Hacker News Reader

I’m talking about non-experts approaching a subject with genuine curiosity and an honest desire to form a balanced perspective. I don’t have a PhD in climate science nor biology nor history so I believe the most reasonable starting point is to try to understand the expert consensus. Scientific skepticism on the part of non-experts is just a form of cynicism or - more generally - a form of confirmation bias.

View on HN

Fair enough, I don't think it's a good way to convince people to simply claim your excellence however. I'm not interested in arguments from authority. If there's a big spat in a scientific field, usually you get this distribution. It's hard to be a skeptic in science, but that's where all the action is.

Typically useful scientific fields are based in the hard sciences where this doesn't happen, I guess.

How can you even know what the consensus is?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com