make an argument for panprotoplasmic parity. But when the zoophile Mark Derr writes, “The question of whether animals possess consciousness, intelligence, volition, and feelings has long been settled in the affirmative,” he must be reporting the consensus from a species other than our own. Animals may have decided the matter to their own satisfaction, but human beings, as far as we know, are still debating it.

Because the reality is that the theory of evolution does not explain — nor is it expected to explain — how life started (we will speak about this later on), but neither is there consensus in explaining how this already-created life evolved, whether gradually or by little steps or by great leaps or in all these ways, and if in all these ways, then at the same time or successively; neither is it known whether these forms of evolution affect “macroevolution” or “microevolution,” or both, equally; we also do not know the subject of evolution, since there is no consensus about whether it is the individual of a population or the species; and, for that matter, neither is there agreement about the very concept of species.373 Neither is the degree of intervention of natural selection known; there is not even unanimity about whether, in reality, it acts at all — something admitted even by great admirers of Mr. Darwin, such as the Nobel Prize winner Hermann Muller:374: “We have seen that if (natural) selection could be avoided in such a way that all varieties would survive and multiply, the highest forms (of life) would have arisen in any case,” or to put it another way, natural selection does not explain the result.

A consensus by itself is meaningless. It was once the consensus that the earth was flat, that the sun orbited the stationary earth, that the Catholic Church was the source of all Truth, that Jesus Christ was God, and that classical physics was almost perfect, bar a fee minor details. All great advances have come about by overturning the consensus. That’s actually the definition of a great advance! To say that no one should be allowed to challenge or doubt the consensus is just about the most serious anti-science statement that anyone can make. That’s turning science into religion, a faith that no one is allowed to question! It’s a simple fact that no matter what the scientific consensus is – and science has been wrong about countless things in its history, and even defines itself according to the principles that all of its claims must be capable of falsification or verification, hence it always places a doubt over itself – the consensus can be completely misguided and mistaken. The dogmatic assertion that it is wrong to spread “doubt and confusion” after “a scientific consensus had been reached” is simply chilling. This is the quintessence of the paradigmatic, blinkered scientific thinking attacked by Thomas Kuhn.

There has now been a lot of scientific investigation into this, and there’s a broad scientific consensus that if you sleep less, your attention will likely suffer.

We have to ensure we understand what existence is and what an I is in the context of an accepted consensus about these terms and definitions. Our reasoning and arguments may be correct if we know more deeply what existence or an I is. The most important thing is to go beyond words or literal expressions to catch the real intentions of philosophers and thinkers rather than to catch potential linguistic errors. We may temporarily win arguments and make personal gains if we only pursue linguistic errors. Still, we would produce confusion and lead the sincere search for scientific or philosophical discoveries astray.

For example, consider the case of global warming. People from the 2-D world assume mass delusions are rare, and they apply that assumption to every topic. So when they notice that most scientists are on the same side, that observation is persuasive to them. A reasonable person wants to be on the same side with the smartest people who understand the topic. That makes sense, right? But people who live in the 3-D world, where persuasion rules, can often have a different view of climate change because we see mass delusions (even among experts) as normal and routine. My starting bias for this topic is that the scientists could easily be wrong about the horrors of climate change, even in the context of repeated experiments and peer review. Whenever you see a situation with complicated prediction models, you also have lots of room for bias to masquerade as reason. Just tweak the assumptions and you can get any outcome you want. Now add to that situation the fact that scientists who oppose the climate change consensus have a high degree of career and reputation risk. That’s the perfect setup for a mass delusion. You only need these two conditions: Complicated prediction models with lots of assumptions Financial and psychological pressure to agree with the consensus In the 2-D world, the scientific method and peer review squeeze out the bias over time. But in the 3-D world, the scientific method can’t detect bias when nearly everyone including the peer reviewers shares the same mass delusion.

