See:
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
This is the web site of Bob Altemayer of U. Manitoba, a social scientist.
This web site and book was recommended by Pres. Nixon's White House
Council John Dean, during a lecture on UCTV. I highly recommend it.
It describes the mindset (or psychology) of the authoritarian person,
who can be either a leader or follower.
This book may seem biased against right-wing extremist
authoritarians, but I do not think it is. It describes mainly
right-winger authoritarians because that is the type we are familiar
with in the U.S. and Canada. But authoritarians can also be extreme
left-wing people such as Fidel Castro, or Stalin. We don't happen
have many like that in the U.S. or Canada, so most of the examples in
the book are right-wingers.
(I digress, but in a sense the Stalinists were conservatives. My
father, who was posted to Russia during WWII, said that the Stalinist
officials he met with the most reactionary, conservative people he
ever encountered. The thing is, they were trying to conserve Marxist
Leninism, whereas our conservatives are trying to preserve pure
laissez-faire capitalism.)
Anyway, let me explain what this has to do with cold fusion. The
other day I was speculating about why mainstream science has become
so conservative over the past half-century. I think it is mainly the
structural reasons described by Hagelstein and others, such as
excessive centralized funding and the overdependence on peer review.
But another reason is that large branches of science have been
captured by empire building people who tend to be authoritarian. As
this book shows, authoritarianism is usually the enemy of the
open-minded, objective scientific attitude. It includes many good examples.
Authoritarians also tend toward "pseudoskepticism" (Marcello Truzzi's
term, I think) or pathological skepticism. In his book, Storms
accuses opponents of cold fusion of being pathological skeptics (p.
49). We have often discussed these people. I consider the people at
CSICOP to be pseudoskeptics, and the Society for Scientific
Exploration to be the antidote, and true skeptics.
Let me work through one example of this
Authoritarians abound at Wikipedia, and they are the ones who
torpedoed the cold fusion article. One of their characteristics,
described in this book is "conventionalism" ("believing that
everybody should have to follow the norms and customs that your
authorities have decreed) and the notion that they speak for the
majority -- even when they do not, or when the definition of
"majority" is so vague it becomes meaningless, which is the case in
cold fusion. As I have often pointed out in arguments with skeptics,
you can define "majority" different ways:
1. The majority in the entire human population -- the set of 6
billion people. Most people in this group have never heard of cold fusion.
2. The majority of professional engineers and scientists. Probably,
most people in this group have read a little about cold fusion in the
popular press and they assume it does not exist.
3. The majority of professional electrochemists, materials scientists
and others who have some relevant knowledge. It is very difficult to
say what this group thinks of cold fusion. Just about every
electrochemist knows Fleischmann and Bockris, and I doubt they would
categorically assert these two must be wrong.
4. The majority of people who have some relevant knowledge and who
have read five or more papers about cold fusion. I would bet that 90%
of these people are convinced that cold fusion is real. I know only
one person in this category who denies that cold fusion is real:
Dieter Britz, and I think his reasoning is far, far off the rails.
5. The majority of mainstream, established, professional scientists
who have performed experiments in cold fusion and published papers.
In most scientific disciplines, this is the only group that has any
say in the matter. Nearly everyone in this group is certain that cold
fusion is real. There are roughly ~2,000 people in this category (out
of the 4,706 authors listed in the LENR-CANR.org database). In normal
circumstances, no one in his right mind would question the judgement
of such a large group of professionals.
What is interesting is that normally an authoritarian would be the
first to define the relevant group as number five, and to accept
their conclusion simply because they are mainstream professionals. In
other words, authoritarians tend to make an Appeal to Authority
logical fallacy. But, in this case, they reject group #5 in favor of
the opinions of people who have no knowledge whatever, such as the
editors of the Scientific American.
As I have noted here before, an Appeal to Authority does NOT mean
citing a relevant, competent authority. That is not a fallacy,
although many people believe it is. See:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-authority.html
Citing McKubre is not an fallacy, because Mike is a bona fide
authority. Citing the editor of Sci. Am. is a fallacy, because the
man told me he has not read anything about cold fusion, and all of
his assertions about the subject are demonstrably ignorant and wrong.
This is one of the errors that pseudo-skeptics at Wikipedia have made
repeatedly. They themselves constantly make Appeal to Authority
fallacies, but when I cite a real authority, they turn around and
accuse me of making an Appeal to Authority fallacy. They are not
strong on logic -- to say the least. Also, none of them has ever
acknowledged this mistake, or any mistake for that matter, which is
also characteristic of the authoritarian personality.
- Jed
