Re:Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts
by ballenf on Monday July 13, 2020 @10:35AM
(#23821186)
To put a finer point the phrase "expert consensus" is circular itself as we tend to take away the "expert" label from anyone whose position diverges too far from the consensus.
Re:Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts
by dtech on Monday July 13, 2020 @02:38PM
(#23824050)
Of course it's not 100% black and wide and there is an element of faith.
The consolidated statement is way to wide, but if you take consensus to mean "a large majority like 66%+ portion of the scientific literature within the field(s) relevant to that specific instance" that becomes a lot more testable for an individual issue.
Re:Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts
by learc83 on Monday July 13, 2020 @05:50PM
(#23825962)
> there is an element of faith
That's exactly my point.
>if you take consensus to mean "a large majority like 66%+ portion of the scientific literature within the field(s) relevant to that specific instance" that becomes a lot more testable for an individual issue.
Yeah we can say that for some specific issue like choosing what time of year to plant tomatoes, expert consensus is useful, but that doesn't generalize, which was also my point.
That's one of those things that sounds like it should be falsifiable, but in practice it's not. The statement is far too broad to conduct reasonable experiments, and if you narrow the scope to the point where you can conduct experiments, then your experiments won't support a conclusion that's broad enough to be a sound foundation for "expert consensus is more likely to be correct".
I happen to think expert consensus is generally useful, but there's still an element of faith in my opinion.