The Playground

    I see that, as usual, Joshua Cude has piled it on thick. I'm willing to answer questions from others, but will not be replying to what is a collection of honed arguments, designed to concisely mislead, with just enough fact to be plausible, but then imputations and implications that might as well be lies. I have not read all of it, by any means. At one time, I went over Cude's arguments carefully, looking for value in terms of the skeptical objections. That value has become very low, what I did look at was bringing up nothing new.


    As to Kirk, he is invited to raise specific issues that might be of use for future investigation, but he is now dwelling outside the realm of active investigation. Heat/helium is under active investigation and I am in communication with that work. So if there is something to contribute, now is the time. His research is rapidly becoming irrelevant.


    I do not normally follow this forum. The most reliable email address for me right now is abd (at) yahoogroups (dot) com, is most reliable. Those interested in creating content on cold fusion are invited to do so on Wikiversity, though I'm very little active there now, I might assist. A major focus of my activity of late has been on Quora. I can be private-messaged there, and often answer questions on LENR. https://www.quora.com/profile/Abd-Ul-Rahman-Lomax

    Where'd Sifferkoll go? I see him bopping thru the different strings on occasion but why the uncharacteristic silence all of a sudden? I have two possible theories - one is that he has seen the light and / or he may have gotten dumped for thenewflame. For that matter, Mats has been painfully silent of late as well. At least he got the title of his book correct. Just wondering.......

    Quote from Dewey Weaver

    Where'd Sifferkoll go? I see him bopping thru the different strings on occasion but why the uncharacteristic silence all of a sudden? I have two possible theories - one is that he has seen the light and / or he may have gotten dumped for thenewflame. For that matter, Mats has been painfully silent of late as well. At least he got the title of his book correct. Just wondering.......


    Perhaps, like many people, he has begun to take on board the sheer flakiness of Rossi and his doings, and is reserving judgement.


    A great shame it is that Rossi is so oblivious to the desirability of adhering to high standards in science and engineering, and data collection and interpretation.
    It is incredibly important to try very hard to disprove one's own hypotheses. How else are you going to know how right you were?

    Wow, that falsifiability meme taken to its absurd extremities. I do hope you're a troll, and not a scientist.


    Enjoy your stagnant progress and status quo loving groupthink, otherwise. But maybe this is what you seek?

    Dewey, I don't know of sifferkolls status but you may get some hint by visiting his blog. Which reminds me you hinted some days ago something about Mats status as looking for new job or something and now innocently asking about sifferkoll. Is there something you like to hint - or even brag about?

    Quote from Keieueue

    Wow, that falsifiability meme taken to its absurd extremities. I do hope you're a troll, and not a scientist.


    Enjoy your stagnant progress and status quo loving groupthink, otherwise. But maybe this is what you seek?



    What on earth are you gibbering about? Every competent scientist I've ever worked with is aware of the necessity to design experiments that would disprove their pet hypothesis if it was wrong.
    If you don't do it, someone else will. It is better to know you were wrong before anyone else shows it.


    Progress is not made by producing strings of false hypotheses. It comes from very critical examination of any new finding or phenomenon, building on that which is repeatable, improving and refining.


    Rossi designs his trials and demonstrations with complete confirmation bias. Hence he gets the results he wants to see.


    I very much hope he has something. Had he been an intellectually honest scientist/engineer, he could have given unequivocal evidence of whatever it is years ago. AND without being too revealing of intellectual property.

    Every competent scientist has intuition, which basically makes your popperoid approach "let's disprove until it's really disproven and doesn't work at all (and if it's not falsifiable, well... means it's not scientific, that it doesn't work!)", moot and void.
    They know where to go and what to look for, but pushing this kind of meme ensures those suffering from self-doubt will go nowhere.


    I understand which this meme is so widespread amongst fools and status quo lovers, though: it's basically the best way to feel safe about one's science and to paint a paradigm into a corner, because of the unknown and undetected, which are unfalsifiable: they cannot be proven or disproven, so when they have an effect on the experience, this experience is not scientific.


    I wonder if Popper thought his concept would become a cultist's coercitive mindtrick?

    Lomax wrote:


    Quote

    Joshua is an internet troll, who has honed and studied cold fusion for years, first showing up just as a certain Wikipedia editor was banned for aggressive "anti-woo" activity.


    Sorry, you've got the wrong guy. I have never been involved in Wikipedia editing.


    Given you can reach such certainty about my identity without good evidence about something I happen to know you are wrong about, it's not surprising you are so certain about other things with a similar lack of good evidence.


