'Scientific Consensus': Shorthand for 'Shut Up, the Grown-Ups Are Talking?'

It’s easy to feel whiplashed by ever-shifting scientific claims about nutrition, health, and medicine. One day, coffee causes heart disease; the next, it’s a miracle antioxidant. Eggs are deadly, then they're essential. When trying to separate the signal from the noise, one phrase, “scientific consensus,” gets thrown around, especially by public health officials and media pundits.

The emotional connotation around “consensus” conjures, at best, some form of scientific vote-taking. At worst, it sounds suspiciously like “shut up” rather than an invitation to examine what we know. H. Holden Thorp, editor of Science, asks in an editorial whether it is time to retire consensus, which implies a static, settled condition, offering instead a more dynamic word, convergence. 

Consensus Feels Political. Convergence Is Scientific.

Settled science reflects our best model, predicting and explaining the real world. Convergence occurs when multiple independent lab experiments, clinical trials, and population studies start pointing in the same direction. That’s when you can trust the signal being separated from the noise.

No study of coronary artery disease has proven that high blood pressure or cholesterol is dangerous. But decades of research, including epidemiological data from places like Framingham, randomized controlled trials on statins and lifestyle, and biochemical studies on plaque and inflammation, all converge to tell a consistent story: clogged arteries are a slow-motion killer, and some risk factors are modifiable.

This is our best understanding and is not based on a vote or petition by cardiologists. Rather, it is like water flowing from many merging streams, forming a large river. If someone wants to dispute that river’s direction, they must explain all the streams feeding into it, not just point to one quirky tributary that veers off. 

Of course, being a human enterprise, science is flawed and subject to non-scientific influences.

When More Studies Are Just Noise

Science thrives on replication. However, ironically, once a strong signal emerges, doing more research on the same narrow question doesn’t necessarily help. It can blur the signal by what economists call diminishing returns.

Look at Alzheimer’s disease. For decades, the dominant hypothesis in understanding Alzheimer’s disease  was “amyloid plaques.” But at some point, chasing amyloid like it’s the smoking gun has yielded less and less bang for the buck. Billions have been spent tuning in to that signal, yet the cure remains out of reach. Meanwhile, promising signals about inflammation, metabolic health, or vascular contributions have struggled to break through the noise and get funding and consideration.

In our media environment, each new study is an opportunity for headlines and spin, overshadowing decades of solid, convergent research. It gives the illusion of controversy when what we often need is clarity.

The Signals We Miss—and the Ones We Don’t Even Know to Listen For

There are also signals we ignore, such as those described by Donald Rumsfeld as the unknown knowns. We’ve known for years that physical activity, sleep, social connection, and diet play a role in cardiovascular and cognitive health. But the static, louder buzz around miracle cures or pharmaceutical silver bullets often drowned out these messages. The known signal is right there—but we tune it out.

Then there are Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns—the signals we don’t even know exist. Maybe Alzheimer’s isn’t just a brain problem but an immune one. Maybe heart disease is driven as much by stress as cholesterol. Science can’t find those stations unless it scans new parts of the spectrum. That’s where curiosity, rather than consensus, matters most.

Finding the Real Signal

If you’re wary of scientific “consensus,” you’re not wrong. Consensus can be hijacked, politicized, or misrepresented. But the answer isn’t to toss science out. It’s to ask better questions:

• Is there a strong, converging signal?
• Are different lines of evidence in tune with each other?
• Or is what I’m hearing just another crackle of noise?

Science doesn’t speak with one voice—it hums when multiple instruments play harmoniously. That’s convergence. That’s a signal.

The rest? That’s static.