First is this weird word, agnotology. It’s the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. The term was coined by Robert Proctor when he was studying this history of distortion by big tobacco. If you look at the climate change discussion, the public discourse, and you look at the tobacco discourse, there are some very striking parallels. The idea is to simply sow doubt, where there is almost universal scientific consensus, not only on the nature of climate change, but its causal mechanisms as being human activity. There’s nearly universal consensus, more consensus than you would get in science on most anything, and yet certain agents have been able to produce doubt, and thereby derail action. The same kind of thing happened with the adverse health effects of tobacco.

Art does not come from commandments, or follow logic or the consensus opinion of scientific experts, but springs fresh every time from stone and wood and green sprig of earth. It is the stuff that makes good gardeners, hunters, farmers, builders, carpenters, poets, bards, sculptors, painters, drawers, healers, physicians, and herbalists.

In this holy war, I write as a war correspondent, awash in a deluge of propaganda from both sides. I have tried to gather the most accurate information available on the actual effects of various drugs on sexual drive and sexual performance. Since we are concerned here with a theological and legal conflict as well as a scientific field for investigation, there is little consensus. Trying to find out what a drug really does to the human mind and body, in America today, is like trying to find out who shot first at Waco or Ruby Ridge. “Only God knows for sure, and He isn’t telling.” All that the objective reporter can do, then, is to print the claims of both sides and let the reader decide for himself who can be trusted.

I don’t blame Al Gore for taking that position; he was presenting rigorous data and representing the consensus of the scientific community. Because he was a recovering politician, seeing two sides to an issue must have been second nature. But when the only available options are black and white, it’s natural to slip into a mentality of us versus them and to focus on the sides over the science. For those on the fence, when forced to choose a side, the emotional, political, and economic pressures tilt in favor of disengaging or dismissing the problem.

Plimer condemns the entire movement: “Climate change catastrophism is the biggest scientific fraud that has ever occurred. Much climate ‘science’ is political ideology dressed up as science. There are times in history when the popular consensus is demonstrably wrong and we live in such a time. Cheap energy is fundamental for employment, living in the modern world, and for bringing the Third World out of poverty…. Furthermore, the education system has been captured by activists, and the young are inculcated with environmental, political, and economic ideology. During their education,

So what is the scientific consensus on the components of a high-quality program? According to experts such as Yale emeritus professor Edward Zigler (a leader in child development and early education policy for half a century), the best preschool programs share several common features: they provide ample opportunities for young children to use and hear complex, interactive language; their curriculum supports learning processes and a wide range of school-readiness goals that include social and emotional skills and active learning; and they have knowledgeable and well-qualified teachers who use what are known as reflective teaching practices. Effective programs also demonstrate careful, intentional programming that is driven by more than just scheduling whims or calendar holidays or what’s in the teacher guide this week, and they also take seriously the active involvement of family members.

Epigenetics is a discipline that relies more on speculation than genuine scientific understanding. Nevertheless, scholars of race and racism would do well to keep a wary eye on epigenetic research, as this is an avenue whereby many researchers will attempt to resurrect the biological concept of race. Defining ‘race’: is there a consensus that race is a social construct?

But true science is never “settled,” and true scientists are always eager to ask and answer questions.

In contradiction of the scientific method, IPCC assumes its implicit hypothesis is correct and that its only duty is to collect evidence and make plausible arguments in the hypothesis’s favor.

Fundamental uncertainties arise from insufficient observational evidence,

models should therefore not be used to guide public policy formulation until they have been validated and shown to have predictive value.

IPCC models do not incorporate important solar factors such as fluctuations in magnetic intensity and overestimate the role of human-related CO2 forcing.

evidence is lacking that a 2°C increase in temperature (of whatever cause) would be globally harmful.

The weight of evidence now leans heavily against the theory.

Invoking the precautionary principle does not lower the required threshold for evidence to be regarded as valid, nor does it answer the most important questions about the causes and consequences of climate change.

There is no scientific consensus on global warming.

GCMs perform poorly when their projections are assessed against empirical data.

changes in temperature precede parallel changes in atmospheric CO2 by several hundred years;

IPCC ignores mounting evidence that climate sensitivity to CO2 is much lower than its models assume

The Sun may have contributed as much as 66 percent of the observed twentieth century warming, and perhaps more.