On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 3:34 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> James Bowery <jabow...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> There is a similar unenlightened self-interest at work in preventing the >> proper development and deployment of LENR. It is "intelligent" in that >> sense and it has no incentive to become "enlightened" about its >> self-interest. >> >> There are therefore two questions in modeling this "intelligence": >> >> 1) What is the actual authority structure? >> 2) What is the actual incentive structure? >> > > > The only people standing in the way of cold fusion today are a small > number of academic scientists, at places like MIT, the DoE, Nature magazine > and the Jasons. Unfortunately, they have a great deal of influence. They > are opposed to it on theoretical grounds, and because they can't imagine > they might be mistaken, so they are not cautious. (That thought never > crosses their minds.) Not because they are invested in oil. > > There is also opposition from many ordinary people and many stupid people > at places like Wikipedia > > In all of these cases we're dealing with the incentives of social status more than authority structure. The key incentive here is to avoid embarrassment in the eyes of the others in the milieu but even her influence flows from the top down (MIT, DoE, Nature, Jasons, etc. -> Wikpedia zombies, etc.). Clearly "MIT" can't be considered a unified entity as exemplified by Hagelstein. Indeed, Hagelstein's presence at MIT pretty much neutralizes it as a point of leverage from the social status angle since, as an institution, MIT can point to Hagelstein as the exemplar of their properly neutral institutional role. So forget "MIT". The DoE has only partially covered its *ss with the Ramsey verbiage in the preamble to the DoE panel's report (and its reiteration in the 2009 report). This might be a weak spot -- especially given the hostility some Republicans have toward the Obama administration. Nature magazine stands much to lose, but the British foundation of that journal was protected to some degree by delegating authority over the rejection of Oriani's paper to the US editors. They can point their finger across the pond and simply say they should not have been so lax with the colonists. The Jasons, on the other hand.... the Jasons.... their raison d'être is precisely to discover game-changing physics potentials and not for any namby-pamby concerns like economic competitiveness or academic integrity. The Jasons are supposed to be "above" Nature magazine and the academics at the DoE and MIT, etc. Moreover, you don't have to get them all in agreement. All you need is one of them to break ranks. So how do you identify the Jason(s) most likely to be more concerned with national security than peer pressure?
