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Comment by yters | Hacker News Reader

When most ancient philosophers were theists and believed in libertarian free will and an immaterial soul, was that a convergence to the truth, too?

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I'm not sure what point you're making. When people believed in a flat Earth, or geocentrism, or miracles, those things did not contradict empirical knowledge of the world. Since then, we have established empiricism as the most useful tool for examining the real world, and expanded the scope of human knowledge considerably. I'm not sure what about that you might take issue with.

The idea that consensus entails convergence to the truth, when the best thinkers have consensus on antithetical ideas in different time periods.

You're ignoring the different amounts of information those people had about their environments. Do you happen to have issues with a particular scientific consensus, is that where we're going here?

It might be that our modern thinkers are missing the forest for the trees because they are overwhelmed with information about their environment.

I don't have any issue with the current consensus, it just seems incorrect reasoning to say consensus is convergence to truth. Why isn't consensus just groupthink, a notoriously bad way to arrive at the truth?

The current consensus is the closest that science gets to "truth". Depending on your definition of "groupthink" (which seems like a deliberately pejorative term), either that describes most categories of knowledge, or we can suggest that the difference is that there is a rigorous methodology and system of verification for these beliefs.

Consensus does not have the best track record in science. Much better is the actual evidence and experimentation instead of what people who call themselves "scientists" think about the evidence.

Consensus is the track record of science. Observations are not theories.

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