How Scientific Consensus Has Gotten a Bad Reputation

nerdyalien writes From the article: "Fiction author Michael Crichton probably started the backlash against the idea of consensus in science. Crichton was rather notable for doubting the conclusions of climate scientists—he wrote an entire book in which they were the villains—so it's fair to say he wasn't thrilled when the field reached a consensus. Still, it's worth looking at what he said, if only because it's so painfully misguided: '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.'" As a STEM major, I am somewhat biased toward "strong" evidence side of the argument. However, the more I read literature from other, somewhat-related fields (i.e. psychology, economics and climate science), the more I felt they have little opportunity to repeat experiments, similar to counterparts in traditional hard science fields. Their accepted theories are based on limited historical occurrences and consensus among the scholars. Given the situation, it's important to understand what "consensus" really means.

Comments

Science creates understanding of a real world.

[BoRegardless]

No functioning computers would exist without "Science." Science is verifiable and reproducible often in a variety of ways, or it is not "science."

Re:Science creates understanding of a real world.

[i kan reed]

True as that may be, people who are absolutely nuts tend to use the perpetual openness of science as an excuse to inject irrelevant, arbitrary insanity into discussions of fact. I'm not just referring to the (particularly common as Slashdot) climate change deniers who dismiss all sorts of careful analysis of data and theory for some unspecified null hypothesis "because we've been wrong before". But crazier people.

Conservapedia's owner cum dictator, Andy Schafly comes to mind as a frequent abuser. Who has made "be more open minded" arguments over things as scientifically established as relativity, which he asserts doesn't exist, or walking on water being scientifically possible.

And creationists do the same.

The point, of course is that while established science can always be wrong, arbitrarily embracing the opposite and asserting the evidentialist structure of the scientific method as a reason is crazy. The proof is in the pudding, if you will.

Re:Science creates understanding of a real world.

[i kan reed]

Which is, of course, silly.

Because discussion is essential to education, and we cannot possibly expect everyone to do all science on their own. The walls of pragmatism and human lifespans stand block the avenue.

Re:Science creates understanding of a real world.

[i kan reed]

They do, actually. It has lead to some very amusing graphs.

Re:Science creates understanding of a real world.

[phantomfive]

See, what you are saying is correct, some people refuse to acknowledge evidence when it is right in front of their faces, and that's a real problem. The evidence for relativity is fairly clear, and quite strong; if someone rejects it, either they are not looking at the evidence, or not understanding the evidence.

However, when someone says, "you should believe what I say because there is consensus," that is a problem too. Science argues from reproducibility and evidence; from ancient times people believed things because they were claimed by an authority. If Aristotle said it, then it must be true, for example, or if the bible says it, then it must be true.

The great advancement of science was to not believe in authorities, but rather to look at the evidence. Nullius in Verba is the motto. Saying, "believe me because we have consensus" is a step back to the dark ages. If the evidence is strong, then present it. If the evidence is not strong, then your consensus will do nothing.

Re:Science creates understanding of a real world.

[Matt.Battey]

Most non-scientists are not in a position to evaluate the claims of any given scientist.

I'm pretty sure that was the argument the Church had against releasing full, translated copies of its data, a.k.a. the contents of the Christian Bible.

This argument doesn't pass the sniff test. It is the job of a "scientist" to present claim and data that supports said claim in such a way that it may be consumed by anyone and still stand on its own, only then is there "consensus."

Re:Science creates understanding of a real world.

[i kan reed]

Of course, that doesn't make any sense.

We're not saying that to people who have meaningful evidence. We're saying to to people fixated on irrelevant points raising scientifically absurd objections consistently and repeatedly. There isn't a scientific debate happening here. If we were, we wouldn't see so much "just asking questions" about things with well established answers.

These are people who are trying to assert "my ignorance is equal to your knowledge" out of an implied deference to fairness.

Re:Science creates understanding of a real world.

[i kan reed]

Of course I do. Clear explanations are not the problem here.

Climate change science can be turned into an executive summary quickly and easily. These summaries are essentially a bunch of incontestable facts that still get contested.

A. Carbon dioxide provably has much stronger absorption bands in the infra-red wavelengths than Nitrogen, and Oxygen, and a little more than water. These are the only compounds more prevalent in the atmosphere than CO2. You can run experiments in the lab seeing different radiative rates of cooling from different mixtures of "air" and CO2.
B. Paleoclimate reconstructions have show than CO2 concentrations consistently acts as a primary moderator of temperature on earth after the first occurrence of plantlife.
C. Naive modeling shows that substantially increasing the CO2 concentrations from current levels of the atmosphere shift the equilibrium temperatures of the planet substantially. More complex models incorporating other known factors, within the entire range of their uncertainty levels, show the same thing.
D. Human activity has almost doubled CO2 levels.

