At 01:41 PM 2/21/2011, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
I don't know about Joshua, but a report of an experiment with no details given sure doesn't convince *me*, but maybe that makes me a pathological skeptic, too, eh?
Of course not. That was hyperbole on Jed's part. He might be right, if Joshua is very knowledgeable. He's, so far, parroting some pieces of the pseudoskeptical line, but that's understandable. After all, the pseudoskeptics dominated coverage in media for twenty years.
However, this is what I find fascinating. If you just read mainstream peer-reviewed journals, you don't find this imbalance. You can find, in peripheral journals, tertiary references to cold fusion as being an example of pathological science, but these are not reports by experts in the relevant fields, they are people studying other things who use the example as if it were an established thing.
But the thing is *not* established by what's in peer-reviewed mainstream journals. Quite the opposite. There is an *impression* that the rejection was established. That may have largely been created by the 1989 U.S. DoE review, which was highly negative in reality (much more negative than the report they issued implied, as to the strong majority position). That review took place only a few months after the announcement, before the positive replications started to come in! It was highly imbalanced, representing what seems to me like a somewhat reasonable skeptical position *at the time.*
And then it was treated as if the conclusions were written in stone. And when it says that the experiment could not be reproduced -- which was true for a few months! -- that has been quoted over and over, long after it became preposterous.
