mindguard are a social phenomenon, emerging from a groupthink.
when the group want to shutdown dissenters that endanger future prediction of the victims, some people self-appoint themselves as mindguards, knight of the True Truth that have to be protected from Evil, and they expect some return unconsciously.
Roland Bénabou : The Economics of Motivated Beliefs
Nice, thanks.
QuoteIve read good book by Broad & Wade, and they have been quite harsh on cold fusion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayers_of_the_Truth ... 1982, obviously not about cold fusion. However, Broad and Wade have often been cited by people thinking it applies to cold fusion. I'm sure it does, to some extent, as, really, to all scientific fields, but the citations I have seen are essentially clueless about the actual history of cold fusion. Fraud has not been a major part of the story. What can be asserted not uncommonly is possibly unwarranted -- or premature -- conclusions from data. There has been sloppy experimental work. I've seen fraud alleged with the MIT "Negative replication." I think that was not likely fraud, but some severe clumsiness in handling and presenting data. (It is extremely unlikely that the MIT work actually created XE, they did not have high enough loading, by far, so that elevated "baseline" would have been some kind of artifact, probably. What does show in that was the rush to judgment that McKubre described in his Current Science article last year.)
Searching for this, I came across http://www.ise.ncsu.edu/jwilson/colloq.html, a "doctoral colloquium address," whatever that is. It starts with a quotation of Feynman on Cargo Cult Science. Feynman was actually fierce on what might be called "Stuffed Shirt Science," people who simply swallowed orthodox views, and that is part of what he was referring to in Cargo Cult Science, much more than to fringe believers or lunatics.
His warning is to not fool yourself, "because you are the easiest person to fool." And then others quote them to claim that others are fooling themselves. The idea that the writer might be fooling himself is absent.
This fellow cites the cold fusion history, entirely through a single authority, Huizenga, 1993. He's obviously clueless about the full history, and Huizenga was obviously under the heavy influence of a belief as to how things are. It's not that Huizenga did not have some valid criticisms, it is his expectations and theoretical explanations that are a problem. He did not know what he was doing, he had missed entirely the implications of "unknown nuclear reaction" and treated cold fusion as if it were merely the known d-d fusion reaction, but in some unexpected condition. Which was, then, and remains, highly unlikely. Huizenga remained interested in cold fusion, if I'm correct, for a long time, attending the conferences. But his mental flexibility was apparently fading, and that happens to some of us.
The writer goes over the Langmuir criteria for pathological science. Some of these can be presented to apply to cold fusion, but not most of them. And the writer is ontologically naive. For a more balanced view on "pathological science," see Bauer, ‘Pathological Science’ is not Scientific Misconduct (nor is it pathological), http://www.hyle.org/journal/issues/8-1/bauer.htm
Quotesame for Lewis who recently... forget it.
Well, I don't know which Lewis to forget.
By the way, Bauer gets some things not quite right.
Quotea committee empaneled by the US Department of Energy concluded that there was nothing worth pursuing in these claims.
Not quite! But that is a very common idea.The introduction to the conclusions:
QuoteOrdinarily, new scientific discoveries are claimed to be consistent and reproducible; as a result, if the experiments are not complicated, the discovery can usually be confirmed or disproved in a few months. The claims of cold fusion, however, are unusual in that even the strongest proponents of cold fusion assert that the experiments, for unknown reasons, are not consistent and reproducible at the present time. However, even a single short but valid cold fusion period would be revolutionary. As a result, it is difficult convincingly to resolve all cold fusion claims since, for example, any good experiment that fails to find cold fusion can be discounted as merely not working for unknown reasons. Likewise the failure of a theory to account for cold fusion can be discounted on the grounds that the correct explanation and theory has not been provided. Consequently, with the many contradictory existing claims it is not possible at this time to state categorically that all the claims for cold fusion have been convincingly either proved or disproved. Nonetheless, on balance, the Panel has reached the following conclusions and recommendations.
and then there are some specific conclusions:
QuoteBased on the examination of published reports, reprints, numerous communications to the Panel and several site visits, the Panel concludes that the experimental results of excess heat from calorimetric cells reported to date do not present convincing evidence that useful sources of energy will result from the phenomena attributed to cold fusion.
Here it is, 27 years later, and that is still a reasonable position. "To date" and "useful sources of energy will result." What I say is that it is possible.
QuoteThe Panel recommends against any special funding for the investigation of phenomena attributed to cold fusion. Hence, we recommend against the establishment of special programs or research centers to develop cold fusion.
The Panel is sympathetic toward modest support for carefully focused and cooperative experiments within the present funding system.
That was a decision that the evidence for cold fusion was not yet strong enough to justify a major program.
Now, the problem: what they actually recommended was never done by the DoE. The 2004 made essentially the same recommendation, and then there was no follow-up. Both reports were widely interpreted as rejections. In fact, the 2004 DoE came very close to a majority view that the anomalous heat was real. It was evenly split. The 2004 review was mangled by how it was set up, but still it came to that conclusion, which was much stronger than the 1989 position.
So why is it popular opinion, oft-repeated, that the reviews were so negative? Well, it's obvious. It agrees with personal views, for pseudoskeptics, and it agrees with "believers" claiming the whole thing was unfair.
It is rare that anyone actually studies the reviews in detail. I think most of us prefer to believe whatever we want to believe, and isn't that obvious around here?
My training is in ontology (including how world-views develop and how to come to be stuck with fixed reactions) and the technology of personal and social transformation. I was only recently trained, beginning in 2011. It's been quite a journey.
