Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonunivgrad | Hacker News Reader

Scientific consensus is often wrong. Science advances one funeral at a time. Most “scientists” are conformists looking for their next grant. Outside of the tenured professor elite, most of them are looking for the next job. And the tenured are just one step higher on the pyramid, motivated by prestige and admiration, not pure motives. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s called being human. But don’t put too much stock in consensus, because many of the great breakthroughs have been ignored and ridiculed before finally being accepted.

View on HN

While it's fun to criticize science this way, this line of criticism misses an important fact: namely that open scientific inquiry has been one of the most successful enterprises in the history of humanity.

In a period of a few hundred years we've gone from believing that there were a few basic elements and that the sun revolves around the earth, to understanding the deep nature of particle physics and the structure of the Universe. We turned a basic understanding of chemistry into an understanding of subatomic particles, and the ability to create entirely new elements.

We did all of this through a process of open and skeptical inquiry, which has been remarkably consistent in its ability to tear down unsupportable theories. The reason the Kuhnian critique exists is not because the scientific process failed, it's because the process worked but just took longer than people expected it to because people are human and imperfect. And the speed of scientific advances over the past decades has been higher than at any point in human existence.

The reason the term "scientific consensus" exists is because most fields are vastly too complex for a single human being to be able to evaluate the totality of the evidence by themselves, at least in a reliable way. So the process is necessarily decentralized and broken up among many experts, who share their opinions. This isn't some popularity contest that you should ignore, it's a critically necessary task that has to be performed in order to digest the research contributions of any field, and make progress on solving open problems.

You're absolutely right to point out that consensus evaluation can malfunction sometimes. You'd be equally right to point out that sometimes experimenters produce invalid results. You're wrong that the answer to the former is to reflexively ignore the scientific consensus process, just as you'd be wrong to say that "don't do experiments anymore" is the correct response to a few experimental errors.

I'm responding to a comment that pooh-poohs serious consideration of alternative theories because they are contrary to the "scientific consensus." No one is going to pursue alternative theories if people don't believe in them. Some of us go against the grain, and that's a good thing. But you appear intent in making any true belief in unpopular alternatives into a sin. God forbid someone have a fringe belief! Fringe is BAD and consensus is GOOD. No independent thought. No room for dreamers and speculators and hunch-havers in your world. At most they can coldly look at evidence for alternative theories but never believe them (and resist all cognitive biases with superhuman ability). Have you even considered that fringe belief, and obsession and cognitive bias in its favor, is essential for progress too?

And your talk about the process and malfunctions is frankly comical. These are human beings, not machines. The average person would rather tell a socially sanctioned lie that led to the death of a million people rather than risk his next promotion.

The danger is that the apparent heights of "the piles" are badly skewed by bias: the evidence for what you favor naturally feels more solid, while evidence that contradicts it, or that it entirely fails to predict, proves very easy to ignore indefinitely.

We know that a conductor moving in a magnetic field produces a voltage, and knowing the strength of the field and the motion, we know absolutely the voltage produced. Applied to moons of Jupiter and Saturn, we expect forces much larger than surface gravity of the moons, and therefore material leaving the poles. But when we find it occurring, we talk about "volcanoes" and "geysers". We carefully ignore that the volcanoes drift about like rubber ducks in the bath. We carefully ignore collimation that would need for the geysers to be shot from perfect paraboloid-shaped nozzles. It is easiest to just agree not to talk about perfect collimation, because it doesn't lead in a comforting direction.

Socially, people like a consensus. A challenger needs "extraordinary" evidence to displace it. But Nature doesn't play favorites: any alternative that accounts for all the established evidence is on equal footing. A consensus in the absence of compelling evidence, or in the presence of incompatible evidence, should make us suspicious that the consensus is a product not of evidence, but of biased preference. Seeing evidence carefully ignored should make us suspicious.

I am not aware of carefully-ignored evidence in the case of galaxy rotational anomalies, but this paper may be rubbing our noses in examples.

Nature is just as happy for all the leading theories to be wrong, and for us not to have invented the right one yet. The consensus can be wrong without any of the alternatives being right. It is discomforting to find yourself wrong, but science isn't about comfort.

If this is some electrical universe support, I think that's a good example of why it's important to know and understand the scientific consensus.

There are all sorts of minor details that can be matched to all sorts of fine theories, but there is almost always overwhelming evidence in other places that contradicts them. Trying to reinvent physics from the ground up by picking a few details is a fool's errand.

