Most types of cancer not due to “bad luck” [pdf]
The author makes a few references to the idea of "scientific consensus", which I find curious. It's a phrase that I tend to cast aside as politically motivated. Politicians in the climate change debate  like to point to "scientific consensus" as a way of saying, "look, all these intelligent people whose work we personally don't understand agree, so they must be correct."<p>But one tenant of scientific thought is that truth and factuality are not measures of an individual's or society's belief, but rather, they are discovered by experiments whose results can be replicated.<p>> <i>People distrust science when it conflicts with their valued beliefs, or when science suggests a solution or intervention that conflicts with their beliefs. People are happy to trust science when it does not conflict with their ideology or narrative.</i><p>I agree, but those same people generally rationalize those views to themselves in the way Adams noted: by pointing at reasons to distrust science or scientists. They get caught up in issues like "climategate", they assert that results about medical science are distorted by financial pressures, etc.<p>In short, the rationalizations of individuals who reject scientific results often point to the scientists behind the results, their interests and motivations, instead of the results themselves. This isn't exclusively true, but I think the tie in to the idea of "scientific consensus" is this:<p>Perhaps science would be better served by a decreased emphasis on the individuals carrying out scientific research and increased emphasis on the results themselves.