blaze spinnaker <[email protected]> wrote: Our entire economic system is based on this thing called money. It's > how we value opportunities. I'm not a materialist, but I do > appreciate having this objective measurement. > > Is it perfect? Obviously not. But it'll have to do until something > better comes along.
> This objective measurement is particularly useful for trying to > determine a reasonable probability of LENR existing. > No, it is not at all useful. In 1989, there were two people in the world who knew about cold fusion: Fleischmann and Pons. What would be the predictive value of asking others whether it is existed? At present, most physicists and other people know nothing about cold fusion. They have not read any papers and they have no idea what is claimed, or what instruments are used. Their opinions are worth nothing. Less than nothing, because they are biased by the nonsense published in the mass media and Wikipedia. I am in favor of capitalism. Money is good for many purposes. But it is utterly useless for this purpose. The only way you make an objective measurement of a scientific claim is by using the scientific method. You have to look at the instruments, the data, and you have to apply the textbook laws of physics and chemistry. There are no other methods, and no shortcuts. Applying the rules of the marketplace to this question is absurd, like trying to referee a tennis game using a C++ language tutorial, or the score of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Different areas of knowledge and life have different sets of rules. You cannot arbitrarily apply one to another. The rules of the marketplace, and the mechanisms of it, do not apply to things like science, art, literature or love. If you cannot decide whether you love someone and should marry, asking other people to judge your emotions or to bet on them would be futile. Money is a good metric for economics. But not all of life is about economics. Some things have nothing remotely to do with it. Science is one of them. - Jed