In particular, EU can't explain gravitational lensing, it can't explain the equality of gravitational mass and inertial mass, and these are just some of the most obvious.

Gravitational lensing??? Inertial mass??? Are Jovian moons supposed to be involved in that now? What are you talking about?

I'm saying that, even if it were possible for the electrical force to explain the motion of some moon, it still can't explain other things that gravity can, and I gave two examples of phenomena that general relativity explains that en electrical universe doesn't.

But perhaps I misinterpreted your post. I took it initially to mean that you believe electrical interactions to be a better explanation than gravity for the movement of those moons - a theory that actually exists out there, called 'Electrical Universe'.

If instead you simply meant something much more specific, that there are electrical interactions that could explain mass ejections seen on these moons better than some geological explanations, then I apologize for my tangent.

Apology welcome.

The point was a specific example of evidence (collimated fluid motion) not consistent with descriptions of the cause of the motion ("geysers") but avoided as a consequence of discomfort with its implications.

Your comments illustrated the phenomenon with impressive clarity: wholly avoiding mention of anything even peripherally relevant, while promoting prejudicial distractions.

The counterweight to this is that there's an enormous prestige benefit for any scientist who conclusively overturns the established scientific consensus. This is why Einstein became so famous in his lifetime: not just because he had some elegant theories, but because he had theories that unambiguously matched the experimental evidence (and even offered new predictions) in ways the previous scientific consensus could not. And even though a few skeptics tried to resist his ideas, the scientific consensus worked in exactly the ways we'd expect it to as the evidence came in.

I have no idea what the situation is with current theories on the motion of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. I'm guessing you also have an incomplete picture of the evidence, but you've got an alternative pet theory that explains some inconsistencies in the consensus theory. I'm also guessing your theory isn't a slam dunk, i.e., that there's good evidence against it and/or there's a distinct lack of evidence in favor of it. But I strongly suspect you're not going to present me with all of the negative evidence for your own theory in an HN comment: I would have to get the impressions of other people in the field in order to actually get a fair evaluation of the evidence. That's what scientific consensus is supposed to offer, and as imperfect as it is, it usually works better than trusting the opinions of a single enthusiast.

Motions of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn? Opinions of enthusiasts with pet theories? What are you talking about?

You illustrate my point better than I could ever explain.

Please try to explain.

ncmncm>>> ... Applied to moons of Jupiter and Saturn ... [implications that there is something scientists are missing about "material leaving the poles"]

matthewdgreen>> ... I have no idea what the situation is with current theories on the motion of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn....

ncmncm> Motions of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn? Opinions of enthusiasts with pet theories? What are you talking about?

It was pretty clear to me what @matthewdgreen was talking about.

Although clearly nothing about what I wrote.

He addressed exactly what you wrote.

(Unless you mean whatever your pet theory is about gravity or magmatism or whatever, and he addressed why that isn't worth discussing too).

You illustrate my point, as well, and so forcefully!

Electro-"magma"-tism has not been anybody's pet theory for going on 150 years.

Congratulations?

I think that perhaps you think people are paying a lot more attention to your theory than you think.

We are talking about scientific consensus, and you seem to be talking about something else.

You have no faint idea what you are talking about. I don't have any "theory".

Why do you reply to things that you cannot even bring yourself to take the time to read and comprehend? Who do you imagine you are fooling?

Scientific consensus is rarely wrong.

There have been 3 major cases in the 20th century that I'm aware of where well-established theories turned out to be wrong.

1) Plate tectonics (dismissed until 1962)

2) The Bohr model of the atom, confirmed by the colours of light absorbed and emitted by ionised helium - which turned out to be wrong

3) The Sommerfeld extension of Bohr's model.

Both (2) and (3) were thought to be correct because they gave predictions correct to 4 decimal places. This turned out to be a co-incidence(!!) and their theories turned out to be wrong and replaced by Dirac's model.

Given the amount of science done in the 20th century, I think that's a pretty good record.

> Scientific consensus is often wrong.

Often wrong, sure - but still right in the large majority of cases.

The most insightful comment is buried at the bottom of the list. Two kinds of people in this world, those who think truth lies where the crowd is and those who think it's where the crowd isn't. The conformists won't see the blindingly obvious until it knocks them over. Unfortunately the genes that make us good for a farming society make us a little sheep like ourselves. Here's to the hunters who've struggled through this far into the age of the farmer! cheers!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com