None of these 4 points are really scientifically questionable, and only naive skepticism(that is, pseudoskepticism) or ignorance leaves much room for debate on them.

Their implications are obvious, and we still get denial, and the problem is not with the structuring, but the behaviors of the deniers.

Re:Science creates understanding of a real world.

[MightyMartian]

And yet no one believes in phlogiston anymore. Science did what it was supposed to do.

I can think of plenty of examples of the old guard trying to hang on to discredited ideas. The Out of Africa theory of human origins, when it first came out, flew in the face of a general view among European experts that modern humanity had evolved in Eurasia. The old guard, to some extent, were more informed by racial biases (the very 16th-19th century idea that sub-Saharan Africans were somehow lower on the evolutionary chain), and indeed there were a few angry bastards, notably on the Continent, that clung to the idea of a Eurasian origin of H. sapiens even into the 1980s, when finally enough molecular data had been gained both from extant human populations and from the remains of ancient humans (including Neanderthals) that it became irrefutable that modern H. sapiens had a very recent origin (sometime between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago) in Africa.

And again, on the same general topic, for a long time the idea that modern humans and Neanderthals had interbred was viewed as completely invalid. mtDNA studies were flung in the faces of researchers who insisted that modern humans and Neanderthals had interbred in Eurasia. Those that insisted that the interbreeding had happened were tut-tutted, in some cases viewed almost as hippies. Indeed, even into the 1990s, the "consensus" view was that any interbreeding was so rare as to have had no impact on the genetic makeup of modern human populations.

Well, lo and behold, by the 21st century, better techniques for DNA extraction and genome mapping revealed that virtually all human populations outside of sub-Saharan Africa did have nuclear genes that came from Neanderthals.

So it strikes me that this, and numerous other examples, consensus that does not fit the evidence is always ultimately discarded. But that some consensus views are wrong does not mean all consensus views are wrong.

Re:Science creates understanding of a real world.

[jo_ham]

The problem is you're not in a position to be able to evaluate the evidence - climate science is difficult and specialised.

If you asked your doctor to show you your MRI scans so that you could evaluate the evidence of his/her diagnosis for yourself, where would you start?

This isn't a "you're too stupid to understand" argument, it's a "it's not your area and it's very tricky, beyond basic concepts" argument.

If you're consistently disbelieving the very large majority of climate scientists when they summarise their findings, then you're a denier (assuming you take other scientists in different fields that are no politically sensitive at their word). If you're simply looking for an easy to digest pile of evidence then you're going to be disappointed. The evidence is all there - it's just not easy to understand, beyond simple threads like "land ice melting > sea level rise" or "higher [CO2] > more retained IR" but how those things fit into the whole is not trivial.

It has become very easy to simply distrust what climate scientists are saying because of a large propaganda campaign to demonise them all. It's almost unique to that particular field - but it happens to a greater or lesser extent where money overlaps with science (pharmaceuticals, GM crops, climate science, renewable energy, nuclear science etc) from both sides of the political spectrum.

Re:Science creates understanding of a real world.

[Runaway1956]

I've never seen an MRI - but I have seen CAT scans. During my EMT training, I did my ER work at Bangor Regional Medical. I stood beside the doctor as he showed us exactly what he was looking for, and how he maneuvered through the "slides" - how the damaged areas differed from the undamaged areas of the brain.

While it is a far leap from my own level of inexpertise to the doctor's level of expertise, the doctor was both willing and able to show us laymen the value of the CAT scans.

The global warming people haven't shown us the value of anything, so far as I can see.

Re:Science creates understanding of a real world.

[Creedo]

The global warming people haven't shown us the value of anything, so far as I can see.

Then you are simply not paying attention. That's just one site, and 10 seconds of typing to get to it. Make an effort to read the data, don't bitch because you aren't getting spoon fed.

Re:Science creates understanding of a real world.

