At 07:55 PM 1/13/2013, James Bowery wrote:
In behavioral psych, the term is "variable ratio reinforcement" for the kind of reinforcement schedule, your refer to, that produces long-persisting behaviors/models/beliefs. Pseudoskeptics would, undoubtedly, like to point to that as an explanation for why cold fusion researchers are irrational.
No doubt. However, the premise hasn't been established, which is why they are called "pseudoskeptics." They believe in this imagined state, "other irrational people."
If we view cold fusion researchers as mice in a Skinner Box pressing a lever for food pellets, where food pellets are cases of observed nuclear products such as excess heat, then clearly they would be correct, except for two things: the mouse isn't irrational and the implied payoff of a cold fusion event is far greater than a food pellet is to a mouse.
I have some mice, my kids really wanted them, and they do like their food. So I don't know.
As Norman Ramsey pointed out in his preamble to the DoE's original review of cold fusion: "However, even a single short but valid cold fusion period would be revolutionary."
Right. But sometimes the "revolution" is in our grave, as we watch the world continue to ignore the obvious.
The payoff for cold fusion, if true, is so huge that it would be a mistake of monstrous proportions to invest anything less than an enormous amount of resources in determining that it could not be reproduced, once there was evidence for it.
Well, that argument would bankrupt us if applied to every possibility. Fortunately, the basic research needed as a first step isn't that expensive. Truly a drop in the bucket compared to what is being spent on hot fusion research, when the latter may *never* pay off. That program developed a life of its own, beyond all reason.
Cold fusion remains speculative as a practical power source. However, I'd say the odds are better than hot fusion, and the only reason I propose waiting for the basic research results is because we need to know what the mechanism is before planning a true "assault" on the problem. Otherwise we could waste billions, just like the hot fusion people (though for a different reason; they do have theory, they only have an enormous engineering problem.)
PS: After a brief web search, there are competing theories out there for the evolution of confirmation bias. One is the "payoff" bias, that demands taking into account the risk adjusted value of a behavior. I tend to go along with that. There is another theory that it originates in social interactions of advocacy. The idea that reasoning is primarily social seems unwarranted and tendentious. If confirmation bias is adaptive for the individual interacting with nature, one needn't explain its persistence in the social setting.
Mmmm.... socially, "looking good" is a powerful motivator, so I wouldn't be so sure about dismissing that. It can become internalized, so the same behavior can occur even when nobody else is looking.
The converse, as was presented in the podcast, is not true. Individuals interact with nature all the time, even though they are within a social setting. It seems therefore that not only William of Ockham, but reality demands some explanation of individual confirmation bias.
Well, quibble: "reality" never demands explanations, we do. Reality just is. It needs no explanation at all, to do the most amazing, wondrously complex, beautiful things.
