Quote about difficulties to accept new science

Alain, you are wasting your time. This is the level of 'discussion' on ECN:

Mary Yugo
November 1, 2015 at 7:52 pm
Help me out. I don’t have time to read every whacko BS claim. Who is Holmlid and why did you mention him or her?

Tony2
November 1, 2015 at 9:06 pm
That wasn’t me. It’s Stephen responding to more wild ideas concerning this Holmlid character and some sort of something he’s done. Holmlid sounds like Swedish name so he won’t have done anything worth mentioning.
Tony2

The complete lack of intellectual curiosity displayed in these quotes, to a normal person would be embarrassing, but to some, it is clearly a badge of honour.

George wrote: &"If you think that any of the statements you quoted, Alain, bear in any way on skepticism about cold fusion, LENR and especially Rossi and other high power LENR claimants, then it goes a long way to explain why you are so insufferably gullible and easily fooled."

Alain wrote: &"You are an evidence for Feyerabend's relativism."

Touché, nice move Alain.

The perfect bar to learning from any (or every) situation is to already know what is going on. To my mind, theory should arise after new evidence to explain it, or more properly, to give it order or make sense of it by fitting a self-consistent model to the evidence. Scientific advance requires both types of evidence, those that the current best model predicts and those that the model doesn't. The first type confirms the model and the second defines the limits of its validity.
The requirement that there must be a single theory to explain all manner of nuclear transmutations seen in a variety of environments in a wide range of LENR experiments seems to be a symptom that dogmatic belief in theories and models as immutable laws has overtaken scientific inquiry and advance. And if this perfect single theory is required before tested and re-tested evidence is even accepted as just a hint of something different occurring, then it doesn't seem to be a symptom of dogmatism, it seems to be proof of it. Kinder, gentler descriptions might be that there are hidden assumptions at play or that models are being applied outside their range of validity when people reject reprodicible evidence as impossible or erroneous. But then I was raised by an experimental physicist...

Quote from LeMoyne Castle

The requirement that there must be a single theory to explain all manner of nuclear transmutations seen in a variety of environments in a wide range of LENR experiments seems to be a symptom that dogmatic belief in theories and models as immutable laws has overtaken scientific inquiry and advance. And if this perfect single theory is required before tested and re-tested evidence is even accepted as just a hint of something different occurring, then it doesn't seem to be a symptom of dogmatism, it seems to be proof of it.

The single theory of LENR causation comes from common behavior seen across all LENR experiments. For example, the lack of unstable nuclear isotopes. This common theory explains both the common behavior among all experiments and also how differences come about between different experiments.

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The perfect bar to learning from any (or every) situation is to already know what is going on. To my mind, theory should arise after new evidence to explain it, or more properly, to give it order or make sense of it by fitting a self-consistent model to the evidence. Scientific advance requires both types of evidence, those that the current best model predicts and those that the model doesn't. The first type confirms the model and the second defines the limits of its validity. The requirement that there must be a single theory to explain all manner of nuclear transmutations seen in a variety of environments in a wide range of LENR experiments seems to be a symptom that dogmatic belief in theories and models as immutable laws has overtaken scientific inquiry and advance. And if this perfect single theory is required before tested and re-tested evidence is even accepted as just a hint of something different occurring, then it doesn't seem to be a symptom of dogmatism, it seems to be proof of it. Kinder, gentler descriptions might be that there are hidden assumptions at play or that models are being applied outside their range of validity when people reject reprodicible evidence as impossible or erroneous. But then I was raised by an experimental physicist...

I'd agree completely with most of this, except that I'd say jumping on LENR as a theoretical reason for given results is the same problem. We never have clear evidence of transmutation - the results that exist are at very low levels and require skill and theories that bound error mechanisms to interpret. Such things, as I'm sure you know, go wrong and are often subject to strong disagreements.

Rossi has shown beyond doubt transmutations. Both in his first isotopic tests (5 years ago?) and more recently. You will forgive me for not viewing that as good evidence. The first set of transmutations were said by Rossi, long after the testing, to be the result of contamination. The second and much more bizarre set I'm afraid I expect to turn out the same, whether innocent or deliberate. After all, Rossi is on record as having used Ni-62 for fuel before, so he probably has some...

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The single theory of LENR causation comes from common behavior seen across all LENR experiments. For example, the lack of unstable nuclear isotopes. This common theory explains both the common behavior among all experiments and also how differences come about between different experiments.

The simplest hypothesis explaining lack of unstable isotopes is that there are no nuclear reactions, and the apparent miscellaneous results come from a wide range of other things.

We see one example here where apparently strong evidence of excess heat from Lugano turns out to be a misuse of an IR camera.

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You use a vague blacket arguments...its is an artifact ? which one...it is never well done... tell me what and for what.the skeptic books about detecting conspiracy theories, and associatied manipulation methods are good to understand that kind of argument.Lugano calorimetry may be wrong if , as we suppose , emissivity is wrong.isotopic shift is classical measurement, and result is clear, and the intervention of rossi is ruled-out by witness.Iwamura isotopic shift have been accused of contamination, like the He4/heat measurements, but the correlations with experimental results, and not with the instrument used, show it is a reality.I imagine that with your blanket/wildcard arguments you will be able to deny any experiment done at CERN, any evidence of superconducting at high temperature except the levitation (and even, is it just seam effect... and you stay vague as usual).The skeptic community have good documentations on that. I'm always surprised how skeptic arguments are good, except on few point where they apply them the opposite way.Cargo Cult skepticism is really a plague.

The difference here is in how ambiguous information is processed.

Take a test for LENR which has results which are unclear: there could be excess heat unexplained by chemical mechanism, or the result could be exactly as expected from energy in with no non-chemical excess.

Take 100 of those tests.

Most scientists, and also skeptics, would take that as zero evidence for LENR existence.

They would say that you need cast-iron proof of some new phenomena because anomalies in experimental data are very common and not easy to decode. So the fact that you have an experiment with weird results is not sign of anything unusual unless it can be proven that the weirdness is not experimental error.

Whereas an LENR advocate would say that an experiment with weird results (pretty well any sort of weirdness will do) that cannot be 100% explained by known theory is evidence of LENR.

One idea that generates this dichotomy is prior belief (in a Bayesian sense).

Skeptics reckon that if LENR existed there would with high probability be fingerprints of it written all over physics. these do not exist, outside of experiments done by LENR researchers, hence a low prior. Related to this is the non-specificity of LENR as a theory. There is no theory that predicts LENR observations, only a collection of "this type of thing is usually observed". When a theory makes no specific predictions it is much easier to make it match evidence - just as a good fortune-teller will say things that fit most people. That means the burden of proof is higher.

LENR advocates avoid this scientific notion of probability and instead use social science or ideas about likely behaviour of people or the argument that total number of claims means there must be something. Whichever way they start with the view that LENR definitely exists and therefore is relatively likely as an explanation for any given anomaly in LENR experiments.

The properties of LENR (see storms etc) mean that it is inherently undisprovable. That is to say, the expected evidence in the case that LENR is not real would be identical to that in the case LENR (of the type posited) was real. That is a problem for scientists wanting to gather evidence for LENR.