> Scepticism is a cornerstone of science itself.

Yes, definitely, however, so is accepting empirical evidence. And as much as claims have to be supported by evidence, so has skepticism of those claims.

We seriously have people running around claiming the world is flat. That is not skepticism, that is retardation.

There is increased skepticism throughout the hierarchy. the flat-earthers and creationists are caricatures, but focusing on them misses or disguises the bigger picture. Many people believe that science, and especially the part of it that often informs public policy, is not scrutinizing itself enough , and is often led by groupthink and popularity rather than rigor.

> and is often led by groupthink and popularity rather than rigor.

To a large extent that's true. Funding goes more to groups who publish more positive results. It's well established by now that the incentive structure needs to change to make science more robust, but there's considerable resistance.

Do you know how people become successful scientists? By "scrutinizing" science and coming up with better and more predictive theories. This idea that science isn't "scrutinizing itself" fundamentally misunderstands how science works. This misunderstanding not only affects the "caricatures" like creationists but supposedly "more sophisticated" critics of science such as "alternative" medicine devotees.

> how people become successful scientists? By "scrutinizing"

Some scientists do, but the majority become successful by looking for things that are highly publishable. Hence why you have a reproducibility crisis in some sciences but no shortage of results/claims.

Define successful and define scientist - Lysenko was quite "successful" in the Soviet Union for obtaining funding and influence because he flattered the ideology of the management. His work however was complete bunk and didn't even hit upon real epigenetic interactions.

They may get rewarded for it in dysfunctional systems but it isn't furthering science.

That is the question, yes, and I think that was what jhbadger meant by “successful” - that one is so in science (from this perspective) similarly to any other field; when people buy into your work, give you funding, your reputation increases, etc.

To the level that this is true (the "reproducibility crisis" has been blown out of hand because the general public confuses reproducibility with generalizability), this is because of the exact opposite of what you claimed earlier -- it isn't "groupthink" but the exact opposite -- the individuality of scientists not thinking as a group and wanting to demonstrate their own unique takes rather than just redoing what others have done.

the cynical in me says that many scientists choose to forgo research that would disprove some semi-established research in the fears that their work might get heavily scrutinized as well. I think you 're talking about "great scientists" which are extreme outliers. Scientists often enjoy that mythical appreciation, but the truth is a lot more pedestrian - there are 7.8 million researchers , 0.1% of the world's population.

There's enough people running around claiming the world is a sphere, which is not really true either. At least the flat earthers understand that most people know less than they think they need to.

It's true enough, it's less than one percent wider around the equator. Calling it an oblate spheroid or something isn't relevant it most situations.

See, I didn't even know that?!

Instead of using a metaphor why not quote an example of the 'retardation' you have in mind. I guess you don't think readers here should be overly concerned with folk who claim the world (the Earth) is flat as against being approximately spherical.

> retardation

I hate to be that guy, but that is really not even vaguely appropriate—retardation literally means you are slow at development. This is unrelated to deluded adults, and I’d hazard a guess that most retarded individuals are not deluded about the earth being flat.

In what sense was the 2008 crisis anything to do with scientific consensus? I'm not sure I follow that.

Economics is not such a robust science as physics.

A famous example is from 2010 and affected the response to the crisis: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the-excel...

Wall Street quant bros thought they had analytical models for prices that were based on reasonable math and science. Turns out, their models vastly under-estimated the probability of a big crash. Apparently there was even a big hegdge fund based on these ideas, Long-term Capital Management, which went bust in the late 1990's, but still the "consensus" ignored it and moved on.

N.N. Taleb writes about some of this in "The Black Swan", which I'm sure most readers here already know about. I would also recommend Benoit Mandelbrot's (yes, that Mandelbrot's) "The Misbehavior of Markets". https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/665134.The_Mis_Behavior_...

Peripherally some Wall Street companies involved had an insatiable hunger for physicists and mathematicians. There was bemoaning that the brightest minds were going to Wall Steeet instead of research. The company thinking that they could apply all of the scientific modeling to markets. It worked until the 2008 crisis hit and then it didn't and they lost their shirts and were living out of their Lexuses.

Personally I suspect the underlying issue is a fundamental lack of concern for truth and its origins just wanting to make money so they throw resources at it without concerns about the why and how to get what they want to hear short term.

That trend is repeating itself in other sectors with misuse of neural networks - and I mean that in a functional sense as opposed to an ethical one. Regardless of the ethics of facial recognition in law enforcement it simply doesn't scale to huge data sets and is being treated as "has to be right" instead of viewing it as the coarse filter it is will lead to problems unless one is sociopathic enough to consider that a feature.

yeah, that seems to be complete bullshit. that crisis was 100% greed and bad governance

Economies have been led technocracies since at least the 80s. There are numerous ways the academia failed to predict the financial crisis, and on the contrary facilitated it: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/22a9/5fc8524947c1b7f985bd75...

The 'greed and bad governance' claim is bogus: one the one hand, it was was academically-approved 'greed', and 'bad goverment' had little to with the collapse of private institutions that the US government had to save.

You're making claims that are entirely unsupported by anything you've provided or said. The paper linked makes the claim towards the failure of academic economics failing to predict the Financial crisis of 2008, not science.

(This also completely ignores that it seems to be a book passage rather than a review and well cited article in a Journal).

You've imposed your own narrative on the article written about Latour here and bought up wild claims about 2008 with no relevance to the discussion at hand.

I actually don't know what your point is other than to rally against the NYT and it sniffs of personal bias the whole way down.

I doubt you've read the article.

And I'll just leave this selected quote here from the article you did link.

"* This opinion paper is the outcome of one week of intense discussions within the working group on ‘Modeling of Financial Markets’ at the 98 th Dahlem Workshop, 2008. "