>the consensus is asserted, credible dissent is suppressed, the policy fails, and the accountability is lacking.
This system puts fraud into scientific records and puts fraudsters into important positions, whenever a school bigwig starts preaching like a megachurch pastor we start counting down the days until their thesis turns out to be plagiarized.
>“If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.” More than 300 years earlier, Galileo more directly noted the irrelevance of consensus, by writing “the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.”
Letting the spark of reason shine through the darkness of assumption is a large part of why life keeps getting better from century to century. If we revert to assumptions, we will stagnate or roll backwards.
>Once consensus is deemed “established” by enough credentialed people, the sociology of influential institutions and their leaders takes over from the epistemology of science. Funding flows toward research that supports or even builds upon the consensus, but not to research that challenges it.
And then schools become activism mills, if people said “research mills” you’d think it the system’s purpose was to cure cancer instead of turning cancer funding into political campaigns.
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>the consensus is asserted, credible dissent is suppressed, the policy fails, and the accountability is lacking.
This system puts fraud into scientific records and puts fraudsters into important positions, whenever a school bigwig starts preaching like a megachurch pastor we start counting down the days until their thesis turns out to be plagiarized.
>“If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.” More than 300 years earlier, Galileo more directly noted the irrelevance of consensus, by writing “the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.”
Letting the spark of reason shine through the darkness of assumption is a large part of why life keeps getting better from century to century. If we revert to assumptions, we will stagnate or roll backwards.
>Once consensus is deemed “established” by enough credentialed people, the sociology of influential institutions and their leaders takes over from the epistemology of science. Funding flows toward research that supports or even builds upon the consensus, but not to research that challenges it.
And then schools become activism mills, if people said “research mills” you’d think it the system’s purpose was to cure cancer instead of turning cancer funding into political campaigns.