Nov 18, 2021 11:17 PM
(This post was last modified: Nov 18, 2021 11:22 PM by C C.)
Manufacturing consensus: Science needs conformity — but not the kind it has right now
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicati...-consensus
INTRO: After having been told for over a year that there was a scientific consensus that Covid had a natural origin — and that any suggestion of a possible lab leak in Wuhan was tantamount to a xenophobic conspiracy theory — it now appears that there is not, and never was, such a consensus. And the lab-leak hypothesis, which once marked any publication discussing it as fringe, has become the subject of an official presidential investigation.
To be sure, the science on this matter is no more settled now than it was before. A report commissioned by President Biden, and released in August, found conflicting assessments from U.S. intelligence agencies about the pandemic’s origin. Many scientists still believe that the virus most likely emerged from human contact with some kind of animal host, and the past few months have not revealed any definitive new evidence to the contrary. What they have revealed is that scientific, political, and media elites have not been entirely forthcoming about the true state of the experts’ knowledge of — and the uncertainty surrounding — the origin of the virus. Some appear to have actively suppressed public scrutiny of the question. At this point, we may never be able to arrive at an answer. But if the lab-leak hypothesis does turn out to be true, this episode will have done more to damage the credibility of scientific experts than any other in recent memory.
Whatever the outcome — whether we learn that the virus jumped to humans from an animal, or that it accidentally escaped from a laboratory, or we remain in a state of ignorance — the lab-leak debacle may become a potent symbol of science’s crisis of legitimacy. The list of boondoggles that much of the public, rightly or wrongly, blames on “the experts” in general — from Vietnam to Iraq to 2008 — is long and growing. But the current crisis comes amid a global emergency in which medical and other scientific experts have played a role whose prominence in public life and intimacy in private life is unlike any we have seen.
What is worrisome about the lab-leak controversy therefore is not only that our public discussions and political decisions about Covid-19 may have been hampered by the experts’ mischaracterization of scientific knowledge. The long-term danger is that the experts themselves have helped to undermine public trust in scientific expertise and the institutions that depend on it, at a moment when such knowledge is more deeply intertwined with our social and political life than ever before.
To help us understand what went wrong, we need to ask again what “scientific consensus” really means, and how the experts got it so wrong in discussing Covid’s origins. One tempting response, particularly to those already primed to distrust elites, is to conclude that scientific consensus is inherently dangerous — little more than self-deluded group think, or a tool for manipulating the public. But that is the wrong conclusion to draw. Consensus, rightly understood, is a distinguishing feature of modern science, indispensable to its progress, and part of its well-earned authority in understanding the natural world — it deserves a defense.
What the lab-leak controversy shows is not the danger of scientific consensus per se so much as the danger — both to democratic discourse and to science itself — when the concept of consensus gets weaponized by those seeking to exploit the authority of science to stifle public debate.
The Galilean Myth. According to one influential view, consensus should play no role in science. This is because, so the argument goes, science is fundamentally about questioning orthodoxy and elite beliefs, basing knowledge instead on evidence that is equally available to all. At the moment when science becomes consensus, it ceases to be science.
This view can be traced to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, with precursors among some of modern science’s founders, notably René Descartes. In the eighteenth century, it was extended and embellished by Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, who sought to use science to overthrow what they saw as the superstitious dogmas of the past. This view of science has since been kept alive by influential philosophical accounts no less than popular portrayals of renegade scientists speaking truth to power. We see its passionate democratic ideal in Mark Twain, who heaped scorn on the “breeds of Experts that sit around and get up the Consensuses and squelch the new things as fast as they come from the hands of the plodders, the searchers, the inspired dreamers, the Pasteurs that come bearing pearls to scatter in the Consensus sty.”
In our own time, the “anti-consensus” view of science gets deployed alternately by progressives and conservatives when marshalling science to attack the views of their opponents. It has acquired a particular allure during the coronavirus crisis — especially for critics of the scientific establishment. To Covid skeptics, scientists brave enough to question mainstream views on masks, lockdowns, and vaccines are modern-day Galileos, counter-experts who claim the mantle of science by rejecting the consensus. At the same time, defenders of our government’s pandemic policies claim that Anthony Fauci is the real Galileo, boldly facing the onslaught of Republican politicians and an ignorant public.
But however influential, the characterization of science as fundamentally anti-consensus is largely a myth. Like all myths, it has its heroes, especially Galileo — who, having been forced by the Catholic Church to recant the Copernican theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun, is alleged to have muttered Eppur si muove! (“And yet it moves!”). And also like all myths, this one contains elements of truth.
Early modern science did break with tradition in many respects. It did so by rejecting particular scientific claims associated with medieval religion, such as the ancient geocentric model of the cosmos. Modern science also claimed autonomy from medieval religious and philosophical traditions broadly, developing into its own distinctive intellectual tradition. And, of course, scientists sometimes are and must be skeptical of received wisdom and question entrenched beliefs.
