Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well established scientific concensus. If you're referring to anything related to Covid there's no well-established scientific consensus it literally just happened around year and a half ago it's impossible to have scientific consensus. Even the most respected scientists are saying they don't know about a lot of things related to covid. also well-established scientific consensus is not an ideal goal post . Galileo wa…
"Well-established scientific consensus" may not be perfect, but may I challenge you to provide an alternative with a better track record? It generally takes in new information and self-corrects over time. As I mentioned to someone else in this threat, Issac Asimov's essay "The Relativity of Wrong" may be old but it's still very relevant today.
An expert may have a PhD and know 5000% more than you about a subject but compared to the amount of knowledge required to understand how the universe or any scientific subject works...their knowledge is smaller than a rounding error..and our current knowledge as a human race is too.
Experts are poking at the world just as much as the rest of us, they just have bigger sticks, and are wrong ALL the time. But being wrong is the first step to being right. Elon had the worlds most highly trained and advanced rocket scientists working for him at SpaceX and they still crashed a bunch of rockets. You get a second opinion even though medial doctors have many years of education, don't you?
The problem is not science or education, it's how humans understand truth.
I could be wearing a red and black flannel shirt and one expert would say the shirt is red and another expert say the shirt is black and both would be telling the truth, but neither is correct.
Now pretend that flannel shirt has trillions to infinite numbers of colors and you have science.
Scientific consensus is data with strong statistical significance that all scientists agree on. The shirt is clearly red! But it's only a small subset of data among infinite amounts of data in this world much of which we don't even know about and the human race probably never will. So while a scientific theory may be true, it may not be correct. And highly informed scientists can see just one part of the whole and claim it's the truth.
And it's hubris to claim otherwise, especially looking at how often scientific consensus has been on the wrong side of human history, with Mengele, Galileo, Labotomies, etc.
Thalidomide, the drug, would calm morning sickness and the scientific consensus was that it was a good drug from the limited amount of data they knew about at the time...until more data came in....and the scientific consensus changed on a dime.
The problem is humans have a desperate need to provide some sort of order to this absolute chaos we live in because the world is scary and we're going to die and people want immediate answers they can rely on to make sense of it all.
So they create narratives like religion, or scientific consensus, or political party and claim those are the one true answers and justify their success with the rain dance working or scientific data curing an illness or how cheap they made gas prices..ad infinitum.
Scientific consensus, religion, politics, are all merely single narratives to explain this insanely complex world.
And while all are important to listen to and can be very informative, they should only be SINGLE data points in your own critical thinking. There is no single source of truth. And there is no shortcut to the truth.
Anyone who claims to have the objective 'truth' in a world as infinitely complex as ours is a religion person, and if you follow them unskeptically you are an acolyte, and if you censor people who are questioning you, you fall into an inquisition type situation.