Climate scientists have played political games using scientific instruments such as climate models and multiproxy studies, with "peer-review" and "published in quality journals" as the main chess pieces, and look what they have reaped. There is no shortage of other examples. Consensus – Humans are essentially pack animals. What is relevant is reproducible results. From the speech “Aliens cause global warming”. We don’t have an e=mc2 sort of universal agreement on climate change, or the nature of black holes, or the safety/dangers of low-level radiation or genetically modified foods. I mean, how long did it take before the schools of oceanography and climatology were finally merged? Crichton says “the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus.” Fundamental to Kuhn’s analysis is the notion of “normal science,” which is the very definition of consensus – the agreed-upon body of knowledge and experimental program as understood by the majority of practitioners in a field. When I talk to scientists about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, I get chapter and verse on its mathematical robustness and its 100% empirical record. Or do you follow the Crichton/Iraq example, and assume they must be wrong and do the opposite? A person believes that a cat is a better pet than a dog. Society at large is more consensus-oriented. To the extent that Crichton’s argument bears some resemblance to Kuhn’s it’s at the point where paradigms are overthrown because of an accumulation of anomalies that don’t fit the paradigm. After applying Redundancy theorem we can write only the terms containing complemented variables (i.e, C) and omit the Redundancy term i.e., AB..'. During their teens, kids look to other kids for their cues on how to talk, dress and act. It’s a consensus of explanations. Or let’s suppose that for some reason world leaders had taken it into their heads 10 years ago to create an International Panel on Curing Cancer with seemingly unlimited budgets for meetings. For example, the consensus of ¯ and ¯ is ¯. If people stop asking questions and challenging assumptions, power gathers and if we’re not careful we all could end up in some regrettable place (like Iraq) wondering which questions we forgot to ask before we agreed to consent to someone else’s explanations of the evidence. After all, what are the chances all those people were all wrong? It’s as significant as Copernican or Darwinian theory and must not be accepted as true based on the esoteric “knowledge” of a handful of scientists. The word consensus has two common meanings. There is no such thing as consensus science. People experience the false-consensus effect in many areas of life, and the best-known example of this cognitive bias appears in a 1977 studyon the topic by Lee Ross and his colleagues. The prisoner's dilemma refers to a situation, wherein an individual has to choose between self-interest and mutual interest. These two theories are usually spoken of as in opposition based on their arguments. He himself says it this way: “Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough.” Agreed. Functionalists assert that rapid social change is generally nonsensical and threatens the society's peace and stability. Nobody has seen e=mc^2 written as divine revelation, the stars did not move in the sky for some scientist, and read “e=mc^2.” Rather, scientists have performed a bunch of expirements that conform with our understanding: e=mc^2. The theory includes aspects of division of labor,rational system , bureaucracy theory and contingency theory with each of the aspects of improving output and efficiency. I used the example of the Iraq War as a classic example that expert consensuses do not mean that anything is there, and in my view Bush threw caution to the wind, when caution and waiting for solid fact would have been better. The consensus theory emphasizes that the social order is through the shared norms, and belief systems of people. Lay smiled to himself. McKitrick: What is the Hockey Stick debate about? I am sure every scientist involved has his or her own subjective probability distribution over the potential outcomes. Would you like Weekly Updates? Kuhn’s conclusions were much the same: Consensus occurs when the theorem, axiom or findings have useful or powerful applications. His language is confusing. The vast majority of geologists believed J. Harlan Bretz was wrong about the Missoula floods. You and I obviously have a different level of comfort in the replication that’s gone on, which is fine. We no longer need to question it, test it, prod it- we just say “this is the thing, here’s how it works, end of story.” It’s a black box, and it just magically works, to our perception. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory. I’m not sure how adding another example of a case in which a consensus was wrong helps here. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. The consensus is undefined if there is more than one opposition. "Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Dissent occurs when the solution fails. