Tips for Denying Scientific Consensus

[atyy]

There's always a necessary tension between the two points of view. Even in mathematics - can there be true rigour? No, because just to define ZFC requires an undefined, intuitive meta-language. Presumably that meta-language was learned by an individual from a community. Nonetheless there is also the point of view that a proof is right or wrong regardless of what the community thinks.

http://www.math.wisc.edu/~miller/old/m771-10/kunen770.pdf (p31)
"Each axiom of ZFC other than Comprehension and Replacement forms (an abbeviation of) one sentence in the language of set theory. But the Comprehension Axiom is a rule in the metatheory for producing axioms; that is whenever you replace the ϕ in the Comprehension Scheme in Section I.2 by a logical formula, you get an axiom of ZFC; so really ZFC is an infinite list of axioms. Likewise, the Replacement Axiom is really an infinite scheme."

 

[lendav_rott]

Tom Magliozzi has a PhD and he can tell you how to fix your car, because well ... he's funny and has his own radio show.

So, yes, you can graduate from MIT (as both brothers did) and wind up being an auto mechanic.

http://www.cartalk.com/content/tom-and-rays-bios-photos-0 auto biography page.

Very well, I'll give him a ring to check my suspension, but can I use this one example to deduce that all people who have a PhD and are funny while on the air are competent enough to fix cars?

 

[Czcibor]

One more advice, especially for the brighter ones:

Got into fight not with real scientists but with people with political/business agenda which accidentally is in some points similar to the consensus.

Ideas:
-Vaccines - quarrel with lobbies of vaccine companies that were good at lobbying at gov to sell tones of flue vaccines during alleged epidemics.

In each case present victory in such narrow issue with as debunking whole theory. Your adversary would work in your favour by not saying that his standing position was not specially science based.