    I know about Schroeder from your writings, but I have not read any of Schroeder's writings (unless they were quoted in cold fusion forums). If you have some examples of passages or arguments of his that are so similar to mine, I'd be very interested to see them, because I like to see intelligent debate.


    Quote

    He is not a skeptic, because he repeats arguments in new fora that were presented elsewhere, and thoroughly answered, as if those answers did not exist.


    If my arguments are repetitive, it is only because they are in response to your repetitive arguments. And no, they have never been thoroughly answered. As you say in another post in this thread, you don't even read most of my replies. You once said they were too painful to read. I suppose the truth hurts. But your failure to read them means you continue to make the same mistakes over and over, like claiming there are a dozen confirmations of Miles (half are not confirmations at all, some are negative, and none of the quantitative results are peer reviewed), or there are 20 peer-reviewed reviews between 2005 and 2010 (half are not in refereed journals), and that there are no skeptical papers (I have repeatedly cited more than a half dozen in the last decade).


    Quote

    Joshua can come up with arguments that sound absolutely great if you don't actually study them in depth.


    Actually, that's what you do, and I am only checking you on it. You rely on the laziness of your audience not to check your misleading claims. I am studying your claims in depth for their benefit.

    Quote

    Lomax: ... Joshua has brought this up many times. Here was what I wrote: ... context ... I'm willing to bet a significant chunk of my net worth on Rossi being real, not because it's "scientifically proven" -...context ...


    Here, Cude quoted, as before, out of context.


    Yea, there was no context, but I disagree that the meaning of that quote depends on context. It means that at the time you said it, you were nearly convinced that Rossi's claims were valid. Given that it was as obvious then as it is now that Rossi had not provided evidence to support his claims, the statement is an illustration of your gullibility and vulnerability to wishful thinking.

    Quote

    Lomax: Again, plausible argument, right? Except nobody is publishing positive papers on phlogiston so of course nobody would be publishing negative.Cold fusion papers are being regularly published. Reviews are being published, 20 since 2005 in mainstream peer-reviewed journals, and not counting the reviews in the February 2015 issue of Current Science (out of 34 papers, many are reviews).


    In the early 90s, cold fusion claims were being published regularly -- one the order of a hundred per year, and at that time, even more negative papers were published. Since then the publication rate (in refereed journals) has dropped steadily to its current level of a few per year, and much less than one new claim of excess power per year. The journal that published many of the early cold fusion papers, including several papers by P&F, and Miles heat-helium results (J Electroanal Chem), stopped publishing in the field around the year 2000.


    And no credible new evidence has come to light in the field for 20 years, and mainstream science continues to consider it pseudoscience. At some point it is understandable that skeptics simply begin to ignore the field.


    In spite of that, there are negative papers being published, as I have cited here several times. In particular, the Arata-type excess power claims, the SPAWAR neutron claims, and the WL theory papers, have been challenged in refereed literature, which pretty well sews up new claims in the field. And there are two analyses of the publication pattern that show the similarity to those of pathological fields and the profound difference from those of accepted fields. Even a field like carbon nanotubes, which has far less potential relevance to science or practical life, generates thousands of refereed publications per year.


    As for those reviews, I have addressed them elsewhere, but it is simply dishonest to claim 20 reviews in peer-reviewed literature. Books and encyclopedia articles are not peer reviewed, and when the bulk of the the citations are from conference proceedings, little attention is paid to them.

    @Keieueue


    I cannot judge for other, but when I work I go through a discovery phase where a low bar of evidence is met and that intuition is really important. Then
    when something interesting is established I switch the role and try to be critical against it e.g. try to disprove it. I mainly worked with logical systems and
    only used this method to haunt down bugs. Sometimes the intuition is wrong and you need to go back to the drawing board. But I can tell you this, I would
    be a poor performer of logic if I only used my intuition and stayed away from negative and critical thinking. I work in a company and there we used different
    roles to drive the research, then you can stick to being creative and invent things and let other do the critical thinking. You are right that if you are only critical
    and demand unjustified tough proof for something you would stall development. But just running straight forward using intuition is only good for a good fiction
    stories of low quality. So run, stop, think, prove, run stop think prove ... that's the popper melody I'm using and which I think work best.

    Quote from Keieueue

    Every competent scientist has intuition, which basically makes your popperoid approach "let's disprove until it's really disproven and doesn't work at all (and if it's not falsifiable, well... means it's not scientific, that it doesn't work!)", moot and void.
    They know where to go and what to look for, but pushing this kind of meme ensures those suffering from self-doubt will go nowhere.


