At 01:50 PM 5/23/2011, OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson wrote:
If "in the unlikely event..." (...as airline attendants are so fond of
saying) Rossi's Wunder-Cats turn out to be a complete fraud I suspect
it would be a really tough weekend for you, Jed.
I can tell you with absolute certainty it would be a tough weekend for me.
It would be tough for me because I would have to take a long hard look
at my discrimination skills, or more precisely the apparent lack of
them. If I willingly allowed Rossi and his trickery to get past my BS
filters it would throw into question WHY I allowed it to happen. I
would be forced to ask disquieting questions like: Was my desire to
simply believe in Rossi's claims so incredibly out of balance that my
naivety completely overruled any sense of rationality or skepticism I
might have still possessed?
I don't think I will have a rough weekend if this contingency arises,
because I have always kept in mind that there is no limit to what is
possible as fraud, under the conditions that exist around the Rossi
reactor. It has merely become increasingly unlikely. I'd say "very unlikely."
When something very unlikely happens, does it mean that our
assessment of "very unlikely" was wrong? Maybe. Or maybe not.
If the fraud turns out to be simple, sure. But what if it was complex
enough that figuring it out, from the limited and restricted
information we had, was exactly as intended: difficult?
What I come up with, at this point, is that a combination of two
factors could still be concealing a fraud.
1. Collusion. If you had a few million dollars to dole out, how much
"assent" from experts could you buy? And we don't know what assets
Rossi would have access to, if the plan was to, say, vanish with
proceeds from an IPO. We could be talking billions of dollars. Look,
I think this is really, really unlikely, because Rossi's life
wouldn't be worth a plugged nickel if he engaged in a scam of that
magnitude, there would be no place he could hide.
2. Multiple cons. I.e., the method used for imitating heat varies
with the demonstration. So that when demonstration two rules out a
possible mechanism behind demonstration one, it's because the method
used in demonstration two is different from that in demonstration
one. What I've seen is that most observers seem to assume that
everything was identical. Cons work based on unexamined assumptions, typically.
From initial very high skepticism -- that still allowed for the
possibility of reality --, I've flipped to the reverse. And,
apparently, so have a lot of others.
