At 04:32 PM 10/2/2009, OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson wrote:
[quoting Jed Rothwell]
> If you have not dealt with a skeptic lately, here is a reminder
of what they
> are like:
>
> http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=1940
I'm trying to figure out why the original author mentioned cold
fusion. The connection with his topic was totally unclear. He says
nothing about cold fusion that shows anything more than the scantiest
knowledge of the science, either from a skeptical or a supportive
point of view. His topic is medicine. Reading some of his other
material, the guy is quite a bit less than impressive as a writer.
What was called for there was a simple pointer to a good recent
review of the field, pretty much like your original post (except you
didn't point to a single review, but to your entire collection. Who
is going to read that collectimay be another story.
Nobody there was discussing cold fusion until you showed up. However,
your post attracted <http://daedalus2u.blogspot.com/>daedalus2u . If
you follow the link, the writer doesn't seem to be the soul of
balanced sobriety. The guy is smart enough to read papers you cite
and figure out hypothetical problems with them, which he then
confidently asserts as the probably explanation. I've seen enough of
these bloggers to know that they are unaware of the depth of the
literature, they *assume* that it is all shallow, shoddy work. The
fact is that with any report, one can make up ("hypothesize")
possible causes of artifact that were not addressed in the report.
For him to respond to a solid review of the field, though, he'd have
to do a lot more work.
Tritium is not a major product of LENR. Helium is. Tritium is nice
because it's easier to measure, but helium, because of the solid
correlation with excess heat, validates the heat measurements. And,
of course, the heat measurements validate the helium; any artifact
would have to somehow cause the measured excess heat to track the
measured helium. The skeptic's criticism of the tritium measurement
*in that one paper* is interesting, if true (I certainly haven't
verified what he asserts about potassium), but ...
You encountered, there, many stock arguments and a few more cogent
arguments, but none of them solidly based. These discussions, when
they go on beyond a point, don't convince anyone of anything, I'd
say, having done a fair amount of this in other fields. It would be
useful to have a well-writtenFAQ that addresses all the standard
criticisms about cold fusion, cite it, and leave, or only answer
*new* criticisms -- and then arrange that they be added to the FAQ,
congratulating the author on their original thinking!
Why don't we do that, Jed? I'd love to help. I'm going to go to that
discussion and pick out the themes, and bring them back here. Instead
of writing that stuff over and over, how about putting together a
document that represents the best thinking on the topic, coherently
expressed. You're an excellent writer, but you are, to some extent,
wasting your time repeating the same things over and over in various
venues. It's enough if, in these places where cold fusion is
mentioned, you, or someone, points to the real information; let the
skeptics rant and rave all they want, and they will, for quite some
time. They are like frogs in the pot being brought to a boil,
croaking and complaining, but not jumping out of the trap they are in.
They pretend to be interested in science, but when they say "call us
when you have a car that runs by cold fusion," we can know that they
don't care at all about science, for that is not a scientific
position at all; cold fusion could be real and totally impractical
for running a car.
The world is full of ignorant people; indeed, all of us are ignorant
of much. It's enough to, when the opportunity presents, convey the
message clearly, but more than that is not only not necessary, it
actually hardens opposition, for few like to be exposed as ignorant.
Within a year, Jed, I'd like you to be able to say, for $x, you can
buy a kit to replicate a cold fusion experiment and detect nuclear
radiation, it's been demonstrated by N people (and, in a bit more
time, published here and there) and you'd be more than welcome to
show how it's fake. Please, try, or point to someone who has.
And, frankly, I don't care what they might say in response. It
doesn't matter what they say. It matters what the people who *do* try
say, especially if many of them are young.
> Scroll down to the bottom and you will see that this person absolutely
> rejects any paper not published in a U.S. peer-reviewed journal.
He will not
> even glance at a paper in a Japanese, Italian or Indian journal. He rejects
> anything published in an electrochemical journal:
>
> "If you don't get the fact that it's meaningless and irrelevant unless it's
> in a reputable peer-reviewed journal, then you're quite hopeless."
>
> He does not consider JJAP or Fusion Technology "reputable."
>
> Note also that he asks repeatedly for proof and papers, and then refuses to
> look at them. This is classic full blown "skeptical" behavior
>
> - Jed
Sure. So? Are we running a Find-The-Skeptic game? Look, we already
know that there are hosts of these pseudo-skeptics. There are also
some real skeptics out there, I'm much more interested in them, and
in engaging them in conversation.
