Edmund Storms <[email protected]> wrote:
> However, once the subject becomes important to a larger group, such as > global warming or cold fusion, to give recent examples, the method is > distorted and does not work. > I would say it does not work as well. It works to some extent. After all, cold fusion was replicated, and those replications were published in the peer-reviewed literature. When the subject becomes important, many institutions become dysfunctional because of politics, greed, fear, and other human foibles. That statement applies to banking, health care, national government, the military, higher education, setting computer standards, agriculture . . . everything, really. In the events leading up to the crash of 2008, banking became highly dysfunctional because of the housing bubble and the separation of mortgages and the lending institutions. However, just because banking is sometimes dysfunctional to some extent in some ways, that does not mean that all banks are hopeless and they can never play a constructive role in the economy. It means they have their limits. They must be regulated carefully and reformed from time to time. Just because mainstream science has been largely dysfunctional in the cold fusion fiasco, that does not mean all major scientific institutions have failed, or that the method itself always fails when politics interfere with its workings. The ENEA has not totally failed. Cold fusion may yet succeed, after all. Wikipedia is an example of a dysfunctional institution, overrun by politics, because of the way the institution is designed. Despite the many inherent problems, there are good articles in Wikipedia. It is not a total failure, by any means. - Jed
