I agree with precisely what you say. No vote, nor market, nor consensus decide what is true of false...
however the problem is not what IS, but what IS ACCEPTED, and what you DO. Taleb moto about "flesh in the game" is that if you have buck or flesh in the game, you invest more energy to control risk and expectation. What Roland Benabou said is that it is not enough... that you can be visibly sure, yet have all the data proving the contrary. I refuse to bet on LENR, and I'm afraid to invest, not because it might be false (I'm more afraid of asteroid rain ;-> ), but because I know there is quite no limit to delusion, and I may lose while being right. North Korea show how far it can go. LENR show it lesser way. No structural difference : irrational beliefs, terror, local interest, mass who follow a frightened elite, and no real boss, not even the dictator himself who is a slave of the system like the queen of bees. My daughter love to look at the film "Coraline" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coraline_(film) at the end Coraline have to bet with the witch that she can find the eyes of the kids and her parents to be freed, or stay imprisoned have her eyes buttoned... The cats and the kids smartly explain her that the witch will accept the bet but will never respect it if she lose. The nay-believers of official science behave that way. Don't play poker with a witch, a russian mafioso, or a physics apparatchik. Vote and Market are not scientific instruments, but sociological instruments. in fact market is both an instruments, and a way to modify the system. LENR+ by allowing companies, scientists, engineers, economist, to make big bucks have allowed them to work for the hope of a reward, instead of pushing them to flee to avoid the terror of the scientific inquisition. Like the cat of Coraline, capitalist have no fear of witch, or physicists opinion. note that about improbable bets, taleb not only say that you should bet on improbable events, provided you know you will lose (but less than anticipated), but he also says that you should not use a fixed reward type of bet, but a "real life" unlimited reward, limited loss, option like investing is research, in startups... theatricalized bets are not so much realist , and the blackswan theory does not hold so well... 2013/7/29 Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> > I wrote: > > >> No, it is not at all useful. In 1989, there were two people in the world >> who knew about cold fusion: Fleischmann and Pons. What would be the >> predictive value of asking others whether it is existed? >> > > To give another dramatic example, suppose at 1:00 pm on the afternoon of > December 17, 1903, you were take a poll about whether man can fly. Suppose > you asked people to place bets as to whether airplanes exist. Out of the > 1.6 billion people in the world alive on that day, at that moment, the only > ones who had ANY KNOWLEDGE of that question were Wilbur and Orville Wright > and the members of the Kitty Hawk coast guard who had helped them fly that > morning. In all the world, there was not another soul who knew the facts or > was qualified to address the question. The opinions of other people were > worthless. Meaningless. All the money in the world placed in a bet would > mean nothing. There was an undeveloped glass plate photograph showing the > first flight: > > http://www.uscg.mil/history/gifs/Kitty_Hawk.jpg > > That photograph was proof. It overruled all opinions, all money, all > textbooks, and the previous 200,000 years of human technology. A > thermocouple reading from a cold fusion experiment in 1989 overrules every > member of the human race, including every scientist. Once experiments are > replicated at high signal to noise ratios, all bets are off. The issue is > settled forever. There is no appeal, and it makes no difference how many > people disagree, or how many fail to understand calorimetry or the laws of > thermodynamics. The rules of science in such clear-cut cases are objective > and the proof is as indisputable as that photograph. > > - Jed > >
