“The dissident’s role is to provide a check against epistemically detrimental and artificial consensus formation.”
Hat tip to Jeff Childers for pointing out this August 10, 2023 essay from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Well worth the read. It explores the concept of scientific consensus, starting from the seminal story of Ignaz Semmelweis and leading on to the so-called “lab-leak” hypothesis for the origins of SARS CoV-2.
Sometimes, a scientific consensus is established because vested interests have diligently and purposefully transformed a situation of profound uncertainty into one in which there appears to be overwhelming evidence for what becomes the consensus view. When a scientific consensus emerges via this accelerated process, the role of the scientific dissident is not, like Semmelweis, to carry out revolutionary science. The dissident’s role is to provide a check against epistemically detrimental and artificial consensus formation.
Throughout the pandemic, any scientific heterodoxy, but especially heterodoxy about the virus’s origin, was treated as a mark of affiliation with a set of unsavory political views associated with the supporters of Donald Trump. But few people in the world had a better claim not to be affiliated with the Trumpist right than Jon Stewart. Nevertheless, the condemnatory response was swift and severe. Colbert immediately asked Stewart how long he had been working for Republican Sen. Ron Johnson. “The two things that came out of it were,” Stewart later said, “I’m racist against Asian people, and how dare I align myself with the alt-right.” He added, “The larger problem with all of this is the inability to discuss things that are within the realm of possibility without falling into absolutes and litmus-testing each other for our political allegiances as it arose from that.”