These are the aspects of modern science that get reflected — and exaggerated to the point of distortion — in popular portrayals of the lone scientific genius resisting the tyranny of consensus. The truth, however, is that while scientists may sometimes speak like Galileos, especially when they find themselves on the margins of scientific or political respectability, they rarely, if ever, act like the Galileo of myth, even when they are challenging prevailing scientific views... (MORE - details)
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicati...-consensus
INTRO: After having been told for over a year that there was a scientific consensus that Covid had a natural origin — and that any suggestion of a possible lab leak in Wuhan was tantamount to a xenophobic conspiracy theory — it now appears that there is not, and never was, such a consensus. And the lab-leak hypothesis, which once marked any publication discussing it as fringe, has become the subject of an official presidential investigation.
To be sure, the science on this matter is no more settled now than it was before. A report commissioned by President Biden, and released in August, found conflicting assessments from U.S. intelligence agencies about the pandemic’s origin. Many scientists still believe that the virus most likely emerged from human contact with some kind of animal host, and the past few months have not revealed any definitive new evidence to the contrary. What they have revealed is that scientific, political, and media elites have not been entirely forthcoming about the true state of the experts’ knowledge of — and the uncertainty surrounding — the origin of the virus. Some appear to have actively suppressed public scrutiny of the question. At this point, we may never be able to arrive at an answer. But if the lab-leak hypothesis does turn out to be true, this episode will have done more to damage the credibility of scientific experts than any other in recent memory.
Whatever the outcome — whether we learn that the virus jumped to humans from an animal, or that it accidentally escaped from a laboratory, or we remain in a state of ignorance — the lab-leak debacle may become a potent symbol of science’s crisis of legitimacy. The list of boondoggles that much of the public, rightly or wrongly, blames on “the experts” in general — from Vietnam to Iraq to 2008 — is long and growing. But the current crisis comes amid a global emergency in which medical and other scientific experts have played a role whose prominence in public life and intimacy in private life is unlike any we have seen.
What is worrisome about the lab-leak controversy therefore is not only that our public discussions and political decisions about Covid-19 may have been hampered by the experts’ mischaracterization of scientific knowledge. The long-term danger is that the experts themselves have helped to undermine public trust in scientific expertise and the institutions that depend on it, at a moment when such knowledge is more deeply intertwined with our social and political life than ever before.
To help us understand what went wrong, we need to ask again what “scientific consensus” really means, and how the experts got it so wrong in discussing Covid’s origins. One tempting response, particularly to those already primed to distrust elites, is to conclude that scientific consensus is inherently dangerous — little more than self-deluded group think, or a tool for manipulating the public. But that is the wrong conclusion to draw. Consensus, rightly understood, is a distinguishing feature of modern science, indispensable to its progress, and part of its well-earned authority in understanding the natural world — it deserves a defense.
What the lab-leak controversy shows is not the danger of scientific consensus per se so much as the danger — both to democratic discourse and to science itself — when the concept of consensus gets weaponized by those seeking to exploit the authority of science to stifle public debate.
The Galilean Myth. According to one influential view, consensus should play no role in science. This is because, so the argument goes, science is fundamentally about questioning orthodoxy and elite beliefs, basing knowledge instead on evidence that is equally available to all. At the moment when science becomes consensus, it ceases to be science.
This view can be traced to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, with precursors among some of modern science’s founders, notably René Descartes. In the eighteenth century, it was extended and embellished by Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, who sought to use science to overthrow what they saw as the superstitious dogmas of the past. This view of science has since been kept alive by influential philosophical accounts no less than popular portrayals of renegade scientists speaking truth to power. We see its passionate democratic ideal in Mark Twain, who heaped scorn on the “breeds of Experts that sit around and get up the Consensuses and squelch the new things as fast as they come from the hands of the plodders, the searchers, the inspired dreamers, the Pasteurs that come bearing pearls to scatter in the Consensus sty.”
In our own time, the “anti-consensus” view of science gets deployed alternately by progressives and conservatives when marshalling science to attack the views of their opponents. It has acquired a particular allure during the coronavirus crisis — especially for critics of the scientific establishment. To Covid skeptics, scientists brave enough to question mainstream views on masks, lockdowns, and vaccines are modern-day Galileos, counter-experts who claim the mantle of science by rejecting the consensus. At the same time, defenders of our government’s pandemic policies claim that Anthony Fauci is the real Galileo, boldly facing the onslaught of Republican politicians and an ignorant public.
But however influential, the characterization of science as fundamentally anti-consensus is largely a myth. Like all myths, it has its heroes, especially Galileo — who, having been forced by the Catholic Church to recant the Copernican theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun, is alleged to have muttered Eppur si muove! (“And yet it moves!”). And also like all myths, this one contains elements of truth.
Early modern science did break with tradition in many respects. It did so by rejecting particular scientific claims associated with medieval religion, such as the ancient geocentric model of the cosmos. Modern science also claimed autonomy from medieval religious and philosophical traditions broadly, developing into its own distinctive intellectual tradition. And, of course, scientists sometimes are and must be skeptical of received wisdom and question entrenched beliefs.
These are the aspects of modern science that get reflected — and exaggerated to the point of distortion — in popular portrayals of the lone scientific genius resisting the tyranny of consensus. The truth, however, is that while scientists may sometimes speak like Galileos, especially when they find themselves on the margins of scientific or political respectability, they rarely, if ever, act like the Galileo of myth, even when they are challenging prevailing scientific views... (MORE - details)