Display MoreJedRothwell wrote:
Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
You requested your talk page be deleted, and it was. It was restored for reasons unstated, but then deleted through an OTRS ticket at your request in 2010.
That's a relief. Thanks for finding that out..
Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
You could still edit Wikipedia any time you wanted, but not as Jed Rothwell, because that account is blocked,
Why would I edit it as someone other than myself? That's nuts.
You are demonstrating, as was demonstrated long ago, that you do not understand Wikipedia policy and the Wikipedia community. Instead, you stand outside complaining about it. That's certainly your privilege, but it has implications. Among them, you acknowledge that Wikipedia has power. Editors who operate within policy -- and some who do not -- have power. We, speaking for the LENR community, are attempting to exercise real power, in the real world, which means as-it-is or as is within our power to transform.
You *could* still edit as "Jed Rothwell," as you did. And those edits, if seen by certain users, would be reverted. They would not be "deleted," you have been quite confused about the difference between a revert and a delation. Your user talk page is actually "deleted," which means, at this point, that only administrators may see it. If it was actually "oversighted," then only certain highly privileged users may see it. It is unlikely that it was oversighted. And then there is what developers can do, and it is highly unikely that a developer would get involved. They rigorously stay out of politics of any kind. I know of no example of a controversial developer action that involved concealing content. (There have been WMF Office changes to software that were opposed by the community, and some threatening noises made, and the Office backed down; after all the Community does the work to maintain Wikipedia. That generates power, but only when the Community is exercised -- which they were!)
When a user edits using dynamic IP, as you did, the edits may not readily be viewed in a single place. (There are ways to approach this using IP range specifications, but .... it's unreliable and will include anyone editing withini your IP range, i.e., it can be a mess. But, then, one could look for your characteristic signature, one could even write a script to do this. But the point here is that to review your behavior becomes difficult, whereas when a user uses a single named and registered account, it is easy. You made it difficult for the community to review what you were doing. They consider that suspcious, and will be prejudiced against you. And you did this for no apparent reason other than pique at being blocked for policy violations. (I have not investigated those, but I do remember at the time thinking that you had, indeed, violated 3RR policy and civility policy. And those were relatively harmless. You were not blocked more than normal short-blocks, which are easily issued, and relatively easy to recover from.)
If you didn't want to edit Wikipedia, fine. To do this with power takes a lot of work, and maybe it's not worth it. Once the faction was on my tail, they made everything difficult, and I was being warned -- and blocked -- even for behavior that, under normal circumstances. Editing Wikipedia to generate positive transformation was already difficult. It became way too much of a burden, so I bailed, every explicitly. I gave up on due process, it had been exhausted, and the Arbitration Committee had demonstrated deep bias (which surprised me, actually, because I had seen many excellent decisions. I did not factor for the depth of the faction's power and their skill at manipulating the community, which they often did by lying to it, with lies that would appear to be truthful as long as one did not look closely. There are lots of people who know how to do this, even unconsciously, and the Wikipedia administrative structure tends to attract these. And most of the Community is essentially asleep. Like Planet Earth.)
To say, however, that you "can't" is misleading and unnecessary. You could. You could even edit with the account JedRothwell. That account was blocked, yes, but that does not apply to two basic privileges: editing your User talk page and being able to email other users who have email enabled. Further, if you have email enabled, other users can email you, and this privilege cannot be removed except by an Office action. They recently started doing this, and it has cause a substantial fuss, because this is the Office disempowering the community. Most of the community, however, doesn't notice or realize these details. And, after all, isn't the Project the greatest thing since sliced bread?
My Talk page access is blocked on en.Wikipedia because I used the Talk page to point to IP edits. Admins may block User Talk page access if it is used for anything other than appealing a block. One of the remarkable facts about ScienceApologist (Joshua P. Schroeder. probably our very own Joshua Cude) is that he grossly violated this and nothing was done. He had substantial support in the administrative community, even when banned.
