A lot of the keyboard banging could be avoided if folks would simply preface their comments with 3 attributes:
Business vs Science viewpoint Circumstantial vs Direct evidence Guilt vs Innocence presumption For instance, if someone has $2M in their retirement account and they're thinking about whether they want to send Rossi a check for $2M or not, it is quite reasonable for them write under the attributes: Business, Circumstantial, Guilt They aren't interested in the exploratory nature of science. They are interested in circumstantial evidence. They must presume guilt on the part of the part of the offer. This particular triplet of attributes best characterizes the true, if extreme, skeptic, when actually making a business decision. The pseudo-skeptic (understand that this applies to "true believers" posing as genuine skeptics as well as "true disbelievers" posing as genuine skeptics -- understanding, further that "believers" are merely disbelievers in the negation) is characterized as someone who imposes inappropriate attributes on a conversation to further their particular true (dis)belief. Let me use myself (as someone who is in a very different situation from the person who is thinking of betting their entire personal retirement account by sending Rossi a check for $2M without so much as accepting Rossi's invitation to do a customer-controlled pre-sale test): I'm advising a national policy planner in a matter involving greenhouse gas emission and the coal industry. The first decision I must make is whether to put any effort into investigating Rossi's claim at all. That choice of putting my personal effort as a research analyst into an area is profoundly different from Obama signing into law a trillion dollar jobs program based on buying Rossi's devices. I am so far from the latter that many if not most arguments that would arise in that context don't concern me in the slightest. My context is: Science, Direct, Innocence By Science I mean, of course, that experiment trumps theory, every time, no exceptions, period -- but I am NOT justified in statements like "I'll believe it when its a commercial product a few years hence, even if erroneous planning on my part contributes to the misallocation of a trillion dollars of public money". The only thing that can invalidate an experiment is another experiment replicating the first experiment but controlling for the critical variable(s). This is so elementary that the fact that 90% of the physics establishment finds it even a point of contention means we have to virtually ignore the rest of what they say. This profound betrayal of enlightenment values by the physics establishment is unspeakably tragic and a state of denial over this traumatic condition is probably behind the behavior of so many pseudoskeptics. Their perpetual imputation of mental illness to what they call "true believers" (in fact, merely those who do not adhere to theory over experiment) is what Freudians called "projection" and it is, indeed, symptomatic of mental illness arising from trauma. By Direct I mean, of course, what a court of law means when they prefer direct evidence over circumstantial evidence. Its not that circumstantial evidence is invalid in all circumstances, its just that it is trumped by direct evidence only to a lesser degree than does experiment trump theory. The presumption of innocence usually goes hand-in-hand with science. The only time science is compatible with a presumption of guilt is in the case where there has been scientific fraud shown. Note that scientific fraud is different from scientific error and this distinction is widely recognized in academia. Now, having said all that, let me point out one other thing about Direct vs Circumstantial that seems to come up time and time again with regards to "cold fusion": The pseudoskeptics continually assert that their criticism of those who are investigating Rossi's claims has nothing to do with whether Pons and Fleischmann had any validity to their claims. This rhetorical maneuver denies the obvious Bayesian law of prior probability distribution: If P&F's cold fusion claim was not valid then any subsequent claims of advances on P&F's cold fusion claim are likewise invalidated. I don't know whether it is possible to ban people from Vortex-L, but that one claim, alone, should be sufficient if even one keyboard is destroyed arguing with such a person.
