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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is true at all. Name one such scientific consensus that was, like climate change, the result of different sources of experimental evidence, that turned out to completely wrong.

The phlogiston theory comes to mind. Combustion was surprisingly hard for science to get a handle on.

The evolution of various atomic models prior to Bohr is also a case where one "consensus" after another was overturned by new evidence. And even Einstein was reluctant to let go of the notion of a luminiferous ether.

And that's just physics. I'm sure biology and anatomy/physiology experts could fill volumes with accounts of false consensuses that took a long time to reverse.

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I don't think it's the kind of "consensus" that GP was thinking about. The examples you provided is just how science works and how it's supposed to work - new, better models replace the old ones. There's often inertia; some of it is justifiable (if you get a result that overturns a well-established model then it's probably you who screwed up an experiment), some of it is just human bias, but solid enough evidence will push through it.

Note the important characteristic of model change in science: all new models must explain the same observational evidence old models did. Bohr did not propose a new model that turned atoms into literal apple pies; the matter kept behaving the way it did, we only learned some additional details. Moving from phlogiston to current chemistry didn't make combustion suddenly work, it always worked.

Given the amount of evidence we collected on climate, it's nigh impossible that we'll come to a new model that says "yeah, it's not humans doing it, we can ignore it".

> yeah, it's not humans doing it, we can ignore it

Taking this further, even if we did somehow find out that humans weren't changing a thing it would still be in our best interests to prevent or slow the changes. Laying blame is an exercise in futility.

For example, let's say that we were somehow wrong about cows not actually being the #1 contributor to global warming (which they aren't[1]). Climate change deniers would have a day of rejoice for being right that it wasn't humans, and then what? Asphyxiate in cow fart.

It don't care if it's humans, cows, an alien beam from outside the galaxy or the hamster people. It's a problem, I stopped caring who's to blame a long time ago. We're currently going for the lowest hanging fruit (carbon emissions), which is the best approach. If tomorrow it turns out it was something different, changing that would be the correct thing to fix. Proving that humans aren't to blame does not exempt us from fixing it.

[1]: http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=1734

> The evolution of various atomic models prior to Bohr is also a case where one "consensus" after another was overturned by new evidence.

Models like the 'plum pudding' were known to be incorrect; they were just used at the time because they were the best available.

We're taught to think we understand. But do we? Language offers a black-and-white feeling we're clearly understanding something perfectly. That's an illusion, reinforced by years of approval at school. Language, which science depends on, is a visual art--symbols on paper. As with any visual art, the structured symbols together really convey very little, even if we agree it means something important. Pages, books, libraries, institutions, frames around frames around frames of ambiguity, approximation and interpretation.

The self-reinforcing successes of mathematics and experimentation, which science depends on much more than language, would seem to escape the linguistic relativism and false sense of confidence you're trying to present (if I understand your comment correctly).

In general, though, personal confidence in our personal understanding is indeed a very fuzzy thing that probably does have a lot to do with popular acceptance. Eventually neuroscience will help us understand this better.

But, the scientific method and mathematics together provide a way to escape the limitations of perceived correctness now. Instead of our brains judging what's correct, we have logically independent methods (science proper and math) that can make the decisions for us.

Yes, as far as numbers go, there's not much ambiguity, unless it's ambiguous math on purpose, like a postulate. Which reminds me, years ago I read an entire book about zero and the evolution of numbers. I think it was http://www.amazon.com/The-Nothig-that-Is-Natural/dp/01951423... the part about clay tablets made an impression. If we had eight fingers, would we do octal calculations? Hehe. Anyway, thanks for the reply. For the record, I wasn't meaning to imply science is super ambiguous.

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