Your description match the model of roland Benabou Collective delusion... He predict few phenomena : That when the delusion is strongly attacked, the violence against dissenters increase (some call that circling the wagons). That subordinate (by order, by funding, by peer-review) follow the delusion of their hierarchy, because they cannot escape the doom and will suffer from punishment by delusioned meanwhile. That delusion is stronger when you suffer from the delusion of others, and weaker if you benefit from their delusion. That lucid people maybe be delusioned because they don't accept their own knowledge, because seeing mass delusion around them. http://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/Groupthink%20IOM%202012_07_02%20BW.pdf
the most funny is that all is mathematically modeled, by a simple model based on the simple hypothesis that people can avoid seeing .the facts if it reduce their perceived wealth. in the annex D you see patterns of denial, in real life, like Enron, Challenger,... the inversion of perception happen when the facts are so unavoidable that it is not possible to maintain the illusion. Nassim Nicholas taleb say something similar explaining that after a black swan people reinvent the history saying all was clear since long (it happen with sendai/fukishima earthquake)... In fact despite evidence most of the time it take a long time to see a blackswan. this is probably the paradigmchange blindness that Thoùas Kuhn describe in his work. http://fr.slideshare.net/sandhyajohnson/the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions-thomas-kuhn-book-summary# all start to be connected. what happen to LENR since 25years is normal, normal science, normal delusion, normal transition, normal black swan. I really notice that in LENR 2013/8/6 Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> > This is well written. It was published in 2009. See: > > > http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/ > > QUOTE: > > The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet > coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they > needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with > not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like > America Online . . . > > As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the merits > of various scenarios. Would DRM or walled gardens work better? Shouldn’t we > try a carrot-and-stick approach, with educationand prosecution? And so on. > In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded > as unthinkable, a scenario that didn’t get much discussion in the nation’s > newsrooms, for the obvious reason. > > The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to > share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove > unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore > profits.. . . . > > [To summarize, newspapers would go out of business] > > . . . Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary > times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen > as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are > viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, > however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking > out the window and noticing that the real world increasingly resembled the > unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking > mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and > enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were > regarded not as charlatans but saviors. > > When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an > industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the > temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening > are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en bloc. > . . ." > > - Jed > >
