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Comment by yawboakye | Hacker News Reader

It's a sad sign of the times that "scientific consensus" doesn't sound crazy anymore. It was scientific consensus that the Catholic church based on to sentence Galileo. He was a lone dissenting voice. A bit of history for you. And this is besides the fact that true scientists have never sought consensus/peer-review. I'll stand by as you come up with non-modern, paper-churning, publish-or-perish examples of great scientists famous (or great) for work or theory that was accepted by means of consensus.

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There's no Catholic Church prosecuting those who defy the official scientific position today. Galileo was not a lone dissenting voice - he was a proponent of Copernicanism, which he overstated the accuracy of his evidence for, feuding with the Church about whether he was overstating, and getting himself in terrible trouble with the Church. Once Kepler's models were confirmed with observations after Galileo with better telescopes the Church accepted. Later Enlightenment thinkers built a martyr myth around Galileo, and today the nature of his conflict with the Church is an ahistorical picture painted by later hagiographies of Galileo

This is a story that does not apply to our times. There've been many regular scientific revolutions even in the last few decades, the Church hasn't persecuted scientists, and the modern scientific consensus has followed with the revolutions. Whether it's the matter of the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, the revolutions in molecular biology, revolutions in astronomy, or other areas where advances are regular, those outliers actually advancing science have only briefly been ahead of consensus in the real world, but most outliers are cranks, and only those with an expert training in a discipline are likely to be able to identify real advances over crank science. The Galileo model of believing outliers virtually always leaves you in the wrong unless you are a domain-specific expert on the topic.

Look at using MRNA as a medical treatment as another example of a recent revolution, one that's now available in a safe, effective vaccine form.

On scientific consensus delivering the goods, here you seem to have it backwards (or our experiences of how science is conducted differs fundamentally). To my knowledge, one person and one experiment (usually, except where the product is purely mathematical) is enough to propose a new theory (but also to refute an existing one). If a debunked theory was supported by scientific consensus (ie theory wasn't standing on its own), what happens to the consensus it merited? and the so-called scientists who "voted?" Or perhaps the scientific consensus was just paperweight?

Scientific consensus provides a means for bad science/scientists to escape ostracism (I use this with the full intensity of its definitions). Because it provides a thick and opaque veil behind which the clergy (all scientists) instructs the laity (the rest of us). Individual scientists no longer stand and fall on their own. So call them cranks if you want but the individuals standing on the banks of the "scientific consensus" stream are arguably the closest we have to 16th and 17th century scientists tinkering away in their private labs, making discoveries that continue to bear their names.

Now, to a philosophy of science I subscribe to: Popper's Falsifiability Test. An undercurrent (probably prominent, even) theme is this: new confirmatory experiments add nothing new if they don't deviate materially from the original experiment. Following this, the whole enterprise of scientific consensus stands on shaky grounds since it adds nothing. It transforms science into a faith-based exercise (akin to bishops at a synod throwing their weights behind certain theories and declaring other bishops as cranks/heretics). This I do not accept.

>To my knowledge, one person and one experiment (usually, except where the product is purely mathematical) is enough to propose a new theory (but also to refute an existing one).

To my knowledge theories proposed that way in modern science aren't taken seriously and in our present time are not the norm for any recent major scientific discoveries or research. Those days are long past. New science is done in expensive labs with very expensive equipment and gets funded by grants. The Alvarez Hypothesis was possible because of cutting edge nuclear science that could identify the iridium. LIGO, and every space science and astronomical discovery are driven by really expensive ever growing scopes. In astronomy, chem, physics, molecular biology, paleontology, et al today you'll need an expensive lab and very large grants to do cutting edge work. At this point we're building colliders many kilometers in length. Modern Science is a product of well funded labs with staffing and equipment funded largely by research grants. There are cases in domains like macrobiology where individuals could do field work and find a new species, but the domains where the individual scientist is doing meaningful work are dwindling to none, and you should update your model of how modern science actually operates and is funded, it's interesting.

This isn't an argument in favor of scientific consensus. There's no straight path between expensive, collaborative research/science and scientific consensus. If anything the units of science have moved from individuals to teams acting as a body. But this isn't scientific consensus.

I'll try to answer in two parts. First you seem to have missed the point that (1) the Church was no (or rather accidental) arbiter of science—they largely deferred to the prevailing consensus. Thus in the conflict with Galileo, they were upholding a status quo which itself was upheld on the foundation of "many scientists believe that …" ie scientific consensus. You have a point if you say that Galileo wasn't a lone dissenting voice but then you'd have to explain what it was exactly that silenced Rene Descartes from publishing (as he confessed). He self-censored out of fear of contradicting the Church's position. If you bear in mind that the Church conducted no scientific experiments, Descartes essentially wasn't comfortable going up against the consensus.

The Church did hold the consensus opinion, and accepted the minority opinion, Copernicanism, as a hypothesis. At that time, the epicycic systems made better predictions than Heliocentrism with round orbits. Kepler's later elliptical models did fit and won out after Galileo's day. Also, while Galileo presented some compelling evidence from astronomical observations, he was the only one able to make them, which made his claims difficult to confirm. He stated that Copernicanism was not a hypothesis, the Church tried to get him to walk that back, but Galileo bitterly feuded with an initially sympathetic, but ultimately hostile Pope Urban VIII enough to get himself in trouble. He was persecuted for defying the pope, the science was only a proximate cause to the root cause of his problem which was that he was rude to the pope.

That points to a bad system, but one that has nothing to do with the modern world we live in, and which if applied by analogy will fit so poorly as to be a bad analogy.

Also the Church conducted scientific experiments regularly, since a number of priests through the ages were scientists, and it was a result of priests taking observations in later, better telescopes that updated the Church's position on heliocentrism.

We don't disagree on all the factors leading up to Galileo's prosecution. But we should be careful judging why he was rude to the establishment. AFAIK it had all to do with the orthodoxy, not personal ongoing grudge. It's the same visceral rejection we have for obviously wrong/broken processes. The papacy around this time was in the throes of more urgent & existential problems, and so reaching for the huge mallet to kill Galileo once and for all made the most sense. Scientific consensus was that hammer.

That aside, individual priest carried out their experiments, not in the name of the Church. The Church had already leaned towards scholarship by this time (post-Bologna) and being the dominant component of all European cultures, it only made sense that it would attract people with interests in science and experiments. (By the time we had scientist-priests people didn't know why they were Christians, to begin with.) This is discounting roles in Church or its bodies—usually monasteries—that required a vow to dumbness.

> By the time we had scientist-priests people didn't know why they were Christians, to begin with.

What do you mean?

Christianity had become culture.

You mean ubiquitous? So? That's a non-sequitur.

I don't mean ubiquitous. I know what ubiquitous means. Latin wasn't ubiquitous in Rome. A thing of culture isn't ubiquitous. If anything it was transparent. Perhaps you should read about the era under observation before attempting to summarise/reinterpret?

Perhaps you should attempt to substantiate your nonsensical claim?

Perhaps you need a dictionary?

I don't. Perhaps you do? Are you unable to substantiate your nonsensical claim?

Call it the church of Google(Faang?) if you will. They have real power over peoples lives and livelihoods. The church of Faang has a nice ring to it.

Google/FAANG have no real point of control anywhere in the process of how the sciences operate. Scientists publish in journals, while social media, search, et al. are handy but not something that guides their research or their consensus.

The real gatekeeping comes in what research gets grants and funding, but if you look into what's happening there, it's not comparable to the Church proscribing things - it mostly means that the DoD, petrochem, and a few industries have outsized influence on what research is done.

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