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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

The scientific consensus used to be that the sun revolved around the earth, and you were put under house arrest if you published anything contradicting that.

Then there was that scientific consensus that margarine was good for you and eggs caused heart attacks.

Or that scientific consensus that disease could be cured by draining the bad blood out of your body.

Or that scientific consensus that if you sailed west too far, you'd fall off the edge of the world.

Or my favorite scientific consensus that in order to ensure a good harvest, it was necessary to chop the hearts out of your enemies and offer it to the gods.

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Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant.

The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus.

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

Science relies heavily on a consensus of observations and a consensus on the analysis of those observations. Reproduction is creating aa consensus

Plenty of scientists have broken with consensus without a new consensus forming around their models.

"Scientists have consensus about X" is something science communicators say. It's about how easy it is to describe the evidence to laypeople than what the evidence is.

> The scientific consensus used to be that the sun revolved around the earth ...

Ever thought about why it took so long for this particular "scientific consensus" was reverted? Because geocentrism could explain the motions of planets pretty accurately, and the easiest actual evidence of heliocentrism was that apparent locations of stars should move very slightly following the motion of the Earth (i.e., parallax) - the effect was so small that the first measurement was made in 1838, about 200 years after Galileo's death. Until then, the apparent absence of parallax was a scientific evidence against heliocentrism.

The lesson to draw is that it's not sufficient to have its proponent put under house arrest in order for a new theory to be accepted by the scientific community. Your new theory has to first explain all the things explained by the existing theory, and then some more that can not be explained by the existing one.

I'll leave it to readers to conclude what that means in the context of global warming.

Honestly I'm depressed by the level of discourse here. Otherwise mostly intelligent people are basically resorting to "Well some groups of people have been wrong about various things before, which proves that this particular (unrelated) group of people can be wrong, so instead of addressing the problem they say we have, let's debate for the umpteenth time whether the problem is real, again."

It's a classical stalling tactic, and IMHO the only proper response is "Get out, adults are talking."

I'm sad you've entirely misunderstood my point. I thought it was obvious.

The point is, no matter how sure you are that you're right, you might still be wrong. If you suppress opposing viewpoints, you're also suppressing any evidence that you might be wrong.

There are also people who know they're wrong - they suppress dissent because the truth will remove the power they enjoy.

Nobody likes being wrong. It's soooo much easier to just suppress any hint of being wrong.

The only way we'll know the truth is to allow dissent. Suppression of dissent is what tyrants do.

> If you suppress opposing viewpoints, you're also suppressing any evidence that you might be wrong.

So what is your proposal? Twitter should continue spending their money on promoting something which may lead to millions of people dying? Or is it something else?

My viewpoint is that your reasoning is incredible naive, well into the area of stupidity.

To be fair, those models were overturned by other scientists publishing their findings. Not randos taking out billboards.

Check out what happened to Galileo when he published his findings. Want more? How about Lysenkoism? Or the rejection of "jewish science"?

None of which is relevant to a social media company restricting ads.

Galileo's problems weren't due to his findings and theories going against the current consensus. Galileo's problems were a combination of:

1. His heliocentric theory wasn't actually noticeably better at explaining observations than the current geocentric theories. Galileo, like the Church, believed in a universe intelligently designed by an all-powerful God, and he believed that said God would of course choose laws of physics that were mathematically beautiful and elegant. He had to hand wave away things that didn't fit with his notion of mathematically beautiful and elegant as optical illusions or observational error, which is not very convincing.

2. His ego. He was a celebrity who was frequently invited to hang out with the rich and powerful, which he loved.

3. He was an asshole. He was very intolerant of and rude to those he considered to be his rivals or his inferiors (and because of his big ego "inferiors" included pretty much everyone else).

4. He had a very poor sense of politics. He failed to realize or ignored that some of those rivals or inferiors that was a major asshole towards either were politically powerful or had better connections than he did to politically powerful people, and they could cause that power to be used to make his life miserable if he kept being a major asshole to them.

There's a great detailed look at the road to replacing geocentricism with heliocentricism here [1].

[1] http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...

Galileo observed the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter, which provided strong evidence that contradicted geocentric theories.

Those were problems for the Ptolemaic system, but were not a problem for Tychonic system. Tychonic cosmology had a stationary Earth with the Sun and Moon orbiting Earth, and the other planets orbiting the Sun.

In Galileo's time there really wasn't good evidence to pick between Copernicus and Tycho. The new evidence only knocked out Ptolemy. The debate between fans of Copernicus and fans of Tycho was still largely philosophical and religious.

> chop the hearts out

That's where we went off the rails. It was the livers we were supposed to offer up.

No wonder everything since then is so screwed.

Heck, scientific consensus used to be that airborne diseases were transmitted by droplets. Whoops.

The interesting thing about every single one of these examples is that consensus was able to change without anyone having to advertise on Twitter.

Genuine question: are airborne diseases not spread by droplets?

I always assumed that it was the water droplets that carried viruses and bacteria, rather than them just floating freely in dry air.

Excellent question!

The distinction here is between droplets and aerosol transmission. As I understand it, droplets are relatively large chunks of water (or whatever), and aerosols are particles in suspension in a gas. At the beginning of the pandemic, most scientific professionals assumed that COVID-19 was transmitted by droplets; the 6 foot distancing advice comes from that assumption, since droplets don't have much range.

(Which is not to say that increasing distance didn't help, but 6' wasn't a magic number.)

This article goes into useful depth on our new understanding: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd9149?url_ver=...

But it's different this time.

I don’t think there is any evidence against the last one.

Evidence against it is not needed. It needs evidence for it.

That’s much easier and less conclusive. The Catholic still confirms miracles and beatifies saints

These things you're listing happened before the scientific method was even developed

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