At 03:30 PM 3/29/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
In an examination of arguments, all arguments should be presented
in such a way that those who believe the argument would say, "Yes,
that's what we believe."
I quote the skeptics verbatim. What they are saying is not
complicated or difficult to understand, so I am confident that I
have not misrepresented their arguments. However in many cases they
do not wish to own up to their own beliefs. That is why they deleted
this document as soon as I uploaded to Wikipedia, as I knew they
would (see the post-script):
<http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/cf/293wikipedia.html>http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/cf/293wikipedia.html
I do not think I have misrepresented any of the arguments in the
2004 DoE panel members' statements, except perhaps this one:
1. Theoretical objections to experimentally proven facts are a
violation of the scientific method
Naturally, some of them would dispute the notion that the facts are
experimentally proven.
The rejection of evidence by Wikipedia is an artifact of
dysfunctional Wikipedia process, well-known and understood in
general, but standing with any coherent method of addressing the
problem except wishful thinking on the part of the Arbitration Committee....
The article was "deleted" from mainspace, article space.
The article was userfied at my request. Here it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Abd/Cold_fusion_controversy
You can see the article history at
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User%3AAbd%2FCold_fusion_controversy&action=history
The article was never properly tagged with an deletion template, but
that didn't stop the process, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Cold_fusion_controversy
I recognize only one or two of the voters as long-term involved, and
even they are quite peripheral. No, Jed, the article didn't meet
qualifications for mainspace articles clearly enough. And the AfD
didn't attract long-term editors to make cogent arguments for keeping
it. I've seen many "controversies" articles deleted, what most
editors would want to see was the best of this information
incorporated in the main article, not set off in a separate article,
and only when the "controversy" information is so much that it
threatens to overwhelm the regular article would it be spun off. And
even when it's done properly, I've seen controversies articles
deleted, so great is the prejudice against them.
Behind all of this is, of course, a general prejudice against cold
fusion, so that it is pretty much assumed that anything
pro-cold-fusion is a fringe point of view.
You did do your work well, but without enough participation from the
other side. Some of what you did was certain to be challenged. The
place to work on this article would have been in user space, not in
mainspace. I can't assist until my topic ban runs out. When
Pcarbonn's ban ran out, he began proper participation but was banned
again, this time as a "community ban," which would probably have been
easy to overturn if Pcarbonn had elected to challenge it. I know how
to do it, and offered to assist, off-wiki, but Pcarbonn was by this
time totally burned out. I don't blame him. He has better things to
do, as do I. But I would still help anyway. The article in my user
space can be worked on, it could be developed to the point that it
would be acceptable in mainspace, and then there would be process to
move it back. I may, indeed, request permission from ArbComm to work
on that draft. I might get it. ArbComm is quirky and unpredictable,
which is, itself, a bad situation, typical of Wikipedia.
(ArbComm is quite predictable, but only from a political point of
view that assumes that the official policies and standing guidelines
mean very little.)
Others clearly state that even though the data seems strong but, as
reviewer 7 put it, "From a nuclear physics perspective, such
conclusions are not to be believed." I do not see how that can be
anything but a #1 error. Either you believe that strong data always
trumps theory, or you believe that theory can sometimes overrule it.
You can't have it both ways.
Reviewer 2 wrote: "It is hard to imagine how 23.8 MeV of excitation
energy, nearly 9 orders of magnitude more than in the case of the
Moessbauer effect, could be coupled to and transferred to the
phonons of the lattice!"
Yes. It is hard to understand. It may or may not be happening. We
first will need to establish if the thing is happening before it's
likely to see sufficient effort put into understanding it to make
that possible.
I list that as two errors in the table:
1. Theoretical objections to experimentally proven facts are a
violation of the scientific method
3. A reviewer's inability to imagine or understand a result is not a
valid reason to reject it.
Reviwer 5 gives also makes error #3:
[Hagelstein] page 3 [says] 'in no case was a calorimetric imbalance
observed (19 examples) where an electrode failed to achieve a bulk
average D/Pd loading of 0.90. However, all electrodes achieving a
loading of 0.95 or greater (15 examples) exhibited an heat excess
more than 3 times the measurement uncertainty'. If this is the case,
then I fail to understand why gaseous loading of Pd with D using up
to 3.1 GPa of D2 to achieve D/Pd ratios greater than 0.95, does not
lead to CF. Baranowski and coworkers (J. Less-Common Mets., 158
(1990) 347), who have had extensive experience with high pressure
loading of metals with H2 and D2, failed to observe any evidence of
excess heat in a system which is inherently simpler than the
electrochemical ones.
"I fail to understand" in this context is a polite way of saying "I
doubt it." This is not literally a confession that the author is
ignorant, or confused. The author expresses strong doubts elsewhere
in the statement. If this meant, literally, "I fail to understand"
("I don't get it!") that would be a reason to recuse oneself or not
reach any conclusion, positive or negative.
Well, the reviewer can be honest and say "I am not convinced," and
therefore make the obvious conclusion that -- for him! -- the
evidence is not "convincing."
Suppose we have a box of perfect evidence that should show to a
neutral observer that a fact is true. Now, we open the box and
present it to a panel of typical people. Suppose two-thirds of the
panel say that the evidence is "not convincing."
Is the evidence convincing, or not? Well, it did convince some, so it
is just that, convincing to some. Overall, it isn't convincing to
most. "Convincing" is not a quality of evidence, but of the
relationship of evidence to people and so, in addition to the primary
evidence, which could be a huge pile of numbers, requiring deep and
time-consuming analysis, we must also look at the process by which
the evidence is presented and examined. How the evidence is presented
could be just as important or even more important than the evidence itself!
And that's an art, how to present evidence in such a way as to make
it convincing. Scientists often are in disdain of this art, because
they know how it can be abused, but scientific process is not immune
to human failure, and it is human failure that makes polemic
necessary. It is possible to design polemic so that it does not stray
into pure advocacy; rather, it can "advocate" neutral attention and
facilitate it. That's not an easy taks, but I believe it can be done.
Part of doing this would be to incorporate in the "polemic" all
relevant opposing positions. That's part of what I'm talking about.
Hypertext is one way to approach this, with a document existing in
layers, with very little detail on the top, and detail increasing as
one drills down through the links.
The process of learning and exploring the topic has to be made easy,
so that when the reader encounters an obstacle, a point of objection
to what is being said, the reader can quickly uncover the basis for
the objectionable statement. And, indeed, we could easily do this
with a wiki, and that's exactly what I should do, create docuemnts
that explore these issues that anyone can edit, but subject to an
overall supervision that keeps it within certain standards. I'll use
MediaWiki, because quite a few people are familiar with the syntax.
Also, the assertion that an inherently simpler method of loading is
more likely to produce the effect makes no sense, since the evidence
indicates that various triggers and stimuli shown in McKubre's
equation accompany one loading method but not another. This is an
example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.
Yes. So the information must be presented in a document that
addresses *all* the objections likely to arise in the reader's mind,
quickly, and, where it doesn't, it invites the reader to criticize or
fix the problem. Remember, a subgoal is that all objections are
stated in such a way as those who beleive them will say, "Yes, this
is what we believe."
This won't be Wikipedia, this will be a managed wiki, with a
responsible editor, initially me. I'll move that control to a
"board," informal or otherwise, as the other people are available. I
haven't decided where to put it. It could be an FA/DP project hosted
at beyondpolitics.org, or it could be a business operation of
lomaxdesign.com/coldfusion. At BP, it would be a creative commons
license, I think. At Lomax Design Associates, I'd own it and be
legally responsible for it....
