2012/11/6 Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> > > > Cold fusion has been suppressed. Not by powerful people at oil companies. > Not by evil people trying to preserve academic funding. No, it has been > suppressed by stupid people. Very Stupid People. > > "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." - Friedrich > Schiller >
Great quotes... whether you hesitate between Machiavellianism and stupidity, best bet is on the latest (quote used by Madelin a French politician ) Roland Benabou theory even says that the best reason to fall into denial is to be involved in the question (to have something to lose, or to accept to have lost). innovation specialist clearly state that to make innovation you have to be alien, stubborns and have similar friends network... note also, that following other controversies I observe that part of the reason to reject roughly dissenters is that there is more and more dishonest rhetoric used by people with agenda (politic, religion, enviro, big biz). The attorney/media culture... and as explain wiki on hyperskepticism, arguing is impossible without some honesty on both side... there is one moment where either you let it go, or became corrupted on equal level... then it became a second natural behavior... It is also much more comfortable and one have a limited budget of "controvery" one can manage. For LENR I see two bad behaviors, liked to lasiness: - the one that say, that they don't understand how it can work, thus it is false (it is stupid to say that it cannot work, because QM allow manything we cannot compute, like WL claims) - the one that see that they cannot find a way using QM to make it work, thus think that QM is false... in fact, I feel that we don't have yet enough data, not enough knowledge in using QM, to exclude QM is compatible with LENR... and since it is much more compatible with known facts than other theories, QM can be the first bet... and anyway, first job is to gather data. note also that at low energy (low stakes) ad hominem, precaution, conformism, is a good heuristic... but when stakes get higher, crazy, corrupted, honest or rational people can get as much genius, dishonest and stupid... only way to guess the truth is to read yourself the data, but since you are not competent normally, what you win on reducing group effect , you lose it on misinterpretation... a kind of heisenberg inequality... This mean that there is no good way to get the truth, other than to make experiments... human profiling filtering is not reliable at high energy.
