Opinion
Consensus is, as the saying goes, everyone agreeing on something that none of them really believe. Which is why consensus can too often lead to appallingly bad decision-making. It was the consensus of the Bush cabinet, for instance, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that the violent tribes of Afghanistan were just itching for some liberal democracy and progressive rainbow parades.
A witch-burning mob is also a consensus. Religion is a consensus – albeit a different consensus in different times in different parts of the world […]
Indeed there is a consensus among rainbow-haired teachers that biological gender is a construct and any attempt to enforce a binary gender ideology on students is – like – literally a form of slavery perpetrated by the Colonial patriarchy.
Even the remarkable analytical tools developed during the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, ways of thinking designed to cut through the fog of consensus are falling victim to it.
Peer review is based on the concept of a slightly tyrannical consensus amongst self-appointed experts. Instead of assigning value to the arguments inside a scientific document and whether or not those are true, peer review has devolved into a room full of faceless nodding heads that are hoping if someone nods back at them, they will have access to a pile of grant money. The harder they nod, the more money they get.
This kind of system is deeply flawed.
But a boon for careerists and intellectual bullies.
The collapse of peer review has been a more-or-less open secret in the scientific community for years. Yet no one does a damn thing about it. Even when mavericks deliberately show up how broken it is.
The failure of peer review has been suspected for a long time, given how much junk science is blindly okayed and later debunked.
The rest of the world had a chance to laugh at the absurdity when an academic hoax conducted by three scholars submitted 20 fake papers. These were the most click-baity topics imaginable that set out to reach ridiculous conclusions. Think – academic trolling.
If peer review was a system that valued truth, the stunt would never have worked. But it did.
By the time the hoaxers pulled their experiment, they had seven articles accepted by serious peer-review journals in the area of gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies.
It was simply a rinse-and-repeat of the Alan Sokal hoax. That didn’t change a thing, either.
More pointedly, it wasn’t the scientific community who spotted the obvious hoax. Just as climate science papers like Gergis et al (2012) were only rejected and withdrawn from publication when a blogger pointed out their obvious flaws, it took journalists at the Wall Street Journal to notice the obvious: the supposed authors didn’t exist and papers like Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon were obviously just plain ludicrous.
The hoaxers had a serious point – and that is, in the post-modernist world of so-called ‘science’, conclusions are being driven by the consensus of activism and political theory rather than reality. Worse than that – truth is actively rejected if it happens to interfere with activist thinking or hurts the fragile feelings of those who came up with the stupid ideas.
If you think the “hard” sciences would be immune, think again.
The United Nations Secretary-General doesn’t stand up out of nowhere and indulge in an unhinged rant about ‘global boiling’. His speech is empowered by the failure of science and the establishment of a tyrannical consensus against truth funded by corporate and political interests.
Not to mention egged on by the media.
The media is definitely having a bit of a love affair with science and, in the process, the media is radicalising science into a more theatrical, ridiculous, and saleable item.
Now, I am not saying that the media created the problem of consensus science – but boy are they happy to cheer it on.
As are the political class.
And, of course, there’s no shortage of chancers, spivs and media tarts in usually the lower ranks of science who are at least savvy enough to clue that jumping on the consensus bandwagon can be a shortcut to the sort of attention they desperately crave, but are unlikely to ever achieve in the lab.
We need to have a new Enlightenment. The press. The scientific community. Our political class. And most importantly – you – the people […]
Our consensus should be fact over fantasy.
Freedom over tyranny.
Spectator Australia
I dunno, sounds like hate speech. Some phobia or other, without a doubt.