While I can agree in spirit with that argument (academics having much to answer for) I still worry about the current trend towards confusing consensus with fact and proof. I've seen too much scientifically determined fact dismissed with comments like: "Well, that's just your opinion." or "I'm sorry, but we don't see it that way." to be too anxious to toss out our entire qualified peer review system in favor of mob rule when it comes to creating reference materials.
And while crowd sourcing may be all the rage, I can't help but wonder why the opinions of experts or scientific research is now often considered less reliable and acceptable than the off-the-cuff collective opinion of 400 laymen, a talk show host, or a badly designed and conducted poll.
-40hz
Understand that for encyclopedias as a class -- Britannica, Wikipedia, and any others -- their charter is explicitly
not to provide 1st tier (researcher published) or even 2nd (literature aggregating the original research). Their job is to convey the consensus, and that's it. Both Britannica and Wikipedia do a pretty good job at this (although I know a number of subject matter experts who are frustrated that WP reverts their edits for facts they
know, but cannot demonstrate through 2nd tier sources, and thus deride WP). So I think that this is as it should be when we're discussing encyclopedias.
That said, I agree with you about the problems people have grappling with concrete facts, the scientific method, and policy. Observed, measured facts (the sun rose this morning at X o'clock) aren't subject to debate at all, other than calibration of the measurement devices. But few people have the sophistication to understand how those measurements work (e.g., recent scientific controversy over measurements of the speed of light at CERN), and so I think that many folks believe that the facts themselves are being debated (and a retarded press doesn't help the matter).
But let me take this a step farther in two different ways.
First, I see a disconcerting overuse of the phrase "common sense", particularly when discussing governmental policy. It seems to be used to excuse a lack of rational argument, saying that no justification is necessary. But reading between the lines, it suggests that either the speaker has no justification, or that the speaker feels that the listener isn't worth giving a justification to. And this is very dangerous because history shows in controversies beyond number (heliocentric universe; biogenesis; etc.) that the obvious answer is frequently very wrong.
Second, even when one has the facts correct, it does not always directly lead to policy decisions. One cannot decide policy without mixing facts with
values, and everybody has their own set of these. Just because the earth's climate is changing, it doesn't automatically follow that something must be done to stop it (I don't mean to debate this argument, simply to recognize that it
is debatable. Just because there are large numbers of undocumented aliens in America, it doesn't automatically follow that they are a detriment to our society.
We may be able to arrive at consensus about the facts of a given issue -- or at least most of us should be able to, since most of us are unable to support an argument against a real expert, and thus have little choice but to accept the consensus of the scientific community. But the only way we can translate those facts into a policy is by taking a single set of values to act upon. Sometimes we can all agree on a value, as when the country was threatened in WWII -- we all found ourselves on the same page. More often, we value different things to different degrees, and so are unable to agree on policy. And so a policy is dictated that interferes with
someone's values. This breaks the enlightenment liberal philosophy on which the USA was founded, and is what Hayek wrote about in the classic
The Road to Serfdom.
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