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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (25678)	8/1/2006 10:35:55 AM
From: TimF	Respond to of 541582

I don't think the consensus should just be dismissed or considered unimportant. I agree that absent evidence to the contrary a strong majority view backed up by experiment and observation deserves respect. Saying the view or theory deserves respect isn't an invalid appeal to authority. Asserting it must be right because a majority of scientists support it is. I don't think the article is asserting that a solid majority view does not deserve respect, and even if it does, I don't. It seems to me the article is about a problem where a current consensus or even the search for consensus can lock in ideas. The political process can distort the scientific process. This consensus effect can happen in science but fortunately there are other factors that can break up the consensus. New experimental results or observations can be replicated and when replicated are hard to ignore. Other fields don't have this type of check, or have it to a lesser degree, so I think this problem is much less severe in science than it is in many other fields. OTOH the problem still does exist, and should be recognized. Politics doesn't just mean decisions involving government. You can for example have "office politics". The politics I was talking about above is more academic politics and political factors within science, not normal national politics. National politics can have an effect as well, but it probably happens much less often. However on some issues national politics does have an effect. (But I'm not sure that this has anything to do with the consensus effect any more, so to an extent I'm changing the topic.) One effect is what get researched. I think that is a totally reasonable effect. Its not unreasonable that politics gets involved in what subjects get researched, at least when the amount of money involved is enormous. OTOH if the political factor gets too large it can cause problems. Another problem is when political views distort the actual research. I don't think this happens very often, but it can happen. A more common issue is that political views spin how the results are presented to the public, or what recommendations are made on the issue including recommendations by scientists. If a strong consensus of scientists is that X is happening, and X is something potentially important than that consensus should be treated seriously. If however a group of scientists says that X is happening, and so the government should institute policy Y and massive program Z, that recommendation is somewhat less likely to deserve any special respect. Its less likely to be a real consensus. Its more likely to be influenced by the political opinions of the scientists and its more likely to involve areas outside the scientists special expertise. People often imply or even directly state that we should follow such recommendations based on the authority of the scientist (at least if they happen to agree with the scientist). That truly is an invalid appeal to authority.