Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up

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    I fall on that french article
    https://associationslibres.wor…mment-page-1/#comment-100
    which is fantastic, and is a translation of that wired article:


    http://www.wired.com/2009/12/fail_accept_defeat/2/


    a must to read about how science really works.



    fantastic description of what LENR experience today, and have experience, and also what t do, and not to do about experiments.

    “Only puny secrets need keeping. The biggest secrets are kept by public incredulity.” (Marshall McLuhan)
    twitter @alain_co

  • Alain, you will NEVER be able to understand how science really works.I am so sorry.


  • It is absolutely true that good judgement on when anomalies are error, and when they are something new, is the hallmark of a good scientist. And we don't know, so anomalies should be followed up (a bit, at least) to see if they come to anything.


    LENR is the worst possible example of this, and on each of the points below different from the example above.


    (1) LENR is NOT an anomaly. All LENR results now are coming from people who expect that very result!
    (2) When LENR positives are followed up properly and consistently, they vanish. If followed up enough the specific error that made them is often found.
    (3) Accepting that LENR might be real many theorists have tried to find a consistent explanation. The various theories around do not fit the data.

  • It is absolutely true that good judgement on when anomalies are error, and when they are something new, is the hallmark of a good scientist. And we don't know, so anomalies should be followed up (a bit, at least) to see if they come to anything.


    LENR is the worst possible example of this, and on each of the points below different from the example above.


    (1) LENR is NOT an anomaly. All LENR results now are coming from people who expect that very result!
    (2) When LENR positives are followed up properly and consistently, they vanish. If followed up enough the specific error that made them is often found.
    (3) Accepting that LENR might be real many theorists have tried to find a consistent explanation. The various theories around do not fit the data.



    Your three part comment above is so far off, to quote a famous physicist "It isn't even wrong".


    Taking each part briefly:


    (1) LENR is a name for a diverse collection of results, many of them anomalous. Sometimes the work is done by experimenters who have preconceptions, as is the case everywhere and in every field of science. Fraud can easily be present, as it has been demonstrated in every field of science. In the "wild west" of LENR, CANR, CF there may be a somewhat greater incidence of fraud because the consequences of "shaming" and loss of ability to apply for grants for a couple of years is not really an issue where most work is self funded or crowd funded or venture funed. Further in LENR, peer review system is very loose--- in part due to the reaction to the petrified system that wrongly "reviewed" the original F-P work.


    (2) This is simply a circular argument. You are defining the results you are looking for, that is "LENRs" that vanish under your critical scrutiny. Surely some of them may actually vanish. But, your stance, would make it difficult to know if you yourself are manifesting a bias and a selectivity of observation that may very well be lumping all such phenomena together as a priori "impossible" say under Huizenga's 3 miracles--- or some other set of notions set in the stone of some inappropriate physics ideal, perhaps one lacking much familiarity with condensed matter theory, or say quantum chemistry, or electrochemistry.


    (3) Is partially correct. It is possible to find some unifying explanations for subsets of the LENR totality. Since LENR is just a name, many different phenomena may have been lumped into the category. If we take away the errors, the frauds, the self delusions, the methodological and analytical errors, we are still left with a core of observations accumulated since F-P began there work on through to today. The funding has been thinner than it should be in my opinion, but taken together the various sources have at least kept the thread of interest alive.


    Since the various theories surely don't all fit the totality of the "better" data, the varied and nascent theories can, and do, serve as operating princlples, operational hypotheses. Currently, it may be premature to formulate a GUT for LENR, too much divergent data, too many disparate categories, too much skepticism, too much "feet in concrete" by those who have made their livings with the existing paradigms. This is also sometimes, or even often, been the case for the stoney edifice of good old physics itself. The data are arising faster there than they can be integrated. And untethered from much reality, physics theories are too abundant there as well (see well meaning critiques by Lee Smolin, Alexander Hunzicker and others).

  • It will be no surprise that I disagree with the above.


    The specific differences are this:


    (1) Could you detail the positive LENR results from those who have no preconceptions (e.g. are not testing LENR?) I know of almost none such.
    Although I agree the phenomena is so loosely defined that a wide variety of diverse anomalous results can be seen as evidence for it. I'm not sure what non-anomalous results could be that, as you imply?


    (2) It is not circular because an anomalous result that did NOT vanish under sustained critical scrutiny would indeed be the sign of something new and (potentially) LENR.


    (3) It is not going to be easy to agree over how much does a partial theory explain, and what is its merit, so I won't argue this - though I suspect that we disagree.



  • (1) That is work for you to do, or for others to report to you-- since you are now the one with the anomalous criteria (in our view). You can buy Storms' book (one with the dark cover), look at the list of published positive results, my recollection is that as of that book's last edit ( The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, World Scientific Press, July 2007, 340 pp, ISBN: 978-981-270-620-1 ). In that initial book Storms was willing to list around 195 such reports. Then you can go through the list pull those that interest you, then pull up the articles from Jed Rothwell's archive and perhaps from Steven Krivit's as well. I would be very pleased to have your informed judgement in a sentence or two of each of those articles, after you read them attending to the data and methods and not just the abstracts, please! Since that book went to press there are numerous other articles describing results, a considerable number in Japanese and Russian, I hear. Perhaps Ed Storms would give you an updated list of such articles from the intervening 8 years. Such an examination, by you, of the say 250 [my gues] or so articles should be publishable itself.


    And tp your other "sub" assertion concerning "non-anomalous" results, I simply meant results where the energy WAS concordant with what might expect from completely normal chemistry only involving the usual enthalpies and free energies discussed in majors general chemistry and majors general physics texts. I suspect you will surely find some experimenter scientists, perhaps the majority, will be found reporting things they did not expect. I say it is the rule rather than the exception here, the field is quite young....


    (2) When your examination of the literature is forwarded to us for review or is published, and it becomes evident that you happen to find a few examples that meet your criterion, then I will withdraw my circularity accusation.


    (3) OK, we can leave it at that. Although I do not disagree with all that you have written since you showed up here at the Forum. However, I don't want to give the wrong impression to some of those here who may not have the longer history in mind. I do NOT typically support your categorically negative positions on CF / LENR / CANR. The jury is definitely still out in my view. I see that it was Max Planck who asserted “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
    ― Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers


    I suspect we are both nearer to the grave than even Planck was when that was written. Nor do I wish any ill on the opponents, I instead wish them to take a path such as that of physicist Dr. Robert Duncan and a fair number of others, often not so public about their changes of mind.


    Best Wishes,
    Longview

  • Alain, you will NEVER be able to understand how science really works.I am so sorry.


    You call your self a skeptic, while your thinking and writing clearly shows, that you are 0 skeptical against established models and thinking. Pathoskeptic, you will never be, a real skeptic. I'm so sorry.

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