[GiordyS]

Climate scientist to layperson: "And here's where things get interesting. CO2 by itself only warms the planet modestly, at about one degree per doubling. We introduced feedbacks into our models which amplify that warming by 300%, turning a fairly benign warming into a dangerous one. This has garnered us a lot of international attention. Unfortunately, nature has not been cooperating and surface temperatures have not increased for the last decade and a half, despite an enormous increase in CO2. Rather than revise controversial feedbacks, we figured out a way to preserve the theory by claiming the deep oceans have absorbed all the extra heat. Since we can't measure the deep oceans with any accuracy it's not falsifiable, and since we don't know if or when the heat will "reappear", we can continue to educate the public for another 50 years even if surface temperatures start to cool."

Re:Science creates understanding of a real world.

[iluvcapra]

People like John Oliver, trotting out a bunch of people in lab coats saying, "look how many people say your wrong" is not an argument; funny yes, but not a valid argument.

It's a valid argument if you're countering the claim that a meaningful set of scientists reject anthropogenic global warming. It isn't a valid argument that AGW is actually happening, true.

A scientific fact is a different thing than an authoritative claim, and you need consensus and political debate in order to create the latter. Science produces testable facts but the question of wether or not we, as a people, must do something in response to these facts, or if these facts are relevant or important, are not questions science can answer.

Implicit in the successive warnings from the IPCC and other bodies is the basic philosophical assumption that AGW is unnatural and hazardous, and must be stopped, because it threatens multitudes of human lives. Science can't really draw a firm line between unnatural and natural, that's metaphysical. Science cannot fundamentally indicate things that are a "hazard," because this is a concept that rests on analytic assumptions that are subjective to human values. And as odious as it is to say, science cannot prove that a human life has value, thus, science cannot justify any action that would save life, on it's own.

Re:Science creates understanding of a real world.

[forand]

I am a physicist. I have explained the expansion of the universe to many lay people without trouble. I have also tried time and time again to explain it to my mother. All such explanations end with her asking "so where is it expanding into." The short answer to this is: nothing. And one can either accept that or learn metric differential geometry. The belief that whatever any given PhD is working on can "describe in laymen's terms what they are doing" does not mean a laymen has the knowledge to understand or even accept the details of the theory. Heck look at Quantum physics in the early 1900s and you see many very intelligent people thinking it is crazy because it is probabilistic. So in short a good scientist can explain to a laymen what they do but the laymen has to accept their expertise when it comes to many specifics.

Scientific Consensus

[Archangel Michael]

Science is about provability, consensus is about getting majority or even a plurality of opinions. These two things are mutually exclusive.

Piltdown Man was once "consensus". We know how that turned out.

Re:Scientific Consensus

[pz]

As an experimental scientist, I can, with certainty, state that you are wrong when you claim "science is about provability."

It is extraordinarily difficult to prove something experimentally. Most advances come about because we (both individually as experimentors, and collectively as members of a given scientific field), think we've accounted for most potential confounds and artifacts, not because we've conducted perfect experiments. Biological sciences, especially, suffer from a huge number of uncontrolled variables that often we are not aware of, but impinge mightily upon our results. Biology, to continue, is noisy. Very, very noisy. In my lab, we measure phenomena related to visual perception, and I can tell you unequivocally that individual variation usually swamps any underlying phenomenon we examine (meaning, we need to measure with lots and lots of individuals to make sure we aren't being fooled, and even then, we can easily get fooled).

Rarely, if ever, do we prove something experimentally. It's only through the consensus of reproducibility that scientific facts get established.

Piltdown Man, to discuss your example, was due to observational error (ie, a hoax), not experimental evidence demonstrating provability. Observational science, as opposed to experimental science, is rife with missteps and re-interpretations. Look up the history of shooting stars, as one example -- they were considered purely terrestrial phenomena well after the establishment of the United States as a country. It took repeated observational events, not experiments, to establish that meteors are astronomical in origin.

Reproducibility is the cornerstone of modern science. Everything else is consensus. We think we know things, and mostly, we've been correct with a high degree of probability, since we've been able to take given conclusions and build, predictably, upon them. But, every now and then, even firmly-held beliefs with eons of structural experimental integrity are demonstrated to have been mistaken. There is very little scientific truth, merely scientific certainty. If you want absolute truth, look to mathematics instead.

The fantasy of the "rogue" that was right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Consensus is something that helps us keep crackpots and bad actors (Say, those that pay for fake/biased studies that support their political or financial position) from pushing their agenda. Charisma and slick marketing are dangerously effective so the practice of gathering the collective opinion of all the experts in a given field is important.

It's not perfect. Occasionally the community is slow to move on new evidence, but science should be a careful and methodical practice.

