It is a judgement call. ***Then, since this is Bill Beaty's forum, it is up to him to come up with the set of facts that we consider to be the watershed between debunkers and small-s skeptics. I have posted what I consider to be the base set and will proceed from it until Bill weighs in. Others can characterize my approach as churlish all they want, but I don't see them putting in a base set of facts. Sneering against vorts IS against the rules, but being 'churlish' when someone blithely walks over a base set of facts is not against the rules.
How many replications does it take to ensure an effect is real? .... Somewhere between 10 replications and 180, it becomes irrational to deny the effect is real. Is that number 15? 20? 50? ***We can proceed with the same probability math I used upthread. If one considers it to be 1/3 chance of generating a false-positive excess heat event, then you take that 1/3 to the power of how many replications are on record. That's the probability of it being an artifact, and it will be far less than the mathematically designed probability of 10^-50 regardless of what number of replications are settled upon. Let's say it's 30 labs and they've replicated it 10 times per lab (It's highly doubtful that 30 labs would replicate it only once each lab). Then it's (1/3)^300. Joshua Cude thought it was better than 5/6 chance of false-positive, which has never happened in the history of science and would be a great phenomenon to investigate in and of itself. Also, he never gives a figure of how many replications have made it under the wire, because then he would have to admit that this is not really a pathological science. So all we really need is for Bill to weigh in on how many replications are considered "obvious". And what the chances of generating false-positives are. From my readings, the number of true false positives appears to be far less than 1/100. Perhaps Ed can shed some light on this. On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 2:37 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote: > Kevin O'Malley <kevmol...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 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. >> > > It is a judgement call. > > Science is objective, yet at the finest level of detail, it is a judgement > call. It has a strange duality. The key question has always been: > > How many replications does it take to ensure an effect is real? > > Everyone will have a different answer. A knowledgeable person will want to > look at the papers, and evaluate the skills of the researchers, the choice > of instruments, the signal to noise ratios and so on. For an experimental > finding as surprising as cold fusion, I think most people will demand 5 or > 10 "quality" replications from professional labs. What constitutes > "quality" is partly matter of opinion. > > Somewhere between 10 replications and 180, it becomes irrational to deny > the effect is real. Is that number 15? 20? 50? Only you can decide, but I > would say that by 1990 there were so many replications of heat and tritium > that any continued doubts were irrational. > > A Bayesian analysis sheds some light on this. (See Johnson and Melich). > Still, deciding exactly where you draw the line becomes a little like > Mandelbrot's question: "how long is the coast of England?" The closer you > look, the fuzzier it becomes. > > - Jed > >
