OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson <[email protected]> wrote: The phone caller, Charles Pooley's, chosen method of debating Dr. Storms > entailed an unfortunate but all-too-common tactic of attempting to carpet > bomb into oblivion the stated belief of the opposition.
I believe this may be caused partly by cognitive dissonance. That is to say, arguing with yourself. People such as Pooley exhibit other signs of arguing with themselves such as an active refusal to look at the literature. They go out of their way not to look at the data. For example, when I offered copies of papers by McKubre to Robert Park, he refused to touch them. He stepped back and let them fall to the floor. That seems like a forced action. It is not how ordinary adults behave. Most ordinarily polite people would say "thank you," take the paper, and throw it away a few minutes later. (Park has turned down papers from many others, including McKubre himself as I recall.) A second sign of this is the rote recitation and repetition of one's point of view, like a prayer. People who hold what I consider far-fetched religious beliefs must reinforce these beliefs constantly. (I mean *some* religious beliefs, not all.) They tune their radios into stations that repeat the same ideas day after day, year after year. They go to church and hear the same doctrines every week. People who believe more moderate religious ideas feel no need force themselves to recite or hear them repeated so often. A third sign of this is extreme mental effort to support one's point of view. Skeptics work much harder to get the wrong answer than they would to get the right answer. Here at Vortex we see Yugo and others twisting themselves into pretzel shapes to avoid reality. To explain away the facts they make up convoluted fantasies, which grow ever more complex and farfetched. That's hard work! I find it easy to assume assume that the scientific method works, and replicated, high sigma data means what it has always meant for the last 400 years. I assume calorimetry works, along with tritium detectors, x-ray film, and so on. That is the path of least resistance. Opponents must dream up endless reasons to show that cold fusion does not fit the rules. They resemble pre-Copernican astronomers who made up rules, and then exceptions to rules, and then exceptions to the exceptions to explain why planets could move retrograde. As Benjamin Franklin wrote: "The history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field, the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities." - Jed
