More on Intellectual Diversity at Stanford

I posted my theory about the mainstream/consensus ratio on Aaron Swartz's blog. Matthew Weiner responded by pointing out that consensus references on the Web outnumber mainstream references for both gravity and evolution. Hmph. I suppose a generalization based on Usenet does not necessarily apply to the Web.

There is, of course, a difference between a conclusion based on numerous lines of evidence (e.g., that the Earth is billions of years old) and a conclusion based on one time series (e.g., that the observed global warming is mostly due to human influence).

I also noticed an HTML comment in the original post:

<!--The Stanford numbers are, of course, made up. -->

Considering Global Consciousness Project, the numbers for paranormal believers on university faculties seems oddly low.