At 10:54 AM 6/23/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Well, "Kemo Sabe"'s comments inspired me to create a seminar on
Wikiversity to deconstruct, er, examine the skeptical arguments.
Lots of people believe the crap he was putting up.
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Cold_fusion/Skeptical_arguments
I believe you have put more effort into this than it deserves. No
skeptic will read your arguments, and supporters already know this stuff.
Jed, those arguments are still alive. Mixed in with the crap are some
possibly cogent arguments that apply to the level of certainty that
we might have, and the arguments depend on ignorance of the reality
of research in the filed.
If no skeptic will read the arguments, that's fine with me. They will
find themselves increasingly isolated, because the next generation
isn't going to read their old arguments without being aware that
Stuff has Happened since then. But why, then, did Kemo Sabe bother
responding on the SciAm page? Just to humiliate himself?
A learning resource on Wikiversity is for people who want to learn
about a field. If skeptics only want people to learn from
"believers," that's up to them to decide whether to participate or
not. My intention is to maintain the overall neutrality of the
process, to ensure that if there are any cogent skeptical arguments,
they are separated out from the noise and clearly shown.
A seminar may or may not come to a conclusion. It's up to the teacher
and the students.
Now, is there a page where all the skeptical arguments are
sympathetically presented and then deconstructed? I think there might
be. I can then link to the page. By the way, lenr-canr.org is
whitelisted in toto on Wikiversity, I got that done before they gave
me adminship. And I wouldn't have whitelisted it myself anyway.
Conflict of Interest, you know.
The Skeptical Arguments subpage is part of an overall course on Cold
fusion. That existed before I arrived, but was quite primitive and
undeveloped, and somewhat confused cold fusion, sonofusion, and
muon-catalyzed fusion, as I recall. The history is there.
