Science is a Government with No Human Representatives
Consensus is prized over debate because it is required by the media/state before giving power
I have a lot of titles for this post, and can’t pick between them. Here is another one:
AI - The New Fear Frontier for Scientific Pharaohs
Much of the human aspect of science, i.e. the foibles of science, seems to emerge spontaneously and unconsciously. For example: The fact that publication bias often leads “science” to report as truths whatever stories satisfy roughly the same consumer demand for a dopamine-rush that drives your TV news coverage is an unfortunate accident; it isn’t something anyone decided would be a good thing and sought to implement.
This doesn’t seem to be the case with modern (especially post-SARS-CoV-2) scientific manipulation of government policy via Declaration of Apocalyptic Prophesies.
Case in point, watch as Geoffrey Hinton and Andrew Ng casually outline the importance of establishing a consensus in AI-doom-porn, a field of thought they find currently too heterodox (clicking on the image will do nothing; the video is linked in the caption):
HINTON: We need the AI researchers to reach a consensus in much the same way as climate scientists have reached a consensus on climate change, because politicians and other decision-makers are going to be looking for technical opinions from the AI researchers, but if the AI researchers have all sorts of different opinions, then [politicians etc.] are going to be able to pick and choose whatever suits them.
In other words, if AI experts aren’t speaking in lockstep, then the emissaries whom polities send to represent them within the apparatus of the state (i.e., politicians) will be free to make decisions according to their own interests (which ostensibly align with those of their constituents). AI experts must achieve consensus so that they can clearly define what it is that politicians must do (about AI). Just as climate scientists use consensus to define what politicians must do (about all of human industry). And biologists use consensus to define what politicians must do (about zoonotic viruses, and all of human industry). And psychologists use consensus to, well, tell politicians what twitter activists and pharma money told them to tell politicians they must do (about medically experimenting on children).
There is a pattern here; the reason the human endeavor of science has become intolerant of dissent and free thought is because the secular state, whose public representatives are hostile toward the will of the public, is constantly hungry for pre-defined value sets that are disembodied from public debate and can be used to skirt responsibility for enacting the whims of elite consensus over whatever societies might actually want.
Scientists satisfy this hunger by issuing unanimous statements of what the defined value set in a given realm is; in so doing, they author new belief-sets in elite consensus (because elites believe in “science”).
By satisfying the condition that grants them client cult-priesthood status (having consensus), scientists and their respective field achieve essentially dictatorial powers, powers whose only limits are that regardless of conferring total sway over elite opinion, do not include making practical what is impossible — yet any given pre-defined belief-set frequently demands just that.
This limit, however, is hardly exonerative — even an outright dictatorship faces exactly the same limitations on policy. In fact, outright dictatorships might better respond to popular demand than the science-cult-dictatorships that prevail in the West, simply because it is ultimately understood that actors within the dictatorial state bear responsibility for the policies of the state, regardless of their de jure insulation from public accountability. This difference explains why China quickly yielded to citizen protests when lockdowns at last became too widespread; whereas the West’s alleged republics never conceded anything regarding SARS-CoV-2 in the face of outright protest, and only offered media shaming and legal censure of their own dissidents. In neither case does the public have a representative in the government, but in the case of outright dictatorship at least it has a patron.
Still, there is give and take, and the role of the scientists in the science-cult-dictatorship is not that of an omnipotent God-king (but, again, neither is it really such a case with God-kings).
Illustrative of these limits on scientific power is the distinction between our above examples, with climate scientists exemplifying a dominant dynamic and biologists and psychologists another, more subservient dynamic. In the latter case, biologists and psychologists, it is of course true that elite and even popular beliefs and desires are informally consulted by the cult-priesthood before issuing value-sets. Transgender ideology is not a creation of psychologists; and its takeover of the field and requisite reversal of the field’s consensus of reality has itself required suppression of dissidents; many if not most psychologists would probably have preferred freedom of thought rather than client status in service of an externally created and imposed ideology that serves elite power politics and moral fashion. As for biology (i.e. epidemiology, virology, etc.), the so-called Pandemic was from beginning to end a negotiation of elite will with popular will, as in the example of Fauci’s early reversal on mask recommendations. In these realms it is obvious that the latitude granted to scientists to author their own proclamations of reality (with value-sets that imply specific policies) is proscribed by not merely practical concerns, but the demands of believers and non-believers alike, and especially elite preferences.1
Yet the conduct of scientists even in these more nuanced interfaces with public sentiment still can never be considered forgivable; science can never be considered the victim of social dysfunction in this role, because having the role at all still depends on artificially synthesized consensus. If scientists would stop speaking in lockstep, they would stop being the authors (or ghost-authors) of political decisions, and politicians would have to find some other vehicle for satisfying elite preferences over non-elite preferences.
All that is required is more disagreement and debate on the fundamentals.
Does displacing animals from their habitats in the 21st Century substantially increase the risk of viral spill-over vs. all the centuries that preceded it, in which the same viral reservoirs were continually invaded — or are we simply measuring and noticing sporadic outbreaks more, thanks to more sensitive sequencing? That we are uniquely disturbing viral reservoirs today is a cornerstone premise of the Cult of Pandemic Apocalypses, and it is also pure dogma. It may be true; it doesn’t matter. The consensus matters.
