> Also, consensus is just a convergence of opinions and may be the result of thinking inside a box, groupthink, or subjectivity.
Consensus implies that many different theories have been banged together, and all the weak ones broke. It also implies that there is some objective evidence that is the basis of the consensus. It is more than just "opinion".
> History is replete with examples of consensuses that were entirely and even dangerously wrong
But this is precisely how science is supposed to work - it is a process of asymptotically the "Truth", and it gets closer at every pass.
So, by definition, past consensus will look "silly", given what we know now. Example, germs. Medicine refused to believe they existed. Lots of people died. Conversely "Phlogiston" was thought in the 1700s to be the "fiery element" contained in wood when it burned. When Priestley showed that combustion added something to the combusted material, it was then found that oxygen was crucial to burning, and "oxidation" became a thing, getting what we now call "chemistry" a jump start. But these only seem silly now due to the inherent clarity of hindsight. The process is to make the best you can of what evidence you HAVE NOW, and they did that. We do that now. It is all we can do.
> and if I had to guess, I'd say most of the consensuses currently in vogue are partly or completely unsupported by evidence.
An example? My personal view is that I am overwhelmed with a unending flood of new data in the miniscule, obscure cul-de-sac branch of science where I toil. I buy 10 2GB drives at a time from Costco when they go on sale, tear the case and the USB interface off them, and plug their SATA ports into my RAID array, which current totals 37 TB of data, each bit saved twice, so 74 TB actually consumed so far. And it is all just neutrinos data. People spend their entire careers coming up with better ways of searching data for patterns, as no one can even comprehend all the data. Genetics is the absolute worst at chewing up storage - the masses of data they have to bench-press are stupefying.
> If we seek the truth, we have to sort though and reconcile all the information available.
I don't think we can - we can compare data if it is similar enough (and from similar detection equipment), but many data sets are so "apples and oranges", we can't really reconcile one with the other until we have a better handle on the exact underlying mechanism. But once we DO have a handle on the underlying mechanism, we can build much sharper tools, and get much better data, so the older datasets become "trash" at that point, rather like everyone's notebooks back when "N-Rays" were all the rage - no on cares about that stuff, its actually more embarrassing to the heirs of those researchers than my parents' photos of me in my high school soccer and football (kicker) uniforms.
Bees are a little easier, in that we have a set of polaroid snapshots of what the bees actually did when subjected to x,y,z. The only problem is that we don't have enough photos from enough angles, and we aren't really sure if the bees were also subjected to q and r, in addition. So the datasets are not large at all, but comparing two to each other is almost impossible.
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