    I understand which this meme is so widespread amongst fools and status quo lovers, though: it's basically the best way to feel safe about one's science and to paint a paradigm into a corner, because of the unknown and undetected, which are unfalsifiable: they cannot be proven or disproven, so when they have an effect on the experience, this experience is not scientific.


    I wonder if Popper thought his concept would become a cultist's coercitive mindtrick?



    Granted, intuition is often where the seed of the hypothesis comes from.


    The rest of your post is Just. Plain. Wrong; and the Popperian concept of falsifiability is extremely useful.

    Quote from joshua cude

    As for those reviews, I have addressed them elsewhere, but it is simply dishonest to claim 20 reviews in peer-reviewed literature. Books and encyclopedia articles are not peer reviewed, and when the bulk of the the citations are from conference proceedings, little attention is paid to them.


    So, do you take satisfaction in that?

    Lomax wrote:


    Quote

    Looking at cold fusion must look first at experimental evidence, not at theory.


    This is true, but at the same time one should not ignore what has already been learned about nuclear physics to make weak evidence more acceptable.


    There are many examples of surprising results in science that were (relatively) rapidly accepted in spite of contrary expectations because the evidence was strong: HTSC, quasi-crystals, the accelerating expansion of the universe (dark matter, dark energy), and so on.


    At the same time claims of perpetual motion machines (or other free energy claims) date back more than a century, and it is wise for scientists to demand unequivocal evidence for such claims because they are so contrary to expectations.


    Cold fusion is not as forbidden as perpetual motion machines, but as Hagelstein says, it is contrary to current solid state and nuclear physics, and therefore the evidence must make the claims more plausible than possible artifacts. And this generally means the evidence should be as robust as the evidence that predicts it will not happen. So far, it's not in the same ball park.


    Quote

    Cold fusion papers were not uncommonly rejected because of "lack of explanatory theory," which completely misses the point.


    Cold fusion papers were rejected from high impact journals because the they did not meet their standards of scientific rigor. One component of that may be the lack of a plausible mechanism, but the other is the poor quality of the evidence. Again, more than 100,000 papers have been published on HTSC (in all the best journals) without an explanatory theory. What was needed was better evidence, but when the experiments improved, the evidence became weaker, just like pathological science everywhere.


    And it's not just high impact journals that find cold fusion work to be sub-standard. The DOE panel criticized the quality of the research, and Nagel (a cold fusion advocate) laments the low quality of cold fusion papers in his 2009 review of the ICCF. And just yesterday, we have the following exchange between two cold fusion believers, one a thought leader in the field:


    Dewey Weaver: "Lastly, there is very little rigor in LENR replication these days . . ."


    Jed Rothwell: "Very little? You are too polite. There is none, and apart from Mike McKubre, Mel Miles and few others, there never was."


    I haven't seen any from McKubre and Miles either, but then, McKubre admitted he got tired of trying to "science cold fusion", so it seems the work Rothwell considers rigorous, failed to generate credible scientific evidence.


    I don't think it's a coincidence that positive claims of cold fusion are associated with lack of rigor. Maybe that's the 4th miracle in the field.


    Quote

    It's outside what we can do, the environment in which the reaction is found is far too complex to predict using theory, and that is about the one thing I remember clearly from sitting with Feynman: predicting the solid state is beyond our capacity. Then and now, still.


    Nuclear reactions, and in particular fusion reactions in metal hydrides have been predicted to exquisite accuracy in the design of military weapons, and commercial neutron sources. The design of highly reliable radioisotope thermoelectric generators to provide power for space vehicles relies on accurate predictions of the behavior of solid state in the context of nuclear reactions. The entire electronics revolution was based on the ability of scientists and engineers to predict the behavior of the solid state in various conditions. Presumably Feynman said exact solutions for solid state are not possible, but that is not the same as saying nothing is predictable.

    Quote from Shane D.

    Well &quot;honed argument&quot; is a sword that can cut both ways. <img src="https://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/wcf/images/smilies/smile.png" alt=":)" />

    Of course it can. Any troll with well-honed and heavily practiced can create enormous confusion. Any expert who knows a field and with high experience can also develop well-honed argument. So be vary careful whom you trust, because there are very smart people -- read "clever" or "cunning," out there whose goal is not to educate you, but to freeze you into positions that will blind you. And, yes, this cuts in all ways, not just two.


