By 'we' I mean Vortex minus debunkers. Small 's' skeptics are welcome, but debunkers are not. We need to know where to draw the line. Which facts do we consider so obvious that when someone denies them, they're a debunker rather than small 's' skeptic.
Vortex rules: http://amasci.com/weird/vmore.html Note that "small-s skepticism" of the openminded sort is perfectly acceptable on Vortex-L. We crackpots don't want to be *completely* self-deluding. :) The ban here is aimed at Debunkers; at "certain disbeleif" and its self-superior and archly hostile results, and at the sort of "Skeptic" who angrily disbelieves all that is not solidly proved true, while carefully rejecting all new data and observations which conflict with the widely accepted theories of the time. On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 8:02 AM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote: > Kevin O'Malley <kevmol...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> To the Japanese in 1941, Americans seemed outlandish. To the skeptics >> who agree with Cude or Close, we are the ones disconnected from reality. We >> are illogical and even mentally ill thinking that we can "fuse hydrogen in >> a mason jar." I do not think it does any good getting angry at such >> people. It is important that you understand their mindset. >> > > >> ***Okay, Jed. What we need as a group is a minimum set of facts that we >> agree are incontrovertible. >> > > Sure, but we cannot expect people like Cude to agree with any of them. A > person can always find a reason to dismiss something. Cude says that the > tritium results may all be mistakes or fraud. Jones Beene accused him of > being intellectually dishonest, but I assume Cude is sincere. Bockris > tallied up tritium reports and said that over 100 labs detected it. If I > were Cude, this would give me pause. I find it impossible to imagine there > are so so many incompetent scientists, I cannot think of why scientists > would publish fake data that triggers attacks on their reputation by the > Washington Post. What would be the motive? But I am sure that Cude, and > Park, and the others sincerely believe that scientists are deliberately > trashing their own reputations by publishing fake data. > > > >> I would think it is that Pons & Fleischmann were careful >> electrochemists, the preeminent of their day. >> > > Of course they were, but no skeptic will agree. Fleischmann was the > president of the Electrochemical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society, > but Cude and the others are convinced he was a sloppy, mentally ill > criminal. That's what they say, and I do not think they would say it if > they did not believe it. > > > >> That the physicists who chose to debunk their findings were far from >> careful due to inexperience in electrochemistry and this led to their >> negative findings. >> > > There were many reasons experiments failed in 1989. Some of the failed > experiments were carefully done, but they used the wrong diagnostics. Most > of them looked for neutrons instead of heat. > > > >> That there have been 14,700 replications of the P-F anomolous heat >> effect. If not, then how many? 180, as per Storms and National >> Instruments? >> > > Those are two different tallies. The 14,700 is the number of individual > positive runs reported in the literature for all techniques, including glow > discharge. 180 is the number of laboratories reporting success. Some of > those labs saw excess heat many times. If 180 labs measure excess heat 10 > times each, that would be 1,800 positive runs in the Chinese tally. > > I do not know where the Chinese got their data. Presumably from published > papers. I have not gone through papers counting up positive and negative > runs. > > > >> What are the base minimum set of facts that we all agree on? >> > > If "we" include the skeptics there is not a single fact we all agree on. > Not one. Cude looks at Fig. 1 in the McKubre paper and says the peak at 94% > loading means nothing. I think he says it is the result of random effects > or cherry-picked data. I look at it and say it proves there is a > controlling parameter (loading) that cannot possibly cause artifactual > excess heat, so this proves the effect is real. I say that even if only 20% > achieve high loading, the other 80% are not relevant. Even if only one in a > million achieved high loading this would still prove the effect is real. > Cude looks at the preponderance of cells that do not achieve high loading > and he concludes that they prove this graph is meaningless noise. There is > absolutely no reconciling our points of view. > > From my point of view, his assertion is scientifically illiterate. He does > not seem to understand how graphs work, and what it means to say that data > is significant rather than noise. From his point of view, McKubre, Storms > and I have no idea what we are talking about and this graph is no more > significant than a "face of Jesus" burned into someone's toast. I gather he > thinks it is random noise that happens to peak at 94%, or it is fake data. > I cannot describe what he thinks, because I have not read his messages > carefully, but I am sure he honestly believes that Fig. 1 is meaningless. > > - Jed > >
