re: Was Demar Hamlin really at the Bills v Bengals game?

quote:

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I don't see the majority creating the consensus as untrustworthy because I listen to industry sources, I see them as untrustworthy because several of their colleagues, who have zero upside to stepping out of the groupthink, have done so. And when they've done so they've told us that what goes on behind the curtain is exactly what we think it is, and any theories and the people who propose the theories that don't agree with Al Gore are shunned. If you want research dollars and to be accepted, you start with the conclusion and "research" reasons to support it.

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That, like the evidence in the Demar controversy in this thread, is ambiguous. People end up differently weighing evidence like earnest dissenting voices within a field. Consider any well-established scientific theory you think of that's well-supported, and then ask if there are dissenting voices in that field who have been frustrated at having been unsuccessful in getting research funded to investigate their preferred theories. There probably are. Does this justify choosing dissenters over controversies in every case? If not, how else are we choose?

A lot of what seems to go on "behind the curtain" is distorted by a similar process of rational polarization that's going on this thread about ambiguous evidence about a person's appearance at a football game. The 2009 East Anglia "Climategate" controversy involved hacked emails released and then, depending on who you believe, discuss either a conspiracy to manufacture evidence about climate research or are benign discussions of ordinary scientific work like peer review.

Once you get on a side of a public controversy, you tend to scrutinize the weaknesses of the opponents' position much more than your own and usually end up getting more dogmatic about it. Science's own social-epistemic processes, when they're working right, over time keep this polarization from happening and if you can find an accurate signal of the right structure of the social-epistemics then you can have a more objective sense whether a particular consensus is reliable or whether you might be better served to shop for dissenting ideas.