We enjoy stories about underdogs and misunderstood geniuses or the rogue new guy that goes up against the "establishment" but in reality actual true stories of this nature are quite rare. Statistic noise rare. Real breakthroughs are nearly always the culmination of decades of work from hundreds of researchers.

Michael Crichton, frankly, was a hack that enjoyed the above fantasy a bit too much. He did do a bit of research for his projects but it was always just dressing for the same plot over and over again.

That man has done more damage to the world than he ever knew. When he fell in to the climate change denial camp he provided legitimacy to the anti-intellectual nonsense that we're struggling to deal with today.

Re:Crichton is an idiot.

[ceoyoyo]

A consensus is a bunch of people who share an opinion. It has nothing to do with right or wrong.

What consensus means:

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

'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 phrase "One investigator who happens to be right" assumes one would be able to tell who is right and who is wrong immediately as it happens. The consensus is agreeing who got reproducible provable results.

People who do not understand science, who want to game the system are intentionally gaming the system. They bring in rules used in philosophical debates and legal arguments into science. Equal time for both sides works ok in philosophy and in courts. But not in science. Let us say one side has tons and tons of data and the other side is waving hands. Giving equal time to both is doing a great injustice to the side with data.

If one side is just asking questions, raising doubts, etc and the other side is actually answering the questions and clearing the doubts, it is a great injustice to give equal time to both. It takes much longer to answer questions than to raise them.

One should gain standing to raise doubts. Getting funding from industry groups with vested interests is not getting the standing. Must publish in the relevant field, get peer reviewed papers. Must risk reputation gained by hard long work to raise questions.

Re:Worse than that...

[digsbo]

In economics, the Austrian School folks agree with you so strongly that they reject the notion that empirical data can trump a priori reasoning. Recognizing that there is no "controlled experiment", any data that refutes a well-reasoned logical argument is considered incomplete. It's a remarkable rejection of empiricism and a recognition that economic activity is based on human behavior (praxeology) and as such can't be precisely quantified.

Re:Crichton is an idiot.

[Imagix]

And as soon as those many many many scientists can repeat and verify that experiment, the consensus very quickly changes to account for the new experiment, and the old consensus vanishes. (Or someone can come up with a counter experiment that shows how the first doesn't apply....) That's how Science advances. "Here's how the current theory works. X, Y, Z.". "Hey, I found a case where Y doesn't happen, if there is a presence of midichlorians (M)." "You're right. Ok, new theory: X, Y (if there are no M), Z.". Doesn't make the first consensus wrong. It was right for all of the available data at the time.

Re:Who profits from West slowing down?

[Microlith]

though there are still perfectly valid debates in almost any other branch of science (dieting, economics, pedagogy, biology, and even computers — you name it — it is all in flux),

Sure, sure...

the science of climate is "settled" and anybody doubting the line pushed by the governments must also believe, the Earth is flat.

Utter nonsense. What's settled is that the climate is changing at the hands of man, what's open to debate is what the impact on us will be in the short and long term. The "consensus" is the same as the "consensus" that supports the modern understanding of evolution - it is a refinement and agreement across the field on the gross mechanism for something, and all the arguments lie in the details.

Kudos for tossing in the pinch of anti-government paranoia, it has to be that and not the desire for massively profitable fossil fuel corporations to defend said profits.

I disagree with the premise...

[QuietLagoon]

Scientific consensus is not political consensus.

.
Scientific consensus is an group of scientists agreeing on a proven theory or the proof of a theory.

Political consensus is a group of people ganging together to push their opinions on others.

The latter has a negative connotation which Mr. Crichton is using to taint the former.

Re:Scientific Consensus is:

[dave420]

You do realise the world of riches that awaits a scientist who could show AGW to be nonsense, right? They'd end up with a Nobel prize, their own science department, and a large research budget. This is such an easily-disproven nonsensical claim made by denialists it's not even funny. It only seems to work on other denialists who applaud it and say "See! See! That's what happens!". Others just laugh and assume the denialist in question is a grade-A muppet.

Re:Gotten?

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

It is proper English. It is the difference between the active and passive voice. "He was sick, but he got well." "He was sick, but he has gotten well." The difference is actually tangentially related to the story subject. When I was in university [mumble] decades ago, all scientific papers for publication, and by extension all term papers, were required to be written in the third person past passive voice. This was thought to appear more objective. Printing costs for scientific journals drove the change to active voice, because, in English, that voice uses fewer words. Now that journals are largely electronic, printing costs are less of an issue, leaving aside Dilbert's PHB's concern about using up electrons. Active voice may also be more readable, particularly for those being taught by teachers who say things like, "Me and him went to the store."

