by Silviu Costinescu

Most (if not all) ground-breaking discoveries came from people who defied consensus, otherwise you would still spray DDT on kids and have nurses selling you cigarettes to smoke in hospital rooms. Consensus is the ground in “ground-breaking”.
Scientific consensus is a logical fallacy that you need to avoid in order to achieve science.

Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

— Michael Crichton.

The scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming is likely to have passed 99%, according to the lead author of the most authoritative study on the subject, and could rise further after separate research that clears up some of the remaining doubts.

The Guardian

Is your info on issues like “global warming” coming from people who can believe 99% consensus is possible among scientists (or any large groups of people), and that’s a good thing for science?
Are all arguments for global warming as imbecile as consensus = truth?
As fake as 99% consensus? That would make Stalin proud…
You know the only other “thing” on the planet that gets 99% consensus? Kim Jong Un.
As far as I dug, these have been the only two methods for reaching 99% consensus in all human experience:
1. Tyrannically silencing anyone who disagrees.
2. Polling an insignificantly small group that you control.

What is the difference between how the global warming “consensus” is obtained and how Kim obtains his?
You can’t even poll 100% of scientists, you can’t merely determine accurately who are all the people who deserve to be polled, are you kidding yourself?!!
The only claim that has obtained 99% consensus in science so far appears to be “we have to please our financiers!”. Do you know who finances this stuff?

Besides, bandwagoning and appealing to authority are not arguments, they are basic logical fallacies.
If you can’t spot obvious traps like these, you have no hope or chance to avoid being duped by people who have a long experience in trapping the ignoramus.

Functional literates be like:

“I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. (…)
Let’s be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.” –
Michael Crichton

“Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory.” – Stephen Hawking

“It does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you there are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period.” – Richard Feynman

Braindead NPCs be like: “Meh, check these presstitutes out!”

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! My articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them