If we're going all Bayesian on this, we'd need to calculate some priors. It's my impression that generally speaking it's not easy to bribe a high-ranking scientist, and not easy to bribe Swedish people, so as far as bribing a high-ranking Swedish scientist, I'm going to say "not very likely" :). That takes care of #1.
Rossi did not have a direct hand in this testing, but indirectly he did, via his pal Professor Levi, who was on-site at Rossi's facility where the testing was performed. There were some off-limit constraints on the operation of the tests. What precisely these were is not entirely clear. So #2 should read "Rossi and close associates" really. #3 is ridiculous I think. I don't see much evidence of incompetency in general. #5 might be "Aliens/The Illuminati/The Secret Government made him do it" but I didn't say that. And never would, actually. I think it's between #2 (modified) and #4. Andrew ----- Original Message ----- From: Eric Walker To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2013 9:20 PM Subject: Re: [Vo]:Levi Hot Cat paper is a gem On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 3:20 PM, Mark Gibbs <[email protected]> wrote: I'm still somewhat skeptical about the whole thing simply because there are too many unknowns but the arguments that it is just a hoax are getting harder to believe ... it would have to be the biggest, most elaborate hoax in science history and would require a lot of people to keep it going and they'd have to keep quiet. Putting my lateral thinking cap on, I see these four possibilities: 1.. Rossi and the "third-party" testers are in cahoots, and we have been punked. 2.. Rossi, like the Amazing Randi, has pulled off a fantastic magic trick and fooled everyone, including the authors of the recent paper. 3.. Rossi and all involved in the testing are unqualified, and what was seen was powered solely by the input power, resulting in a COP <1, and the observations and conclusions were inaccurate and flawed. 4.. Rossi is operating something that probably has at least ~2.6+ COP. Anyone care to attempt to calculate the conditional probabilities of each of these four scenarios, given that we know the affiliations of the people involved in the testing? For the lateral thinkers out there -- is there a fifth or sixth possibility that has not been mentioned? It seems to me that (1) is vanishingly small, and (2) and (3) seem far-fetched, although not as much as (1). Eric
