Reflections, Reflections

Always good to remember (From Volokh - Michael Crichton):

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
Crichton then describes scientific consensuses that turned out to be wrong. I don't think that there is anything wrong with talking about the consensus of scientists or social scientists (and I certainly do so myself), but one must remember that it is the quality of the evidence that makes the work persuasive, not the consensus.

Volokh:

I don't think that there is anything wrong with talking about the consensus of scientists or social scientists (and I certainly do so myself), but one must remember that it is the quality of the evidence that makes the work persuasive, not the consensus.

The problem is most of the time the consensus of social scientists will greatly override a variety of evidence, which also includes some very glaring cases. Social sciences are profoundly about orthodoxy, and orthodoxy is also maintained by the control exerted through the social sciences publishing system. A very rigid hierarchy and various mechanisms for silencing and exiling members that challenge the orthodoxy explains why it takes so many years, decades even, for certain simple advances to be made in the social sciences.