Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: I haven't seen any attempt at exploring the roots of belief with Huizenga. > In a way, his opponents were naive, imagining that if they could just > present the clear argument, he'd fall over.
I do not know anyone who thought that! The radio discussions were not a serious attempt at debate. Plus, as McKubre, I and several others have said, we could do a better job presenting the skeptical side than Huizenga did. > If there are 1,000 that only proves that there are at least 1,000 >> incompetent or fraudulent scientists in the world. Park seems perfectly >> willing to believe that, and unsurprised by it. >> > > It's possible, surely. However, if Park is cornered into admitting that > this is his position, he's toast. At least he's toast among those that have > seen the debate.... I am pretty sure he has said that, and he would probably not mind repeating it. Ask him! Some things I would not accuse him of include evasiveness and inconsistency. He has stuck to his story. He is aware that hundreds of papers have been published. He does not seem fazed by that. Last I heard, he still says they are all wrong. But you have to define this carefully, because in some ways thousands of scientists can indeed be wrong. What I am saying applies *only* and * narrowly* to professional experimentalists: 1. Thousands of scientists can be wrong about theory or about subjects outside their expertise. 2. Thousands of amateur experimentalists can be wrong about, say, perpetual motion machines. Park, Slakey (APS) and others say that all cold fusion researchers are demented or criminal amateur perpetual motion machine fanatics. They are "a cult of fervent half-wits," as Slakey puts it. Okay, this is plausible. There are thousands of fervent half-wits who imagine themselves to be scientists, such as people who oppose vaccination. But, in my opinion, a careful examination of the literature shows this is not the case with cold fusion. However, Park has not read the literature. Not carefully; not even in a quick perusal. Not one paper. That's what he told McKubre and me. He and other prominent skeptics say they do not need to read anything because anyone can see it is impossible nonsense. They say that anyone with the slightest knowledge of fusion knows there have to be neutrons and since Fleischmann and the other cold fusion researchers do not know this, that proves they are ignorant, crazy fools. * As I said, this is how I would deal with reports of people flapping their arms and flying, or the wife of the Japanese Prime Minister claiming she eats the sun's energy every morning. This is the level of contempt the skeptics feel toward cold fusion. They are not secretly reading papers and quaking in their boots, afraid that people will find out they are wrong. That thought has never crossed their mind -- they say. I have no reason to doubt it. If they had an inkling they might be wrong, why would they be so bold? Surely they would hedge their bets and make a few supportive comments. Years ago, Krivit detected a note of this in Park's comments, but I didn't. Other skeptics explicitly state that thousands of replications would not sway them. An odd version of that idea was expressed by R. Ballinger (MIT Plasma Fusion lab): "It would not matter to me if a thousand other investigations were to subsequently perform experiments that see excess heat. These results may all be correct, but it would be an insult to these investigators to connect them with Pons and Fleischmann. . . . Putting the 'Cold Fusion' issue on the same page with Wien, Rayleigh-Jeans, Davison Germer, Einstein, and Planck is analogous to comparing a Dick Tracy comic book story with the Bible." He seemed to say that the replications might be valid even though the original claim is wrong, but I doubt that's what he had in mind. (As I recall this was a conversation with Gene Mallove and I suppose he got a little mixed up as he was talking.) Of course, there is another form of self-selection. Park is selecting his > arguments consistently to produce the same conclusion. Note that "self-selected" in the sense I used is social science jargon referring to groups of people. Typically this refers to "self-selected respondents" to an opinion poll. Such polls are often meaningless. He's reasoning from conclusions. I call that paranoia. > > In short, and to use even more technical language, he's crazy. Seriously, reasoning from conclusions is so common that I think it is normal and therefore sane by definition. It is caused by inadequate education, not mental illness. So are other widespread logical fallacies. Most people never learn these things. That includes most modern scientists, including the famous ones on the 2004 DoE panel. Their comments are riddled with elementary errors in logic and the scientific method. As I mentioned, Melich and I spent an afternoon combing through the panelist's comments, and it was like shooting fish in a barrel. These people are masters of advanced technique without knowing the basics. This seems outlandish but it is true. Such people have been common throughout history, and they still are today: surgeons who do not wash their hands; programmers who write spaghetti code; investment bankers who think that real estate values never fall. Naturally, there are also inept experimentalists, including some who got false positive cold fusion results. But they cannot *all* be inept, and if even one is right, then cold fusion is real. - Jed - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - * Such dismissive attitudes have always been common, and I expect they always will be. The New York Times in 1920 is a classic example: "That Professor Goddard, with his 'chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react -- to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." Generally speaking, a person's level of certainty about groundbreaking science is inversely proportional to his knowledge of it. This goes for both supporters and opponents.
