This annoying trick is described on p. 62 of a marvelous little book
by Darrell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics" (1954, now in its 39th printing).
This book was printed the year I was born. As I recall, my mother
gave me a copy as a child with the admonition: "grown-ups sometimes
lie." In other words, Krivit does not know any tricks that I didn't
learn at my mother's knee.
I am fond of petite women, short poems, and little books. To learn
how to write, read Strunk and White, "The Elements of Style." To
learn how to bamboozle people with numbers, read Huff.
Well, I was ten in 1954, and I think I read the book before I was in
high school, and it made a strong impression on me.
Krivit's presentation is full of deceptive polemic, and if a reader
is careful, it can be detected from the presentation itself.
Krivit presents statements from researchers that he thinks
preposterous, misleading, deceptive.
Slide 25:
Explanation 2
Providential Decree
"Heat and Helium-4 is the Main Reaction Channel.
All other LENR phenomena are minor effects
(-Bob Bass, March 7, 2009, Private Communications)
They "Know" That
No Other Energetic Phenomena
Exists in LENR Cells
No, that's not what Mr. Bass said. He said that other energetic
phenomena would be minor effects. I'm not going to come to a
conclusion, myself, that there are no other major effects, but the
evidence is quite strong that the "main reaction channel" is one
which takes in deuterium and which leaves behind helium. How it does
that is entirely another matter.
Krivit's slides aren't journalism. They are polemic, trying to prove
his Big Point. Which is?
I can tell you what I think the average reader will get from it. They
Are Lying To Us.
And then, since the people allegedly lying to us are the foremost
cold fusion researchers, what will this reader take away as a
conclusion about cold fusion? I suggest that it's likely to be that
the research results can't be trusted. In fact, however, the central
results of the research aren't being challenged by Krivit, he's going
after details that seem Very Very Important to him but which,
overall, aren't, just as it wasn't newsworthy that Fleischmann had a
cold and didn't want to see him in England, which Krivit turned into
a Big Expose of How the Quack Doctor behind Energetic Technologies is
Failing to Help Fleischmann with Parkinson's Disease. (Because he
catches cold?)
(Dardik is a quack? That's a cheap shot, and if anyone wants to know
better the truth, I'd suggest reading Making Waves, by Roger Lewin,
it's quite a story. Dardik is *complicated*.)
