At 03:57 PM 8/21/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Eff the skeptics.
My feelings exactly.
Voice of America, I am today.
Whether "5% success rate" is good news or bad news depends entirely
on the details of those experiments.
They ran 300 experiments. . . .
I believe the 5% refers to the last set of experiments run after
ICCF16. There were, as I recall, about 110 in this series. Six of
them produced irrefutably positive results. I mean results so large
and clearly detected that they convinced even David Kidwell, who is
the most skeptical cold fusion researcher I know.
I think before ICCF16 they got some positive indications, but no
results that everyone at the NRL agreed were definitely real.
Basically, pseudoskeptics look at that 5% figure and make whatever
assumptions confirm what they want to believe. What that really
means, at least in part, is that the researchers worked hard and kept looking.
Pseudoskeptics will assume that the 5% is just noise. Indeed, I ran
into this argument recently. Storms (2007 and 2010) has a bar chart
showing the distribution of excess heat results from many cold fusion
experiments. The first bar is close to noise, but some results in
that bar would be significantly above noise. But the chart goes out,
showing results distributed across a wide range of excess heat
values. Storms point is that if this was noise, all the results would
be in the first bar. That first bar is indeed the majority of
results. How was this translated by the pseudoskeptics?
"Even according to Storms, most cold fusion experiments fail."
It's a standard human phenomenon. We strongly tend to see what we
already believe. If we are not aware of this danger, and sometimes
even if we are, we see new data and interpret it to confirm and
strengthen what we already "know."
Ahem. It gets worse as we get older, sometimes.
I know of only one defense against this, and that is detachment from
all interpretation, and it is not necessarily reliable, because we
are trained from infancy to intepret. Interpretation isn't "wrong,"
but it's highly limiting. Strictly speaking, it is neither true nor
false. That is, interpretations are not "true" because they cannot
capture the depth of reality, they are, at best, useful. They are not
"false" in the same way that a hammer is not "false." It is merely a
tool, that is either more workable or less workable.
What we *can* do, I'll testify, is to quickly recognize and
discriminate between interpretation and raw fact. I.e., observation.
While there is always some level of interpretation in observation, we
actually are quite good, as human beings, at observation, if we keep
it simple. We can get better with training.
One of the key distinctions about interpretation is that it's a
choice. It is always possible to come up with multiple
interpretations. What I observed is what I observed. I might possibly
improve my memory a bit, but I can't change what I observed, itself.
I can change my interpretations, or propose alternate ones. This gets
a lot easier if I don't require that the interpretations be "true."
It helps to know that none of them are actually true, that very idea
is one of the ideas that literally drive us crazy. The real question
for interpretation is its effect. Interpretation is a choice, and we
are actually responsible for it. If we had no choice, if
interpretation were controlled by "truth," we'd have no responsibility.
Sorry, it's just the *truth* that you are a horrible human being and
must be eliminated. We think the only problem with is that the
genocidal maniac is wrong. No, it's the whole concept of truth of
interpretation. It's just "true" that communism will take away our
freedoms, and that Obama is a communist. It's just "true" that Saddam
was a danger to the world and it was necessary to invade Iraq. For
that matter, to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It just
"true" that this saved millions of lives.
Basically, we make up meaning all the time. We make choices. We are
responsible for those choices.
That's the bad news and the good news.