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. Based on the theory of symbolic interactionism, when a society has consensus around what a symbol means (i.e. Attribution theory is concerned with how ordinary people explain the causes of behavior and events. According to Kuhn, normal science “is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like”…”normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.” Paradigm-based research is “an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies.” Kuhn adds that most scientists are engaged in mop-up operations, much of which is intended to stifle dissent for the prevailing paradigm. I stumbled into what I’m doing now when Mann said that he had forgotten where MBH98 data was and Rutherford said that it didn’t exist in any one place. What else is a textbook if not the accumulation of a consensus – the body of knowledge on which the majority of the practitioners in a field agree? Ironing out the Buying Thought Process - influencePEOPLE, Don’t be so Quick to Restock that Shelf - influencePEOPLE, A Call to Lay Down Your Weapons of Influence - influencePEOPLE. What is it? Although it existed beforehand, the term consensus science gained wider exposure after a 2003 speech by Michael Crichton entitled, "Aliens Cause Global Warming" , in which he disussed what he believed to be the impropriety of basing scientific conclusions primarily on scientific consensus. Consensus arises when there is uncertainty about something and a show of hands is required to resolve the issue. 2. Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women. Enter Your Email Below! Many of the issues seem comparable to me. It gets somewhat far afield from the subject here, but what’s usually missing from discussions of WMDs and Iraq is that what was being produced were threat assessments, not proofs. This doesn’t mean that any conclusions of the IPCC are wrong, but just that the isntitutional biases of this type of program shouldn’t surprise anyone. These theorists … He did find the phrase 'scientific consensus' in regards to uncertainty about when life starts, which probably still stands. While I fully understand the definitions of and differences between the two, I am finding great difficulty in trying to apply them to a social situation as we have been asked to do. Consensus is a condition that is both a necessity to the foundation of any field of science shared by more than one scientist and a contingency that should be revisable when evidence suggests as such. from verifying their data, but the conclusion I reach is still that the Hockey Team has things they’re trying to hide. "cat"), communication is clear. It would be interesting to know what the “textbook” probability distribution for the GCM model forecasts would be. Yes, AGW is a fundamental paradigm change in science and has consequences for the whole of society. It is a confluence of opinion in the absence of unambiguous evidence. medical treatments for some specific conditions, think of a noncontroversial one. I can tell you all about the intricate relationship of certain past lifeforms but I wouldn’t know which end of a climate chart on global warming is ‘up’. Fastow was obviously as creative and sharp as Lay and Enron’s board of directors had come to believe” (p. 267). He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. That’s what Crichton is talking about: a consensus of "experts" proclaiming something to be true or "very likely" has happened many times in the history of science. It assumes that people want to preserve the status quo and those who want to change it … “Ah consensus … the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. Has there been any attempt to amalgamate those into some “consensus view”? The vast majority of climate scientists believed Gilbert Walker was wrong about ENSO. In this case, the IPCC process, with its emphasis on a political form of process rather than an engineering audit, seems to result in a type of mutual reinforcement and excitement more characteristic of market phenomena and fads, than what I take to be the more usual scientific process where there is no attempt to negotiate and institutionalize a “consensus”. Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Pinterest. It makes me think about the old saying, “There’s safety in numbers.”. The vast majority of geologists believed Alfred Wegener (a meteorologist, for goodness sake!) Getting back to MBH98, I see an untested and unvalidated study which flies in the face of most studies carried out before and quite a few since, being written into a bureaucratic and unneccessary review of the state of climate science and being unjustifiably promoted as the “consensus view” – then when someone checks the method and finds very large flaws, the screaming begins. John Fleck: You are right. Below are two false consensus examples: 1. I have no idea whether you are being wilfully obtuse about Crichton’s speech, but let me tell you that from where I’m standing, the whole issue of anthropogenic climate change rests on nothing more than a confluence of opinions and religious beliefs amongst some scientists and quite a few bureaucrats. F = BC' + AC. http://www.theaudiopedia.com What is CONSENSUS THEORY? Good. 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