Lennart Thornros <[email protected]> wrote: Jed, glad you can see that the government cannot just select who is the > expert. >
Neither can corporations, universities or individual philanthropists. Problems such as the Dunning-Kruger effect often prevent it. Of course governments and other institutions succeed sometimes. We would not have cold fusion if institutions such as the University of Utah did not have enlightened administrators, especially Peterson: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/PetersonCtheguardia.pdf He gets a large share of the credit for cold fusion. As I said before, we would not have lasers or computers if governments were not often good at selecting experts. I hope you can find the conclusion that it is only people that can get > results. > No, individual people are no better than institutional methods. In most cases they are worse. For example, institutions such as national laboratories have strict internal peer review processes which tend to weed out bad ideas. They are better at this than most individual people. Next conclusion could be; that if people are positioned in a comfortable > way, with very little impact from the result achieved, they will tend to > avoid risk taking. CYA becomes the norm. > That is just as true in corporations, universities and elsewhere. But I do not think it is an important factor. If it were, wealthy people would never work hard, do good science, or take risks because they are comfortable. I know many hard-working wealthy people. Your argument to why the people addressed are the wrong people is very > typical. > It is just as typical of individual judgement as institutional judgement. Scientists in private life who have no decision making roles at all are just as biased against cold fusion as the DoE administrators are. > In other words there is no way we can ask the government what will happen > with the climate. Impact by Exxon, Goldman Sachs and all the others will > impact the response. > It will also be impacted by the professional researchers at the NOAA and other climatologists. All policy decisions, and the funding of any program is always affected by politics, greed, money and other factors. This is true in government, in private corporations and when individuals fund research. It is true even when individuals fund themselves. When Patterson, Rossi, Storms and others funded their own research by themselves, their decisions were affected by political factors and money, and by their own biases and weaknesses. There are always powerful interests opposing every change, every new technology, and every improvement to safety and public health. The tobacco interests tried to prevent society from learning that cigarettes cause cancer, and to try to prevent antismoking campaigns. It succeeded for a long time but eventually doctors and others won out, and smoking declined. > Going back to the Paris meeting; do you think there will be anything > positive coming out of that? There is a bunch of politicians, influential > economic interest and a lot of people cashing in perks meeting with a few > scientists. > If there are no meetings at all, and the politicians and people with money never discuss these issues with scientists then I am sure there will be no progress. No policy and no thought to the future can only result in stasis. - Jed
