Just A Very Short Unplanned Sunday 'Post-let' (It's Raining Outside)
"Consilience", yes -- "consensus" is too often nothing but the puffery of just one herd, and leaves too much out of the whole matter under consideration
John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist who used to hang out with the two speculative, mentally wild-haired scientists, Harpending and Cochran, published this piece today — https://johnhawks.net/weblog/consilience-convergence-and -consensus/. An excerpt from this blog post:
Michael Ruse noted Charles Darwin's work as a hallmark of the consilience approach. Darwin brought together evidence from entirely different fields of inquiry: animal and plant breeding, geology, natural history, biogeography, sociology, and many others. He had a remarkable ability to answer questions in one field by examining data in another field entirely. The ability to bring together observations that seem disconnected from each other, explain all of them with one unifying explanation is a powerful mode of scientific thinking.
Consilience of evidence also helps to answer criticism that scientists are closing off debate by excluding ideas that do not fit within their disciplinary boundaries. Where “convergence of evidence” may seem inward-facing, confined to a single research tradition, consilience is explicitly outward-reaching. It requires translation and integration across disciplinary boundaries and sometimes even across different ways of knowing.
The public asks more of science than scientists often ask of their own fields. That may seem unreasonable. But I think scientists can answer the call to expect more in their work, to communicate more effectively to more people, and to be transparent about what they know and don't know. It's not the process of “vetting and validating” that accomplishes these goals; it's the transparency, replicability, and openness that makes it possible for anyone to evaluate the work.
By the way, for those unfamiliar with the term, “puffery”, see this wikipedia entry for explanation.
Hi Larry, regarding consilience, I think you would enjoy the chapter on genius from renowned scientist Hans Eysenck's autobiography, who delves into similar material (he also has a separate book dedicated to the topic which I have not yet read, although I own it). Eysenck is little known today, but at the time of his death he was the most frequently cited living psychologist in peer-reviewed scientific journal literature. What I like about him is that he was willing to research and discuss low-status, derided topics like human biodiversity (i.e. differences in race) and astrology, which I had covered previously in a post, and which created a lot of problems and blowback for him. I appreciated his courage to publicly engage in unauthorized topics, even though he was peak establishment.
The chapter starts on page 286 of the following link: https://hanseysenck.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Rebel-with-a-cause-the-autobiography-of-Hans-Eysenck.pdf