At 04:28 PM 5/27/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
No argument can be settled and no progress made unless you abide
by this rule: experiments are the only authority.
There is a problem with your view, Jed. You are proposing an
absolute standard for deciding issues but no mechanism for the
decision. You left out *who* and *how* such decisions are made.
That is only a problem when -- as I said -- the experiments are
difficult to interpret, or inconclusive. For example, the 1919
eclipse data used to verify relativity was difficult to interpret.
Only an expert could work through the details. (See Collins & Pinch)
Sure. But enough smoke was generated about cold fusion that the
experimental work was, in fact, difficult to interpret. The nature of
the experimental data was such as to arouse natural suspicion. The
lack of a decent theoretical explanation shouldn't have stopped
research, but, politically, it hurt.
Remember, I'm considering Wikipedia process. So an editor doesn't
have a clue, doesn't know whether or not to trust, say, some
peer-reviewed publication. Thinking of this as a topic in nuclear
physics, the editor asks a friend who, they think, will understand,
who knows the physics, supposedly. What do you think is likely to happen?
There is a way around the Wikipedia problem, but it takes a special
combination: someone who understands the topic of cold fusion, but
who also can be very, very patient wtih the usual assortment of
ignorant but active "fools." In the end, those "fools" are stand-ins
for the readers. Some of them, a few, really don't care about the
truth, but most of them, held by the hand and walked carefully and
slowly and civilly through the evidence, will shift. They are not all alike.
I wasn't given nearly enough time, and I had too little support. But
... I'll be back. They will try to ban me again, I'm sure. They won't
succeed, and they might take themselves out in the process. I had
just started to move beyond discussion to article action when the ban
came down. I was mostly dinged for discussing too much! I'll move in
quite a different way when the ban expires in August, I think it is.
Pcarbonn came back and was immediately attacked, it was blatant. He
was "community banned" at the noticeboard. That would have created
grounds for an immediate appeal to ArbComm, and, in fact, it woudl
have been more or less open and shut. There was no misbehavior, not a
whisper, and the results of the earlier case setting the original ban
were drastically misrepresented by JzG. If he tried that trick with
me, I'd be at ArbComm with devastating evidence, there is a lot of
it. Understand that this wouldn't be evidence about cold fusion, it
would be evidence about the misbehavior of administrators and the
people trying to suppress what they think of as fringe science. In
general, that faction is losing, the community is waking up to what's
been going on.
Some aspects of cold fusion, such as helium or neutron detection,
call for expert knowledge. These are difficult to judge. Many excess
heat results are marginal and unconvincing, and cannot be believed
without extensive modeling and calibration. However, other results
are clear and can be understood by anyone with a junior-high school
level of physics and chemistry. After 1990 there were enough of the
clear-cut results to make an airtight case.
After Will et al. reported their tritium results, which confirmed
TAMU and Los Alamos, every journal and newspaper on earth should
have announced that cold fusion is real. Many previous experimental
claims were universally accepted with less convincing evidence than
this. Any article that calls into question the existence of the
phenomenon today is unscientific blather.
Sure. Look, the article is bogus, much of it, or, more accurate, it's
almost twenty years out of date. It pretends there aren't any
theories that aren't "ad-hoc," whatever that means. It doesn't tell
the story of the suppression, when there is plenty of reliable source
on it. It completely misrepresents the strongest evidence for cold
fusion, heat/helium, citing the reviewer's error in the anonymous
report from teh 2004 DoE conference, instead of actual reliable
sources, and the misrepresentation makes the strong correlation look
like an anticorrelation. I don't wonder that someone reading that
article would still tend to think the field is bogus. A few will see
through it. But a few isn't necessarily enough on Wikipedia, when
there is a dedicated faction, even though that factionn is actually
opposing general community consensus on how the encyclopedia is
supposed to be put together.
If cold fusion was held to the same conventional standards applied
to all other discoveries, people like Huizenga and Park would be
dismissed by every serious thinker. Even Wikipedia would fall in
line. Cold fusion is the only subject in the Scientific American
described in fact-free riffs of the imagination written by people
who brag that they know nothing about the subject! See:
<http://lenr-canr.org/News.htm#SciAmSlam>http://lenr-canr.org/News.htm#SciAmSlam
Now, Jed, consider what you've just pointed out. The editors at
Scientific American got it seriously wrong. Do you expect the editors
at Wikipedia to do better? The latter aren't professionals, they are
not trained to do what they are doing, and there is no serious
supervision. But there is another multidisciplinary journal that has
the same impact factor as Scientific American, that is getting it
right, and this, properly brought forward at the Wikipedia article,
will turn the tide. Naturwissenschaften.
When I started introducing NW sources, they tried to claim it was a
"life sciences journal," i.e., to make it appear they would know a
neutron from a neutrophil. Basically, these are editors who don't
know beans, they simply jump on any appearance that seems to promote
their agenda, which, in this case, didn't even have anything to do
with cold fusion, it had to do with trying to discredit an editor,
me. Where normal process was used, they would lose every time. So
they bypassed the process, but, in doing so, they had to invest major
resources and reveal the extent of their bias. See, Jed, it's all in
the record, and the truth tends to come out, eventually. What they
have done is really very visible, and if I had time, I'd have done
much more....
As Obama said in the debate about conservation: "It's like these
guys take pride in being ignorant."
It sure seems that way sometimes. Actually, in the case of one of
your favorite editors, Jed, what really happens is that if you expose
his ignorance, he retaliates. He'll shut up where his ignorance was
exposed, short term, but he accumulates every appearance of
misbehavior that he can find, and dumps it where it can do the most harm.
Cardinal Richelieu supposedly said (it's disputed): If you give me
six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find
something in them which will hang him. There is always some ways to
make activity look bad, if you don't care about truth.
We have gotten used to this mess. We forget how strange it is. We
take it for granted that Sci. Am. and other mass media will publish
articles about this one subject that are fact-free compendium of
stupid mistakes and absurd rumors. This is unprecedented. Of course
the mass media often gets things wrong, but not to this extent. I
expect you could search through 150 years of Sci. Am. and not find
any other articles about relatively simple experiments that are so bollixed up.
Quite possibly not. Jed, this is really a huge story, and it's amply
covered in what Wikipedia considers reliable source. But the "cabal"
seriously won't like it. And that's where they are truly vulnerable,
all that is necessary is to allow them to oppose and remove, what's
in reliable source at the same time that they insist on using weak
sources on the other side.
It's been pretty amusing. They would cite something from a source
that made cold fusion look bad, but when something else is put in
from that same source, they attacked the source as weak and ignorant
or biased. (Bart Simon was the example, but I've seen these people do
the same thing in many articles on many topics. Few people, though,
have the tenacity to prepare and present a case before the
Arbitration Committee, or even the lower levels of dispute
resolution, and the oligarchy has vigorously resisted attempts to set
up ways to level the playing field, for example, the Association of
Mediation Advocates, which was designed put together inexperienced
editors needing assistance in negotiating the Bystantine
"not-bureaucracy" of Wikipedia, with experienced editors who could
help them filter out what was proper from what was not, and to
present their cases well. You can imagine how popular this was with
the bullies!