Is the Antarctic losing ice or gaining it? It doesn’t matter, and usually isn’t measured, as revealed by a new paper finding overall gains in ice over recent decades by… actually measuring ice.2
Overall, the Antarctic ice shelf area has grown by 5305 km2since 2009, with 18 ice shelves retreating and 16 larger shelves growing in area. Our observations show that Antarctic ice shelves gained 661 Gt of ice mass over the past decade, whereas the steady-state approach would estimate substantial ice loss over the same period, demonstrating the importance of using time-variable calving flux observations to measure change.
Hat-tip to Stephan Sander-Faes of Die Fackel, who provides a thorough review and highlights the importance of observation over modeling:
Nor does truth matter when it comes to warning of the existential threat of AI, or even defining what AI can and can’t already do. Consensus is the “end in itself” — except the end, again, is influencing government policy. To return to Hinton’s comments, now at 2:05 of the video:
HINTON: A second point is that I think it’s fairly urgent for the researchers to come to a consensus about whether these big chatbots like GPT-4 or [Google’s] Bard actually understand what they’re saying. There’s clearly some people who believe they do and some people believe they’re just stochastic parrots. And, so long as we have those differences, we’re not going to be able to come to a consensus about dangers. And, so I think it’s sort of urgent for the research teams to address this issue of whether they understand or not.
“Just pick an answer,” Hinton is essentially stating — stop debating; achieve dogma. This despite the fact that humans have yet to fully comprehend their own consciousness, and may never do so; I’m sure the question regarding chatbots can be resolved in a simple negotiation. Just get the different teams into a meeting room to trade concessions and be done with it.
Post-script: Limits and Ironies
Naturally, matters are not in fact as simplistic as a tossed-off, medium-length blog post would portray.
Arguing against hyper-consensus as an intentional and nefarious aggrandizement of state and media resources by scientists, is the fact that Western scientists especially have long been hostile toward whatever ideas are heterodox vs. the prevailing world-view. Hyper-consensus does not immediately cease when the Church stops decreeing reality, become a forgotten problem for hundreds of years, only to spontaneously erupt when anxiety over global warming gains outsized political cachet in the 1990s.
Nor is contemporary hyper-consensus necessarily more complete than in the interregnum of dogma of the Enlightenment to Atomic age. The new Antarctica ice study was funded by the British Natural Environment Research Council and indirectly supported by NASA, and has been published (rather than being cradle-killed in peer review). Perhaps a sign that, as with Bretz’s proposal of the Missoula floods, we only have forty years to go before dissent wins over the consensus.
Modern hyper-consensus is further exaggerated by the media’s tendency to report from the abstract rather than the discussion portion of scientific literature, the former prone to excessive claims of certainty over previous and current findings (though this itself likely feeds into the motivation for “putting on a show” in the abstract, as with the incantation of the “safe and effective” dogma whenever vaccines are mentioned).
A final nuance to mention is the ironic fact that this entire dynamic — science operating as a clearing-house of Cult Priesthoods to legitimize an elite-serving media/state — may be disrupted and dismantled by AI. If piles of algorithms can better fulfill the role of manufacturing elite-serving consensuses of reality, what politicians in their right minds would bother to continue asking scientists to do the job?
If you derived value from this post, please drop a few coins in your fact-barista’s tip jar.
Nor should our criticism be construed to imply that scientists even end up happy with the receipts of their dictatorial influence. For example, in a pre-print uploaded just after publishing this essay, the UK’s Pandemic Modelers, including Neil Ferguson make conference to report their complaints. These individuals have exercised a national and global influence more substantial than few other humans who will ever be born. Yet predominant in their reflections is a feeling of deprivation; deprivation of recognition, deprivation of career opportunity; deprivation of the integrity of their work. For scientists fulfilling the media/state’s hunger for Apocalyptic Prophesies, the typical experience may follow rules akin to the idiom, “That’s show-business.”
Individuals faced challenges in balancing competing demands of and distinguishing between ‘response’ work and research. Some individuals sacrificed otherwise beneficial opportunities, such as teaching. Although response work created some opportunities for career progression, these were distributed unequally relative to contribution. Access to these opportunities depended on several factors, including career stage, and relative privilege (which is the differential access to resources, opportunities, and advantages some groups have compared to others). We note that privilege is often invisible to those who have it, and recognizing one's own relative privilege is a key part of understanding and addressing social inequalities.
Note that when it comes to climate change I am too much of an energy fatalist and instinctual Malthusian to consider the current panic meaningfully detrimental; I think the same activities implicated in climate change (which wouldn’t justify any disruption of human economic activity even if true) are probably posing existential threats to the productive capacity of the earth’s ocean and soil. I simply resent the fictionality of the thing.
You really nailed it, even if by no more than a medium length blog post. There does seem to be a scientism priesthood, that would like to speak ex cathedra just as Hinton seems to advocate. Maybe this got rolling with Gallo's press conference on isolating the "AIDS virus", kicking off science by press release.
I worked for NASA as a physicist working on infrared remote sensing all during the 90s when "global warming" was the consensus. Did I believe we were going to incinerate? No, neither did my principal investigator. We were trying to build technology to explore the role of cloud cover in the thermal budget of the Earth. That technology is now widely used in handheld thermal IR imagers. Quite possibly we were able to obtain research funds because the high priests of scientism had declared a worry-bandwagon for climate heating. But good came of it in the form of atmospheric science and IR sensing technology despite the idiotic consensus-driven "science" panic over climate.
Reminds me of the meteorologist Alfred Wegener who published his idea of Plate Tectonics in 1912 only to be shunned by the field of Geology for decades. Then many years later, the physicist Henrik Svensmark postulated that cosmic rays have the greatest effect on Earth's climate...also shunned as a heretic. Scientific dogma is a tough hegemony to crack.