This is pretty tough to evaluate, but I would guess that media, and the interests of the elite generally, has a longstanding influence on the ‘scientific consensus’ as-viewed-from-a-sociological-standpoint (IE the average opinion of scientists).
Today we see Twitter going against scientific journals. In the 1900s, would we see conservative-leaning media going against scientific journals?
OK, maybe that’s not a fair comparison. The situation is complicated. Conservatives were ‘never’ (approximately?) allied with science, preferring religion as an authority-gatekeeper.
So one error I was making was conflating all authority structures with each other. It might possibly be that preference-for-authority-structures correlates (so that we can coherently point to “authoritarians”), but there are certainly some specific pairs of authority structures where adherence anticorrelates.
We had quite a while during which there was a consensus among climate scientists for global warming but a lot of doubt in the media about global warming. Elite opinion of course influences the scientific consensus but actual scientists are still partly bound by the empiric reality in their field and not just by whatever narrative elites want to push.
Most of the time the media just ignores scientific journals when they say things they don’t like. The thing that distinguishes social media companies is that they have users who do engage with scientific journals and at the same time want to control the information flow.
A lot of good scientists are heterodox thinkers because heterodox thinking is useful to make breakthroughs in science.
The modern left likes bureaucratic authorities in which individual people inside the system have relatively little power to turn their own opinion into policy.
This is pretty tough to evaluate, but I would guess that media, and the interests of the elite generally, has a longstanding influence on the ‘scientific consensus’ as-viewed-from-a-sociological-standpoint (IE the average opinion of scientists).
Today we see Twitter going against scientific journals. In the 1900s, would we see conservative-leaning media going against scientific journals?
OK, maybe that’s not a fair comparison. The situation is complicated. Conservatives were ‘never’ (approximately?) allied with science, preferring religion as an authority-gatekeeper.
So one error I was making was conflating all authority structures with each other. It might possibly be that preference-for-authority-structures correlates (so that we can coherently point to “authoritarians”), but there are certainly some specific pairs of authority structures where adherence anticorrelates.
We had quite a while during which there was a consensus among climate scientists for global warming but a lot of doubt in the media about global warming. Elite opinion of course influences the scientific consensus but actual scientists are still partly bound by the empiric reality in their field and not just by whatever narrative elites want to push.
Most of the time the media just ignores scientific journals when they say things they don’t like. The thing that distinguishes social media companies is that they have users who do engage with scientific journals and at the same time want to control the information flow.
A lot of good scientists are heterodox thinkers because heterodox thinking is useful to make breakthroughs in science.
The modern left likes bureaucratic authorities in which individual people inside the system have relatively little power to turn their own opinion into policy.