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Comment by rxhernandez

8 years ago

> The rest of science doesn't get described so confidently

Um what? I feel like you haven't spent 10 minutes in a physics class. As someone who spent many years studying physics, you have to get within range of the quantum level before people in that field start feeling a little shaky in their beliefs.

The history of consensuses? Yes, please, you should do that, because it has gotten us quite far given the constraints of time. There are so many crackpot ideas that are thankfully rarely explored due to consensus.

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rxhernandez

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late2part  8 years ago

Things that were described confidently for centuries (or less):

  1.  The earth is flat.
  2.  The sun revolves around the earth.
  3.  Fire is an element.
  4.  They have chemical/nuclear weapons.
  5.  No one can enter the search market; AltaVista owns the market.
  6.  Pets.com can't fail - look at who is invested and how big is the market.
  7.  Noone will ever need more than 640K of ram.
  8.  There is a world market for maybe 5 computers.

etc. Who cares how solid the consensus is - what matters is facts and truth.

averagewall  8 years ago

Scientists were widely confident about the correctness of Newton's 2nd law and the universal law of gravitation up till the late 1800s/early 1900s. Then Einstein showed their limitations/incorrectness. You can't look at contemporary modern consensuses because if it's a consensus, it'll look like it's right until the future when/if it's proven wrong.

Philosophy of science says we can't prove theories (of a certain type, which includes most of physics), only disprove them. So there aren't scientific truths, just current best theories.

Many cultures had religious myths about the history of the world which they widely believed.

I'm not saying that people who disagree with the consensus are necessarily right, or even that we should bother to listen to them - just that sometimes they might be so consensus isn't a reason to judge something as true.

  • dragonwriter  8 years ago

    > Scientists were widely confident about the correctness of Newton's 2nd law and the universal law of gravitation up till the late 1800s/early 1900s. Then Einstein showed their limitations/incorrectness.

    While Einstein revised them, the Newtonian equations are correct enough that they are still generally used for all kinds of things.

    If that the best example you can use to make the argument that the current scientific consensus could be wide off the mark, you've done more to refute your argument than advance it.

    • averagewall  8 years ago

      Bloodletting. It's honestly trivial to find examples of where science was wrong. I'm not going to research them for you if you'll make up ad-hoc reasons to reject them.

      Obviously I can't give an example of current consensus being likely wrong because if I knew that, scientists would too and it wouldn't be the consensus.

      Here's a snarky example though. See if you can find the flaw in it - current consensus among scientists is that you can't prove causation without doing an experiment - in particular you can't prove it using historical data. This is an obstacle to medical research since ethics impedes controlled experiments on people and it's part of why nutrition advice is frequently wrong (there you go for even more examples). But climate scientists have apparently done just that - themselves demonstrating that either the consensus is wrong or they're wrong. Either way, a consensus is wrong.

      These are just an arguments to show how wrong consensus can be though - in reality I'm pretty sure that climate scientists don't acutally believe they're right without any doubt. It will be politics and attempts to manipulate people that changes confidence values into supposed certainty.

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