MINDMATTERS.AI -- Enforced orthodoxy, often described as "scientific consensus," is an impediment to science. For example, a recent article in The Skeptical Inquirer treats the tendency for Nobel Prize-winning scientists to explore unconventional theories, outside the "scientific consensus," as a disease. However, scientists who reject consensus and think for themselves are often the ones best prepared to make major discoveries. The top rank of scientists is full of mavericks -- Galileo, Newton, Semmelweis, Einstein, and Watson and Crick, to name just a few -- who made outstanding contributions not despite their unorthodoxy but because of it. They were all willing to think outside the box. Richard Feynman -- another unconventional fellow who did Nobel-Prize winning science -- insisted that "science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." A scientific culture that welcomes unorthodox ...

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EDWARDFESER.BLOGSPOT.COM -- COVID-19 is not just an epidemiological or medical question. For example, how much economic damage is likely to be done by a lockdown? How does that damage weigh against the damage the virus is likely to do? At what point might a lockdown result in more sickness and death from neglect of other ailments? What sort of social instability is it likely to produce over time? Epidemiologists and doctors can't answer such questions. Weighing and balancing all of these requires statesmanship, and phronesis -- practical wisdom or prudence -- which doesn't come in a book or from a degree. In fact scientism -- the view that science alone gives us knowledge -- is one of the great enemies of phronesis. What all of this entails is that ...

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