Consensus

by Judith Curry
A decades’ experience shows that “Consensus messaging” doesn’t work. – Dan Kahan

by Judith Curry
If deference to the authoritative opinions of experts is essential to our rationality and knowledge, and if that deference unavoidably rests on trust, not only in the competence, but also in the epistemic and ethical characters of our experts–then it is high time that we get to work on the ethics of expertise. Indeed, it is past time. – John Hardwig

Context
The sociology and politics of ‘expertise’ have been the topic of numerous CE posts:

by Andy West
Emotions and messaging about climate change.

by Andy West
Climate psychologists have for years now puzzled over public inaction on climate change and also what makes skeptics tick (or sick), apparently making little progress on these issues.

by Judith Curry
Group failures often have disastrous consequences—not merely for businesses, nonprofits, and governments, but for all those affected by them. – Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie

Context
The social psychology of groups conducting scientific assessments (e.g. the IPCC) is a topic that in my opinion does not receive sufficient attention.  For background, here are some previous CE posts:

by Judith Curry
We shed new light on the epistemic struggle between establishing consensus and acknowledging plurality, by explicating different ways of consensus-making in science and society and examining the impact hereof on their field of intersection. –  Laszlo Kosolosky and Jeroen Van Bouwel

by Judith Curry
Some interesting new research on understanding  why there is a lack of public support for the climate change ‘consensus’, the nature of the scientific consensus, and agendas in characterizing the consensus.

by Will Howard
“Consensus” means different things to different people — and herein lies the problem.
 
You might have heard that 97% of climate scientists agree the world is warming and people are the cause. This level of agreement, known as “consensus”, is often put forward in the climate debate in support of human-caused global warming and action to mitigate it. It was recently popularised on US talk show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

by Judith Curry
An academic feud swirls around how best or even whether to express the scientific consensus around climate change.  

I’ve written several previous posts about the Cook et al. paper Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature.   See my previous posts on the paper:

by Judith Curry
The public seems to have gotten the memo that climate scientists believe that humans are warming the planet, and the warming is dangerous.  They also don’t seem to care.