Alan J Fletcher <a...@well.com> wrote:
> And apart from the usual MY response http://www.popsci.com/science/** > article/2012-10/andrea-rossis-**black-box#comment-147923<http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-10/andrea-rossis-black-box#comment-147923> Mary Yugo wrote here: His [Rossi's] "marks" must be investors and distributors who pay him for shares and fees in advance. This is speculation. Yugo does not actually know who these investors or distributors are, or whether they have paid, or how much. She speculates that such people exist and then (more-or-less asserts) that as a fact. She should have said, "I suppose . . ." or "In cases like this you sometimes find . . ." This is a strange mental habit some people have. You go from speculating to assuming that what you imagines must be a fact, with no intermediate evidence gathering. Conrad Black's biography of FDR has some glaring examples of this. It is a strange book. Black is an amateur historian. He is an opinionated, wealthy person, who is free to publish whatever he wants. The book has some sharp observations and thought-provoking ideas, but it is dangerous because he keeps dreaming up assumptions, changing them into facts, and then finally claiming that everyone alive at the time knew these were facts and agreed with his views. This is contractual history gone berserk. The worst example: Black says that U.S. and England could have successfully invaded France in 1943, but they waited until June 1944. Granted, some historians and some people at the time thought they might have, especially Stalin. He keeps repeating this assertion, until a few chapters later he has FDR, Eisenhower and Churchill "knowing" this as a fact in 1943, and trying to find ways to justify the delay, to fool the world. They agree with Black. Okay, think about Eisenhower's famous message that he drafted in case of failure: "Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. . . ." I can't imagine Black does not know about this message. Apparently Black imagines Eisenhower drafted this message and kept it secret for years just for show. Or just to fool future historians. There are many assertions about cold fusion by skeptics that are similarly far removed from reality, based on weird ideas of how people behave or what motivations they might have. Some skeptics assert that hundreds of professional scientists are deliberately publishing fraudulent data. They never say why these scientists would do that, or what benefit there might be. They ignore the fact that the scientists are excoriated for publishing this data. Sometimes they claim that scientists do this to become "famous" even though most cold fusion researchers labor in obscurity. The accusations do not add up. They remind me of the assertion made by some homophobic people that homosexuals "choose" their orientation. This begs a couple of well-known counterarguments: Given all of the opposition and persecution homosexuals faced in the past, why would anyone choose to be homosexual?!? Do heterosexual people choose their orientation? Specifically, did you, the person making this accusation, choose to be heterosexual? Black's book also has some egregious factual errors. For example, he casually states that Harry Hopkins was drunk on one occasion toward the end of his life. Hopkins was dying of cancer and could not drink, according to his biography. This is not a big deal, but anyone who writes a biography of FDR has to read that biography. Books like this are dangerous. They give you mistaken ideas. After you find several mistakes in a book, I think it is best to set it aside. I know a lot about FDR and I can spot many errors, but there may be errors in this book that slipped by me, which I have now added to my "knowledge." There is a 19th century quote ascribed to Twain and some other humorists of that era: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." - Jed
