At 09:27 AM 5/27/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
You do know that the dyed-in-the-wool skeptics think the article is
hopelessly biased toward cold fusion, right?
Sure, and creationists think the Wikipedia article on evolution is
hopelessly biased. However, they are wrong and their opinions count
for nothing. In science, all issues must be decided by the weight of
experimental evidence. If Wikipedia uses some other standard then it
cannot be used to describe scientific subjects. No argument can be
settled and no progress made unless you abide by this rule:
experiments are the only authority.
There is a problem with your view, Jed. You are proposing an absolute
standard for deciding issues but no mechanism for the decision. You
left out *who* and *how* such decisions are made. Indeed, you are
thinking analogously to the anti-fringe cabal, sorry to inform you!
They believe, generally, that "scientific consensus" should be the
standard, which, they also believe, will be shown by the best
literature, the most evidence, etc. But, again, they leave out how
the judgment is made.
Cold fusion is a relatively unusual -- but not unique -- situation.
The bulk of the literature favors it, even if we restrict this to
peer-reviewed literature, and even if we restrict it to peer-reviewed
secondary sources, but the cabal is aligned with knee-jerk majority
view among "scientists," and many of them are scientists or students
of science in some fashion. They don't read the literature on cold
fusion because they consider it a waste of time, after all, they
believe, it was shown to be bogus in 1989, and even though the
fanatics managed to pull the wool over the eyes of the DoE in 2004 to
get another review -- what a waste of time and taxpayer dollars! --
that review came up with "much the same conclusions as in 1989."
And they don't read any more deeply than that phrase from the
summary, and they don't notice that both 1989 and 2004 recommended
further research, they simply "know" that 1989 was rejection, thus
when they read the above, they assume that 2004 was likewise.
But Wikipedia actually has guidelines to cover this, and there was an
Arbitration case where this cabal lost big, at least officially. But
ArbComm is constitutionally incapable of taking on a cabal, they know
it, and they are terrified of cabals, to the extent that a relatively
innocent group of editors interested in Eastern Europe were
sanctioned, banned, and an excellent administrator lost his
privileges, because they had a mailing list and *horrors* discussed
Wikipedia activity and cooperated. In fact, their cooperation was
almost always benign, where as the anti-fringe faction was violating
policy right and left.
What they would do, mostly, is exclude material that was found in
reliable source. That's what they did with Cold fusion. Officially,
the response to possible biased or misleading material in reliable
source is to balance it with other material from reliable source, and
to place the contradictions in apposition to each other, letting the
reader decide.
But (1) this faction doesn't trust the readers.
and (2) they believe that fringe science, being utterly rejected by
consensus, isn't balanced, because no sensible scientist will waste
his time writing about it. This is, of course, inaccurate, grossly
inaccurate, when the alleged "fringe scientists" are publishing in
non-fringe journals, but these guys aren't the brightest bulbs in the pack.
Given that the believe cold fusion was conclusively rejected twenty
years ago, and that nobody sensible even considers it, because it is
*obviously* impossible, they see the material in the Wikipedia
article that, on the face, "waters down" this rejection or shows that
research is continuing, is "coddling" fringe fanatics. And misleading
readers. And they actually believe this, I'm pretty well convinced.
Some of them, such as Enric Naval, are utterly ignorant of science, I
ended up working on Oppenheimer-Phillips process with him, and it was
embarrassing. This editor was one of your major enemies there, Jed,
as well as mine. The reason" We made it painfully obvious that he
was, to use the technical term, an idiot. He didn't know the
difference between a nucleus and a molecule. He got a decimal point
so far off that he wrote a size for a deuteron that would make it
visible to the naked eye. ScienceApologist saw this coming down, and
he was just coming off his ban, and he got special ArbComm permission
to work on that article. And, together, we made a quite good article,
I think. And they tried to ding me for writing about cold fusion....
But I actually worked with SA, and, because he did understand the
science, the results were good, there. Pcarboon, likewise, seems to
have been able to work with SA. It wasn't SA that was really the
problem, SA would just slow us down -- which may be good!
The problem was the ignorant science fanboys. And, unfortunately,
that described much of the administrative cabal, and even, to some
extent, ArbComm. They didn't and don't have time to read the sources
themselves (except rarely they do it). Rather, they make knee-jerk
judgments of behavior. You were a sitting duck for them, Jed, because
you are frank and unrestrained, often. I don't blame you for calling
idiots idiots, so to speak, but the consequences could be expected.
With me, the situation was much more complicated, and involves
politics around the global warming set of articles.
I tend to anticipate what will be consensus next year. Gets me in
trouble, this wasn't the first time. But I'm careful, and I did not
actually break policy, but when you have two dozen editors yelling at
you for being a point-of-view pusher, with half of them being
administrators, ArbComm may not notice, till much later, that this is
a coherent and idenfifiable faction with an axe to grind. Very
difficult to combat. It's happening, those editors are more or less on the run.
But Wikipedia process is so horrifically inefficient that it's taking
years for them to reap what they sowed. The inefficiency is the real
problem. And how that came to be is a whole other, and long story. In
short: it just grew that way.
Lots of people know it, including peoploe with "powerful" positions.
I can penetrate the oligarchy, given time. They are not, generally,
badly motivated, but it takes *lots* of time to get through
entrenched opinions. My main agenda, from the first, was certainly
not cold fusion, but improved Wikipedia process. As you know, my
first involvement with you and with cold fusion was in noticing an
abusive blacklisting. That work is unfinished. I got an ArbComm
ruling that, indeed, the blacklisting was improper, but that's
doesn't automatically fix it, that's not the way Wikipedia works.
When I get around to it, I suspect, the global blacklisting at meta
will be undone. It really doesn't make sense, and it's in violation
of policy.... but thte meta administrators don't like to admit error,
that became obvious from reviewing a number of cases of improper
blacklisting. Shoot down the orignal reasons for the blacklisting,
they make up more, going to sometimes preposterous lengths.
You have to remember, most of the administrators are literally kids.
With some subjects it is not clear where the weight of experimental
evidence lies. Some experiments are difficult to interpret, or
inconclusive. After 1990 that was not a problem with cold fusion.
Well, I'd put the place of no return the point where Miles' work on
heat/helium was confirmed, at that point, the preponderance of the
evidence was favorable. Huizenga noticed Miles and wrote about the
significance, for sure. But I think he was losing it by then, if not
long before, so he never revisited the issue, as far as I know.
Discovery of the ash correlated with the heat nailed it as fusion,
though there was (and is) room for some nuclear reactions that some
don't call "fusion," though I think that's silly. At that point, the
clear responsibility of the scientific community would have been to
re-engage and either show how that evidence was defective, with real
experiment to back it up, i.e., confirming the result but then
showing the true cause as other than nuclear reactions, or
confirming. They didn't do that. They abandoned the field, but still
convinced that they were right.
And then draggad along everyone else who assumes that "scientific
consensus" can be trusted, but who doesn't look at what that actually
means. Properly, it means the consensus of the knowledgeable, and you
can't be knowledgeable on the topic of cold fusion unless you know
the literature and what has been reported.
N-rays and polywater were killed by actual experiment, showing and
demonstrating the nature of th eerror. As you know, that was never
done with cold fusion. It was rejected for theoretical reasons, and
Huizenga was quite explicit about this. Theory can be incorrect, or,
as in this case, correct within the field of experience and
incorrect, or incorrectly applied, when extrapolated out of that field.