So Steven continued:
I disagree on one crucial point. Skeptics are not bad. We need
skeptics. I would also say that you are, in fact, a healthy skeptc
since you aren't willing to accept the conclusions of any experiment
unless they have been independently replicated. This individual, on
the other hand, is not a skeptic even though I would bet he often
self-congratulates himself and truly believes he is pursuing a
skeptical line of inquiry.
That's correct, I'd say. There is more than one individual there,
though. Nevertheless, every single one of them was both ignorant and
presumed that he (or she, perhaps) was knowledgeable enough to
contradict an expert with utter confidence and no humility. As you
know, they made statement after statement that was unsupportable,
once one knows the literature. In a blog-discussion environment,
where there is no decision-making process, only debate with no
specified purpose or goal, there is no way to lead these horses to
water, all you could hope for is that some independent readers will
notice. I'd say that this same purpose can be accomplished with a
very brief post pointing to a solid document that is designed to lead
the reader from the normal position of skepticism to something more
open-minded, to a recognition that those working in this field aren't
entirely dim, that there is some basis for, at least, suspicion that
LENR is real. That's where one-third of the experts were in the 2004
DoE review, and a more careful process would have taken more to that
suspicion. And, as well, more to conviction that, yes, this is LENR.
It takes a certain critical mass of knowledge to come to that
position, that knowledge normally isn't absorbed in a day or in a
blog conversation.
If you try to force a horse to drink, the horse, quite properly,
won't trust you. No matter how much you tell the horse that the water
is fine, just taste it! People have natural -- and necessary --
defenses against polemic that shows any sign of being compulsive or
obsessive; that blog was about medicine, and they will immediately
wonder why you started talking about cold fusion there. Simply
because the author mentioned cold fusion? He was apparently trying to
make some point about silly research having to do with H1N1
vaccinations, and cold fusion was entirely peripheral; so your post
would immediately appear as that of someone on a mission to "defend"
cold fusion. Right?
Let me just say that the very fact of being on such a mission will
arouse suspicion. It's very tricky to pull off.
I will try to spend some time analyzing that blog discussion and
others you have engaged in. I'm not terribly interested in the very
specific and unusual claims about artifact there, though I suppose
they should be listed in the more detailed parts of a FAQ, possibly
on linked pages. Where there are people, skeptics, willing to engage
in real discussion aimed at finding either consensus or, at least, a
clear delineation and description of differences, it's possible to
find much more agreement than we usually imagine. The pseudo-skeptics
will avoid such a process; that's what happened on Wikipedia. I was
being successful at facilitating consensus on the issues I was
bringing up, but that process takes a great deal of discussion, and
the "cabal" was able to frame that as "tendentious argument," and,
because there were twenty or thirty of them, and only a handful of
people arguing for the positions I was asserting, they were able to
sway the arbitrators who were too lazy to read the evidence. Numbers
count. So, if you *do* want to continue blog advocacy for cold
fusion, get some help, don't do it alone. If there are some other
cool heads making supportive comments, it can make a big difference.
There is also the good-cop, bad-cop routine, one person can simply
assert the truth (as you mostly do) while the other skewers the
opposition, pointing out the complete idiocy of their positions. You
can then calm down the "bad cop," defending the skepticism as
understandable, which it certainly is (hey, stupidity is
understandable!), which puts them off their feed; after all, you are
supposedly the fanatic. If you are advocating cold fusion, you must
be a fanatic, right?
I just told my wife that I've finally invested in the cold fusion
project (we are getting divorced and it's not really her business any
more, but we have a long-term relationship, for sure, because of the
kids), and she was worried that I was getting myself involved with a
bunch of fanatics. "Isn't that considered rejected?" Yes, it is. But,
don't worry, I told her. I'm not investing in any kooky schemes, I'm
only investing in what I know, with near-certainty, will work.
Science, not energy generation!
Jed, if this kit idea works, and I'm quite confident that it will
(with some possibility that the first kits won't work, but unless the
whole SPAWAR publication series is nothing but artifact, and the
Galileo project a big, reproduced mistake, that problem will only be
temporary and it will be fixed. And we won't be selling kits until
they work reliably. And then it will be very possible to assert to
those skeptics that, yes, it is easy to reproduce a low energy
nuclear reaction experiment, and it can even be done -- and has been
done -- for a high school science fair project.... Your argument that
it's extremely difficult was certainly true, for years, and it
probably remains true for the vast majority of cold fusion
techniques, but not all. Co-deposition was known to work, early on,
but everyone was focused on getting more energy out, and codep is
probably not practical for energy generation, it's only good for the
science of it. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there is some way to cycle a
codep cell to repeatedly generate heat, and to make it enough heat to
be useful. That's not my project though, at least not initially!
