At 01:57 PM 6/19/2011, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <<mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.com>a...@lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
Generally, what the record showed wasn't what some of the
participants thought. They were reacting to, not what had actually
been said, but how they had, themselves, interpreted it
In Landmark terms, they had collapsed what had happened with the
story about what happened. Then new stories are often created based
on the original stories, etc.
That is a sharp analysis.
Thanks. I've paid a lot for it, both in money and time. On the other
hand, Landmark is cheap compared to the alternatives.
He [Rossi] could apologize. What would he lose if he did? Nothing
that I can see!
It would be out of character.
Our "character" is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves, that we
act out for the world to see (as well as ourselves). It is one of the
biggest traps that keep us locked into our past.
And if we believe that others are trapped by their "character," we
are ourselves caught in a version of this trap, a belief that the
future is determined by the past.
While there may or may not be truth to this idea, the key to
understanding this is that, operating and maintaining the trap, is
the collapse of stories about the past with what actually happened.
Stories are inevitable. Believing them, turning them into "fact," is not.
Rossi's "character" is, in *our trap* -- as distinct from his --
something we created as a story from our experience with him. The
more we believe that story, the less capable we become of seeing
anything that would contradict it, and, as well, the more helpless we
become to transform it.
Once the pseudoskeptics created the story that cold fusion was a
delusion caused by wishful thinking, grandiosity, etc., then every
new piece of evidence was interpreted within that story, creating
more and more stories, all self-reinforcing and self-confirming. And,
of course, since they were dealing with "believers," who wouldn't
believe conclusive refutation anyway, why even bother doing the
experimental work to demonstrate "artifact"?
And within the CF community, we created a story about
"pseudoskeptics," a self-reinforcing interpretation that made our
task impossible, for how can we convince people who are rigidly
caught in their own illusion?
I'll declare that there is a path out of these traps, and let that be
enough for the moment.
One fascinating presentation at the MIT Colloquium was from Dr. Xing
Zhong Li, who showed a way of calculating fusion cross section that
was intended to be more accurate than normally used models. If I
understood him correctly, he's sliding this in because it's more
accurate than the other models, but it makes some rather different
predictions at very low energies.... In other words, he's
incorporating the knowledge of the field, and nailing it down to make
it more accurate. And then the surprise. I'm looking forward to
seeing his paper, which, I'm given to understand, will be published.
Li is a hot fusion physicist.
It is not about "right" and "wrong," that's all part of the problem.
I'll relate this to the illusion that there were "positive" and
"negative" experimental findings on cold fusion. When we know the
underlying science, all experiments confirm it, unless artifact is
clearly identified, and setting aside the fact that there may always
remain some mysteries. This much we can see, now, those early
"replication failures" were not replications and so they did not
fail. Replications "succeeded." The alleged "failures" are part of
the evidence establishing the parameter space. For example, loading
about about 90% was required.
As soon as people were looking for "confirmation," taking
experimental reports as "positive" and "negative," they were caught
in the trap.
Yeah, we all wanted to know. The trap is very human and very normal.
Recognizing it doesn't stop us from being vulnerable to it, but it
does allow moving on, and becoming available to new ideas and
information and new possibilities.
Look at this little piece of process with Krivit and Rossi. Krivit
finds "contradiction." I made the assumption that everyone was
telling the truth, and came up with an explanation. Rossi just
provided exactly that explanation. Now, that doesn't mean that it was
true, only that a harmonizing intepretation was possible that allowed
both pieces of apparently contradictory testimony to be true.
With cold fusion, what are the harmonizing intepretations that make
the vast bulk of the experimental evidence ("testimony of
researchers," as distinct from their intepretations, the stories that
they tell about what their work supposedly means) into a consistent
story about reality?
No story is reality, that we should always keep in mind. Good stories
are good at predicting results, usually. That's about it.
