This document by Bill Beaty is well worth reviewing, if the reader is
not familiar with it.
http://amasci.com/freenrg/rules1.html
This doesn't just apply to inventors. Similar phenomena happen with
pseudoskeptics, and *who isn't pseudoskeptical* on occasion, at
least? A genuine skeptic does not forget to be skeptical of self.
Bill lays out the psychology quite well.
I received today an announcement of a remarkable video.
["Kim Sand," salsasas3996@ ...] wrote, to a list of prominent Vo participants:
In this video series the currently accepted theories of physics and
astrophysics are shaken to the core by a radical new theory of the
fundamental forces in all matter.
You will be amazed as a magnetic model of the dome at CERN is used
to create a 100 mm diameter plasma Sun with a 300 mm diameter
equatorial disc of plasma around it!
All the plasma videos are actual footage with no enhancement or
manipulation other than speed. In other words, this is real thing.
Hard to believe, but it is all true.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EPlyiW-xGI
(I had no problem believing that the videos were real and not fake,
though, of course, some are "constructed." Not a problem.)
The basic test device that LaPoint uses is a thing of wonder, the
kind of thing I'd have spent months playing with when I was young.
The astrophysical images are beautiful, the video is eye candy.
The video had the best production values I've seen in the alternative
science field. Yet my mind was screaming at me, "Pseudoscience!"!
Maybe. Maybe he has found something. However, I see nothing like an
adequate explanation of the experimental *basis* for his theory, and
I certainly don't see the attitude that Bill is pointing to, an
attitude of self-skepticism. I see no specific testable predictions
(the lack of such is a basic characteristic of "pseudoscience"). What
it looks to me like is that the theorist has discovered, in fact, a
*pattern* that matches many phenomena. He hasn't shown how this
pattern explains *anything*. At least not to me!
I'm reminded of the claims of Rashad Khalifa, whom I knew. He
believed he had found a pattern in letter and word frequencies in the
Qur'an. I know almost exactly what led him to that, there was a minor
statistical anomaly that he'd discovered. As soon as he believed that
the anomaly was real evidence of a hidden message, he started to see
it more and more. He became convinced that he had made a monumental
discovery, that, in fact, he was specially chosen by God to deliver
this to the world. He paid with his life for this belief.
I was able, years later, when he was assassinated and I tried to
verify his work, to see exactly what he had done. Counting words and
letters in the Qur'an is nowhere near as simple as people might
think, one must make choices. He made the choices that confirmed his
pattern. That was, in his mind, the "correct way to count." But every
time he made such a choice, he constrained future choices.
Eventually, when he still found "contradictions" to his theory (based
on discovered counting errors in his prior claims), he started to
"correct" the text of the Qur'an to match his theory. And he always
found some excuse for his choices or his later "corrections."
The human mind is a pattern-recognition machine, a very efficient and
powerful one. We can readily find patterns in random data. For a
scientific theory, we must do more than see a pattern. We must then,
from the pattern we have detected, make predictions that can test the
pattern, and we must keep thinking about how we might be wrong,
rather than about how we might be right.
Bill gets it right. The "scientific" explorer works as hard as
possible to *refute* the new discovery, and documents that work
meticulously. Because the *mind* -- which very much wants to be
"successful," and we love to be "right" -- will forget all contrary
evidence and only remember confirmation.
