(By the way, this list now includes fpur or five Stephens of one spelling or another, and either two or three Stephen Lawrence's.)
Jed Rothwell wrote: > Lawrence de Bivort wrote: > >> Yes. It is human nature when things are complicated and much unseen to >> conclude that the situation must be caused by a cabal or a conspiracy. > > The situations with cold fusion and global warming denial do not seem > complicated or "unseen" to me. I don't know much about global warming > politics, but I know who is denying cold fusion, and what motivates > them. It is not because they work for "big oil" or anything like that. > One of the infuriating things about this situation is that the main > reasons people attack cold fusion are trivial, and personal. > > Opposition is mostly driving by people and institutions who went out on > a limb denying it back 1989. Most are too lazy or stupid to take a > second look. Lemonick, the guy at Time, is so dumb he could not > understand a simple cold fusion paper. (He really is astoundingly > stupid, as you see from the letters I posted in the News section. You > wonder how he ended up as science editor at a major U.S. magazine!) A > few, such as Robert Park, are so ego driven they don't want to take > another look because they fear being ridiculed if they admit they were > wrong. > > Most others just parrot what they read in Wikipedia. Cold fusion aside, this is actually not a completely stupid thing to do. Those who "just parrot Wikipedia" are never guilty of believing we didn't go to the Moon, or there is no global warming, or the world is actually hollow and we live on the inside, or any of a host of other totally idiotic beliefs which crop up repeatedly and which are supported by a host of totally off-base web pages. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and as such it's really rather good. It presents the mainstream point of view, and that is nearly always a good place to *start* when learning about any field. Unfortunately Wikipedia is frequently treated as a "final authority", which it isn't; no encyclopedia is. Set your expectations for Wikipedia by what you find in the Encyclopedia Americana, and you will probably not be disappointed. And that appears to be the "conventional model" which those running Wiki are trying to follow. Their iron rule about "no research" is extremely significant in this regard; it sets off Wikipedia from nearly all "normal" websites. Ruling out anything which smacks of research seems to be typical behavior for a conventional encyclopedia, but it would be totally weird for Wiki to do that if they thought of themselves as any sort of super-journal. All sorts of journals, newspapers included, are happy to go the "research" route now and then. If, instead of the Americana, you compare Wikipedia to the "Final Encyclopedia" in Gordon Dickson's stories, you will, of course, be sorely disappointed.
