Consensus and conspiracy

Time, I think, to talk about scientific consensus. It is a tricky beast – sometimes friend, sometimes foe.

In scientific circles, genuine consensus – that is to say a position generally agreed upon by the majority of experts within a given discipline – is a powerful thing indeed.

That doesn't mean for a moment that it can’t be wrong. New evidence comes to the fore. When that happens sceptical minds evaluate the evidence, debate what it might mean and how best to interrogate it and over time form a new consensus. Or maybe not – many open-ended questions remain in science. And that is incredibly exciting. It is science collectively saying ‘we don’t know, but we’ll try and find the evidence to allow us to find out’.

So why might consensus be a bad thing? Well – most of the time it isn’t, this is science functioning exactly as it should. But there are pitfalls which we need to acknowledge. For example, back in 2016 a study emerged from the US National Bureau of Economic Research, which set out to test Physicist Max Planck’s witticism that ‘science advances one funeral at a time’. Senior scientific figures, in other words, tend to overly dominate a field and rejection of ideas contrary to their own might hold undue prominence. The work did find some merit in the idea – something to note. But importantly the authors are quite clear that it is for subtle, complex reasons - what they call ‘Goliath’s shadow,’ which can discourage outsiders from ‘challenging a living luminary.’ Fair enough – scientists are human, vulnerable to all the foibles that influence any other group of people.

And yes flat Earthers… I’m looking at you. Unless you are over the horizon, in which case I literally can’t look at you. A fact you’d do well to acknowledge.

I mention all this not to question the basic power of empirical science, but because there is – perhaps always has been – a creeping tendency for some to hear the word ‘consensus’ as ‘conspiracy’. In its extreme, this tendancy can distort consensus in a haze of conspiratorial verve. A verve which can froth over into a belief that researchers are in the grip of scientism – a blind trust in science. And yes flat Earthers… I’m looking at you. Unless you are over the horizon, in which case I literally can’t look at you. A fact you’d do well to acknowledge.

Why pick on this ragtag bunch of conspiratorial nut bags? Well, they do seem to be in the ascendant. At the end of April they held what is, I think, their first convention in the UK. A Jury’s Inn in Birmingham was treated to three days (…three days? Really, what can there be to discuss?) of flat earth ‘theory’. Run by something called FECORE – they are peddling this stuff as genuine science, defining themselves as ‘field engineers researching Earth’. Good grief.

What is in this conspiracy, I’d like to know, for the supposed perpetrators? What would astrophysicists, NASA, ESA (… I shan’t go on) stand to gain by going to such great lengths to sustain this idea?

But we mustn't let these distracting cries of conspiracy stop us paying attention to the real reasons why we form scientific consensus.After all, being mindful of, and trying to correct, any potential pitfalls in our thinking or practice is what makes it science.

Phil Prime Editor, Laboratory News