    One principle to start with, and this is custom in science. Testimony is presumed true unless controverted (that's common law), but anonymous testimony has no probative value. Ever. People will think that if the anonymous testimony points to verifiable facts, and they verify the facts, therefore the testimony is sound. It is not, and the reason is quite simple: there is a vast universe of facts to pick from, and facts can be cherry-picked to create illusion. The problem is not the facts themselves, but the interpretive context provides ready meaning, out of a vast universe of possible meanings. The most anonymous testimony can do is initiate an inquiry, but if all that is investigated is what the troll presented, it's easy to be misled.


    As I wrote, if anyone is tempted to believe what Cude is implying and attempting to establish, ask specifically. Otherwise, his history is quite clear. He keeps piling it on, ignoring what has been written in the past, and I responded to one post here, where he wrote about a casual remark I made five years ago, quoting it out of context. He did exactly the same thing in several other places. Shifting meaning by quoting out of context is highly reprehensible. What is clearly demonstrated is a radically unethical position, and maintained for what purpose? Truth? But he is essentially lying. And he will fill page after page with his deceptions.


    And then others will jump in with support for him. Generally also anonymous. Do you care?

    Quote from joshua cude

    Lomax wrote:



    This is true, but at the same time one should not ignore what has already been learned about nuclear physics to make weak evidence more acceptable.


    I have been waiting for a naysayer to discredit Lief Holmlid experiments. He uses chemistry to produce mesons. These muons will catalyze fusion. His experiment produces a COP of 2 so something gainful is going on. It has been years now and I have not seen any condemnations of his work from anybody appear and all his stuff is peer reviewed. Joshua Cude, will you ever do any original critical work in this area?

    Quote from Nigel Appleton

    A great shame it is that Rossi is so oblivious to the desirability of adhering to high standards in science and engineering, and data collection and interpretation.
    It is incredibly important to try very hard to disprove one's own hypotheses. How else are you going to know how right you were?

    Very early on, Rossi was asked about control experiments. He said, as I recall, that they were useless because he already knew what would happen, nothing. What that demonstrated, if he was serious, and he might have been, was that he had no idea of the function of a control experiment. It is to reduce variables to as few as possible.


    So what was the largest problem with the Lugano test? No control. The "dummy reactor" was not take up to full input power, so we don't know how it would look to the IR camera at over 900 W input. The result of a control experiment is not "nothing." The behavior of that device at 900 W input, but with no fuel is not "nothing." It is very much "something." What is it? And then what is the effect of the fuel?


    There is current Chinese work where the fuel makes an apparent difference, and, yes, they calibrated with full input power. And no thermocouple failures. However, still, the fuel and the presence or absence of a hydrogen atmosphere can make a difference in heat conduction. So they are not done, more work is required. That's science. Rossi was never doing science, that was obvious from 2011. He was doing business, which is a game played with very different rules.

    Quote

    Lomax: No, it doesn't. Rather, one can create a resemblance by selective presentation of fact, at which Cude is expert.


    Quote

    Lomax: Cude is referring to experimental reports, and not to reviews.


    Right, but reviews of conference proceedings do not confer upon the conference proceedings the value of peer review.


    In fact, the argument applies more effectively to heat-helium than to cold fusion skepticism, because skeptical papers *have* been published in refereed journals.


    Quote

    SRI confirmed the Miles work, but SRI reports are not published in journals,


    Not true. McKubre published his calorimetry work done at SRI under the same EPRI funding system.


    Quote

    Customers will base millions of dollars in investments, or more, on SRI reports. Scientifically, they are higher than average in quality,


    Whether that's true or not, they are not recognized in the same way in the scientific community. And scientists are interested in recognition. If the results merited it, McKubre would have wanted them published in refereed journals, just as he published some of his earlier cold fusion work.


    More importantly, in the internal EPRI report, McKubre was *negative* about the correlation work. He wrote "it has not been possible to address directly the issue of heat-commensurable nuclear product generation".


    It was only in very sub-standard conference proceedings that he claims a correlation, and these claims have been associated with alleged falsification of data, documented in some detail by Krivit.


    Quote

    Replications have not been journal-published, they are mostly conference reports. The writer of a review considers all this, as do the reviewers of the review, and reviews are secondary source, considered of higher quality (certainly for Wikipedia purposes) than primary sources like experimental papers.


    Referees for literature reviews do not review primary material -- that would be ridiculous. Literature reviews, especially by the journal editor (like Storms' review) are treated with kid gloves. And literature reviews by non-scientists (like Krivit, for whom you list 5 reviews, 3 unrefereed) surely do not have the authority to elevate any lowly conference proceeding to that of a peer-reviewed paper. You're talking moonshine.

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