Consensus is about the process

[ponos]

I think there is a subtle difference between being right (in the usual sense of providing a model that happens to accurately represent measurable stuff) and the process of scientific discussion. Consensus is just an outcome of a process, ie collaboration. That process is extremely important but does not guarantee being right.

In the end, without resorting to unnecessary complicated terms, if a bunch of people who are supposed to know what they are saying all agree on something that is not immediately testable (say, long-term human impact on the climate), odds are they are more likely to be right than some random wacko or idiot reporter because they spent some time discussing together and have highlighted potential errors.

In the absence of definitive hard data, which will only be available in retrospect, we have to pick sides. Consensus seems a safer bet than the probability that some random guy is the new Galileo or Einstein.

Playing the man and not the ball.

[sugar and acid]

For climate change skeptics are always attacking the science and the scientists. But they never deal with the known facts.

1. CO2 concentration is measurably increasing year on year and accelerating. If you want a running tally have a look here: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
This is one of a number of different high quality analytical chemistry studies that all tell the same story. CO2 concentration is increasing significantly.

2. We know this is because of release of fossil fuel sequestered CO2. By careful investigation of the change in carbon isotopic ratios, and by simply accounting for the CO2 released. Human release of CO2 more than enough accounts for the CO2 increase in the atmosphere, and actually shows that a significant proportion is actually getting absorbed into the ocean and other carbon sinks. But clearly no where near all of it.

3. CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat due to the wavelengths of light it does and does not absorb.

This is all hard chemistry measurement, and are known with a high degree of confidence. These are not up for debate!

The only debatable point is what do these facts mean for the climate and the environment going forward. And here we get into prediction and modelling. The best models and predictions shows that the climate will increase in temperature, and that will have significant and mostly detriment effect on most of the worlds environments and sustainability of human populations going forward.

If you are a climate change skeptic scientist, what you have to come up with is a model that sensibly and scientifically shows why this increase in CO2 won't have any significant detrimental effects. Then put it up for publication in peer reviewed journals. And if your scientific argument has any legs it will change the scientific consensus. All the other stuff being thrown around is political motivated bull shit, with no scientific basis and should be simply ignored.

Re:Worse than that...

[Nimey]

"Rejects empirical data" is another way of saying "taking it on faith", i.e. the Austrian school is a religion by another name.

Whatever happened to scientific discussions then?

[luis_a_espinal]

True as that may be, people who are absolutely nuts tend to use the perpetual openness of science as an excuse to inject irrelevant, arbitrary insanity into discussions of fact.

You seem to be missing the point of TFA. Science doesn't need you to discuss it - it stands on it's own.

If this were true, we wouldn't have multiple physics/cosmological theories trying to explain observed phenomena or expected attributes on the nature of time and space.

If you have to discuss/debate it you have moved well out of the realm of science and into politics.

Kinda like the time when physicists were divided between those who theorized the Universe to be eternal and immutable vs those who thought of it as having a dynamic nature (expanding/shrinking with a creation starting point)?

Science not only relies on explanations of observations already taken. It also relies on PREDICTIONS (and the theories that proposed them) that are thought to be logical/inevitable based on what is has already been observed. Further experiments take place until these theories are debunked, reaffirmed or revisited. The process by which this takes place is strongly based on debate.

Even mathematical proofs are open to debate. You submit your proof. Peers attack it. If they find a chink in the armor, they send it back to you, and you now have to prove that the error is not fundamental, that your original proof can still be revisited and salvaged.

All politics are discussions. Not all discussions are politics - or are you not familiar with scientific discussions? If discussions have no place in science, then we pretty much close the door in the creation and presentation of scientific theories (which are just discussions and proposals which only become facts when experiments corroborate their predictions.) There is no exception to that and frankly it's disgusting you claim affinity for scientific knowledge and understanding and can't grasp such a basic concept.

Re:Consensus is not Correctness

[MightyMartian]

There wasn't a learned man in Europe who believed the Earth was flat. It may have persisted much longer in China, but in Europe and among Arab geographers, there was no one who seriously believed in the flat Earth. The Greeks had figured that out nearly 2000 years before Columbus ever accidentally ran into the Americas on his way to China.