Comment by davebrown10 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davebrown10 | Hacker News Reader

There is no such thing as scientific consensus. In a 2003 lecture at the California Institute of Technology Michael Crichton said, "Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. 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. What is relevant is reproducible results. 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. Period." https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/michael-crichton-explains-why...

I hate this Crichton quote so much. It gets thrown around all the time and no one thinks about how demonstrably false it is. Science obviously has plenty to do with consensus.

When an evolutionary scientist publishes a paper, do they have to reference or recapitulate the theory of evolution? No, because that position is scientific consensus. Ditto for the hypothesis that smoking increases cancer risk.

Consensus doesn’t mean “impossible to change”, it just means it is generally agreed upon. If some evidence about smoking and cancer comes out down the line, the consensus can change. It’s still the consensus, though.

> I hate this Crichton quote so much.

You seem to hate lots of things and this subject makes you desperate to call yourself a specialist. There are 3 days you have been desperately trying to shutdown discussions in this thread. What is your problem?

In what way am I shutting down discussion? I’m just participating in it. There’s a great deal of misinformation on this thread that could lead people to make lifestyle decisions that would put them at risk. Don’t see why there’d be an issue in discussing the evidence behind this misinformation so people can come to their own, hopefully informed, decision instead of a misinformed one.

I’m not interested in poor attempts at mind reading (“this subject makes you desperate to call yourself a specialist”) but I’m happy to discuss the evidence on this subject if you’d like.

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