On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 7:34 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote:
> It means we acknowledge the possibility of error or fraud, and *then we > move on* to the rest of the discussion. > Lawrence already showed how silly this claim is. You repeatedly say there is no chance of fraud; that the claims are proven or thermodynamics is wrong, etc. > > The argument that Rossi might be lying and doing stage magic begins and > ends there. It is sterile. Unless you have some new evidence for it, beyond > Rossi's flamboyant behavior, there is nothing more to be said about that > subject. > It's not about direct evidence of fraud. It is about the absence of direct evidence for his claims. > > Many aspects of cold fusion are proved beyond any rational doubt. > That is manifestly untrue. If it were true, then a panel of experts enlisted to study it would not conclude 17:1 that the evidence for it is not conclusive. > Among people who have read the literature, only a handful of crackpots > still dispute the heat and tritium. > I assume the DOE panel did not consist of crackpots. Before his message disappeared into the void, I believe Cude threatened to > expose the fact that years ago I expressed doubts about Piantelli, whereas > I am now more persuaded by his claims. Cude thinks it is shameful for me to > reconsider the evidence, and two-faced for me to change my mind. I do not > think so. > > No. That's not what I think. It is perfectly fine to reconsider evidence and change your mind. The objection is not that you changed your mind about Piantelli in light of Rossi's results, but that you now use Piantelli's results to validate Rossi's. (And by the way, it was only a few years ago (2009), and you did more than express doubts; you were pretty skeptical when you said: "As far as I can tell, they disproved the Focardi claims.") This is like being quite certain that the Loch Ness monster does not exist, and that the many blurry photographs are all interpreted incorrectly. But then, when a clear photograph finally comes along, like the "surgeon's photograph" (see the wikipedia article on the loch ness monster), you argue that it must be real, not just because of this photograph, but because it is supported by all the old photographs. The problem is that a lot of marginal results and a devoted following make for fertile ground for a hoax, and decades later, the surgeon's photograph was finally revealed as such, and the surgeon confessed to it. And it's not just deliberate hoaxes, but also cognitive bias and delusion thrive in this environment. This is especially so if the results point to profound benefit to all mankind. It doesn't matter how many people try and get negative results; those are rarely reported. But if a few stumble on the same systematic errors or artifacts that others have made, or fall prey to, as you put it, "calorimetric errors and artifacts", which are "more common than researchers realize", those will be added in with the hundreds of previous marginal results, and will appear to many as if evidence is building. But the absence of one solid result that can be reproduced quantitatively by other labs after so many years and so many attempts suggests to skeptics that the evidence is getting weaker. This idea that many marginal results is somehow stronger evidence than a few marginal results is typical of pathological science, and is expressed frequently by you, and recently by Krivit in his interview with IARPA. It just doesn't seem likely to you that so many scientists could be wrong. But when the results are as weak as cold fusion results, in fact it *is* likely. What is not likely is that so many photographs, from so many angles, with so many different cameras, could *all* be blurry. The only reasonable explanation is that when the pictures are clear, the image turns out to be something other than a monster. Of course the clear photos don't dissuade the believers; they just mean the monster ducked under water at the right moment.
