When accused of inconsistency, John Maynard Keynes famously replied: "when the facts change I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
Except, it isn’t that simple – as Tom Chivers explains on his Telegraph blog. All of us, he says, are subject to a psychological phenomenon called confirmation bias:
In other words, we tend to seize upon information that supports what we already think – and thanks to the internet such material is super-abundant:
So, faced with rival mountains of evidence – especially when it’s of a highly technical nature – how do you decide? The particular example that Tom Chivers has in mind is climate change:
On climate change, he has decided who he trusts:
But scientific establishments sometimes change their minds, don’t they? For instance, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity rewrote centuries of Newtonian physics. There are numerous other, if less spectacular, examples in which the mainstream view has shifted. However, that, says Tom Chivers, is precisely the point:
Yet, there is a further consideration here. If whether or not you change your mind on a scientific issue depends on the judgment of others, you need to ask whether they are capable of changing their minds. Can you, in other words, imagine them giving fair consideration to a new piece of possibly ‘inconvenient’ evidence and adjusting their conclusions accordingly? Indeed, is there any record of them having already done so to any significant extent?
If not, then you are not so much "outsourcing" your judgment as surrendering it.