At 12:54 AM 2/11/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
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.
Some forms of mental illness are quite common, especially if we include minor manifestations. When it becomes an obsession, it definitely impacts sanity. I'll agree with the point about education; however, there is another aspect which education does not address, unless we start to mean by "education" some serious training in how to think.
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.
I've been unaware of the identities of the reviewers. Half the reviewers accepted the excess heat evidence. But collect a lot of experts, given them some literature to review and a one-day seminar, they are going to come up with a host of erroneous assumptions. Addressing those would take a lot more than a day. So if there is to be another panel, it should be more like the panels on climate change, with plenty of time to explore and develop consensus reports. The DoE panel was far too shallow as a process to address what had become some seriously entrenched ignorance.
Some of the reviewers clearly had their heads where the sun does not shine. Both other forms of skepticism are normal and to be expected and even welcomed.
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.
Okay, to take the other side for a moment: if entry into the field, those who attempt experiments is highly selective toward the gullible, and if those who then get negative results scratch their heads and don't publish (Can you see the headline? Scientist Confirms That Moon is Not Made of Green Cheese), then, indeed, it's possible that there could be *many* researchers who blow it.
And because of natural variations, then, one experiment might seem positive, or more than one, it depends on how many attempts are being made, and it would prove little or nothing. That CF results were all over the map lent credence to this view.
However, there are CF results that are not all over the map, that are consistent and that have not been refuted by contrary experimental work, and that's, most notably, that heat and helium production are correlated. As you know, that any helium is produced at all is extraordinary and, if the finding is real, proves nuclear reactions. But helium alone, without correlation to energy, is possibly challengeable due to the possibility of leakage and error. Many experiments, though, did careful calorimetry and looked for helium, and it is stunning that when excess energy was not found, helium was not found. Many of these cells were identical except for the "activity" of the cathode, and in these experiments, the amount of energy produced was not large enough to cause other effects, like, say, baking more helium out of present materials, or causing rupture of the cell integrity. That heat and helium are well-correlated, at a very interesting value (within the expected errors), is, in fact, conclusive, it validates both the helium result and the heat result as being, at least, roughly correct.
It's the smoking gun, showing nuclear ash. Ash from what reaction? Still unknown, in fact. Definitely not "thermonuclear fusion," though. That is where Krivit's "expose" is so crazy. Nobody thinks that thermonuclear fusion is going on in CF cells. If it's fusion, it's some other kind of fusion!
