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Posted on 10/06/2026 1:03:50 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Scientists are as prone as anyone else to groupthink, and stifling dissent often produces disaster.
Three of the costliest policy failures in recent decades—the 2008 financial crisis, the Covid lockdowns and the campaign for rapid decarbonization—share a pathology we call the Consensus Trap. Problems began with the output of complex, unvalidated models presented as facts. Institutions and public figures under pressure to appear authoritative ignored uncertainties. Along with the press, these institutions and people became arbiters of truth, amplifying the declared consensus rather than critically assessing the evidence. Once “the science” was declared, dissent was treated as misconduct. In all three cases, as we examine in a paper with Terrence Keeley, the consensus was wrong and the public suffered severe consequences, while the architects of failure avoided accountability.
The 2008 crisis is the clearest example of a Consensus Trap in economic policy. Political incentives to expand homeownership, fee-driven enthusiasm on Wall Street, and Basel II capital rules built around rating-agency models combined to make a multitrillion-dollar subprime structure look safe when it was fragile. When economist Raghuram Rajan warned at Jackson Hole, Wyo., in 2005 that the system could crack, Lawrence Summers dismissed his premise as “slightly Luddite.” Mr. Rajan was right. Millions of workers lost their jobs, and millions more lost their homes. Taxpayers paid for enormous bailouts, and no top executive of a major Wall Street bank went to prison.
Covid-19 had the same toxic mix, but in a public-health emergency. Beginning in 2020, policies allegedly following the science imposed lockdowns, prolonged school closings, church and business shutdowns, and vaccine mandates even for low-risk populations. But data available by the spring of 2020 showed that lethality was concentrated overwhelmingly among the elderly. Simple common sense argued instead for targeted protection. Those who said so—including one of us,...
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
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Science does not allow any questioning today. Academia is a closed structure which only allows absolute submission.
Climate ‘Science’ is a scam. We have consensus..................
It's a big club, and you ain't in it.
I’ve had some very close friends who are scientists and have known a lot more though them and at my house, and what I learned is that the guy in charge of the team, who gets the grant for his research, like my close friends, they are brilliant, but among the worker bee lab rats with science degrees, they are not especially brilliant about anything and their politics are simple minded, some are into conspiracies like any trailer park druggie and so on, they can be pretty stupid and annoying, the kind of dummies you don’t invite a second time.
You get the $cience you pay for.
Many (not all of course) scientists and doctors believe they are part of a sacred priesthood that is incapable of error.
Those folks can be hazardous to everyone’s health.
With unarmed citizens, there is nothing they can really do.
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