I’ve got an alternate proposal for what ‘increasing agreement over long-outstanding points of disagreement’ should look like. I think the emphasis should be on encouraging both parties to agree on and publish lists of what empirical evidence, ideally focused on agreeing about design of potential experiments would help settle disagreements one way or another. The people having the agreements can then offload the need to evaluate the cost of and run the experiments. Disagreements can be tabled until new evidence arrives, and then discussion can happen once new evidence is presented. People can independently search out coincidental revelations of evidence amongst research not targeted at the specific disagreements. I think in many cases new evidence is (and should be) the primary driver of scientific opinion change.
I’ve got an alternate proposal for what ‘increasing agreement over long-outstanding points of disagreement’ should look like. I think the emphasis should be on encouraging both parties to agree on and publish lists of what empirical evidence, ideally focused on agreeing about design of potential experiments would help settle disagreements one way or another. The people having the agreements can then offload the need to evaluate the cost of and run the experiments. Disagreements can be tabled until new evidence arrives, and then discussion can happen once new evidence is presented. People can independently search out coincidental revelations of evidence amongst research not targeted at the specific disagreements. I think in many cases new evidence is (and should be) the primary driver of scientific opinion change.