On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 11:39 AM, leaking pen <itsat...@gmail.com> wrote:
The standard skepticism that any scientist should have, wishing to explore, > to look at the evidence, to experiment and refine, is , from what I've > seen, welcome here. What is not is blindly saying, THis cannot be true, and > then, THEN, after deciding something is false, going about poking every > hole in it possible. Should the same arguements be made from a point of, > Did you consider this, did you take that into account, how can we refine > this and make it a BETTER model, then there wouldnt be an issue, I believe. > Right. To be concrete, I think the issue is primarily one about attention to detail and to questions of burden of evidence. It's fine to be skeptical of the tritium evidence, for example. But if one is going to argue against it, one is going to have a lot of work to do. One will have to show how each tritium result in each experiment was wrong or questionable, in specific detail; i.e., the burden of evidence (on this list, at any rate) will be on the person arguing against tritium having been found in some LENR experiments. We assume here that in general LENR researchers are competent overall. One should just accept this as a ground rule. This is not at all to say that all of the tritium findings have been reliable or that all or even perhaps many of the experiments were done well. It's simply that one can't get away with a facile statement to the effect that "there is no reliable evidence that the tritium findings are not contamination, etc." and expect it to advance anyone's understanding. It's just a dogmatic assertion, since there are specific reasons to think it's wrong. It's fine if the burden of evidence elsewhere would not permit one to refer to the LENR tritium findings. The point is that the burden of evidence *here* allows one to do so, and in order to modify or unseat the general conclusion that tritium has been found in some LENR experiments, one is going to have to do quite a bit of work in connection with the specific details of specific experiments. The burden of evidence is reversed here, and there is no free lunch for someone who wishes to argue against tritium. Eric
