On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 7:31 AM, Eugen Leitl <eu...@leitl.org> wrote:
> If you think there is merit to a skeptical point of view, why don't you > > write about it? > > Which would be in violation of Rule 2, as well. > > It seems that anything (to put it politely) is on-topic here but > a critical view on LENR. That pushes the list into non-worthwhile > territory for me as well. > I can't speak for Bill, and it's his forum. But I do not think the intention is to gather a bunch of people who already agree with one another. It seems to me that the goal is to have a learning process, where people listen to one another and try to achieve mutual understanding, at least to some degree, on the basic facts being debated. Polemical skeptics disrupt such a learning process. Their method is assertion rather than trying to advance mutual understanding of the basic facts to be understood: there are no convincing experiments, there is zero credible evidence, every experimental result lies beneath the threshold of detection, and, by implication, there are no cold fusion researchers who can carry out a credible experiment. Here there has been little to no attempt to understand the history or the details of actual experiments. It's all over-broad generalization. To agree or disagree with it, you have to set aside a great deal of what you've already gone over and start from the very beginning. (Eg.: you're mistaken, as there are clearly competent people among the cold fusion scientists, and so-and-so seems to be seeing something above the threshold of background. The debater is urged to go read a single paper by the author on the topic.) Such over-broad generalizations are the stuff for other forums such as moletrap. You can't build anything upon it other than a kind of canonical skeptical pseudo-religious discourse. Learning about the actual interesting details to discussed and disputed is disrupted. The only statements that are examined in detail are too basic to be interesting. I think a critical view on LENR is fine, but what is to be avoided is a "debunking" mode which employs such generalizations. A LENR skeptic (with the small "s") is very welcome by me (this is obviously not my list). But address specific details; do not rely on ad hominem or over-broad generalizations. Joshua Cude has been doing exactly those things. It's a pity, too, because he's obviously smart. I hope smart skeptics here do not draw the wrong lessons from the current exchange, because it's easy to miss the point at issue -- that what is wanted is a commitment to mutual understanding of the basic facts rather than polemical assertion of statements that only a coterie of hardcore skeptics can get on board with. It's not all that complex, in the final analysis. People just need to respect one another's intelligence. Eric