You have promised not to edit Wikipedia again in any way. Again, that's your privilege. But why might a user edit as "someone other than himself"? That is not what was suggested you could do. You can edit as yourself, as you did, by IP, and the edits would be seen by anyone watchlisting the page. If reverted, any user who thought the edits useful could revert them back in. I did this at times. The faction screams, but can't actually do anything about it. It is not against policy to revert back the edits even of a "banned user," if the user reverting them back is willing to take responsibility for them. And I was. So I did. This did not harm me, ever. I even defied a global ban with this, and the result was that the user was unbanned, when the community saw that he was making positive edits. (I suggested he self-revert, he did, and that cooperation turned the corner for him. It looked quite good!)
I used this, later, when topic-banned and blocked, to make some constructive edits, which, though my IP was blocked by an admin who had made it his mission to Keep Abd Away, were reverted back in, and those edits stood. I started out signing all those edits in the edit summary, with something like this: "Edit by Abd, under ban, will self-revert." In other words, I made the edit, then being banned, self-reverted, thus causing no work for "ban enforcers." This drove the faction and some admins crazy, because I had pulled the excuse for RBI out from underneath them. They could still block, but then, as I continued, they had to start using range blocks with increasing range until they were blocked a very large number of IPs. Collateral damage. Then an edit filter was set up to automatically reject edits with "Abd" in the edit summary. This was truly hilarious, because they were demanding, effectively, that I *not* identify myself, thus making identification of edits far more difficult, creating work for themselves. It was all a deliberate reductio ad absurdem.
(I used a similar argument in pointing out that your IP edits were not as disruptive as they would have been if not signed. Realize that there were arbitrators who recognized all this. Your position was not untenable, had you decided to work with the community. But I remember you then, you were, quite simply, vehemently opposed to Wikipedia, you wanted the cold fusion article to be horrible so that Wikipedia would be discredited. Well, how well did that strategy work?)
Editing under another name, when you have a blocked named account, is contrary to policy, and any such edits, if identified, may be subject to RBI. It is called "block evasion." Policy wants you, if you want to edit, to request and obtain unblock. You never did this.
Wikis have some intrinsic vulnerabilities. That's a far more complex story. At this point, Wikiversity remains highly useful, and you could build educational resources there, and you would be unlikely to be molested, if you follow community policy, and I would certainly assist. I have largely abandoned Wikiversity, myself, but am leaving all options open, and I may return to high activity there. In theory, Wikiversity content on a topic should be linked from Wikipedia. I and another user attempted to create those links; they were removed by the faction, but contrary to policy and, at the time, I was self-declared as having a Conflict of Interest, and confined myself to what should have been non-controversial edits, and to talk page discussion -- which are allowed with a COI.
What the faction did on Wikipedia, in general, was unsupportable if examined. So the faction went after any user capable of creating community examination!
Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
You never tried to work with the community, respecting policy.
They have no coherent policies. Just a mishmash of contradictory, self-serving rules. As far as I can tell the unifying principle is: Winner deals and dealer wins. I will not play that game. I am not interested in participating in such nonsense.
You have no idea how Wikipedia policies were created. What you describe is not Policy, but Practice. The "nonsense" is more or less how almost all human communities operate, so your "not interested" would explain how you are somewhat stuck in the fringe. You don't want to work with real people. Real people are messy and may not think clearly, sometimes. However, treat them like enemies or as idiots and they will squash you, if they have the power. (More often they will simply ignore you.)
I created process that got JzG reprimanded; that was thought next to impossible by some experienced users. I then created process that got William M. Cpnnolley desysopped. That was astonishing! In the process, though, the faction woke up and realized how much they had at stake. They had already attacked, as a followup to the JzG case. Until then their position was that Abd was an idiot troublemaker, ignore him. Once they saw the risk, they devoted resources. I was not the only one to be targeted. Overall, the faction lost power, but it's still dangerous.
Anyone who attacks the faction will likely be seen as a troublemaker. So that is not at all what I would advise!
As to Wikipedia Policies, there was high consideration and intelligence that went into them. The design, as far as it goes, is brilliant. However, there are things missing from it. Consensus is valued, but there was a naivete as to how consensus would form, and be measured (Wikipedia has no real concept of measuring consensus, it more or less assumes that consensus will be obvious, but then factions manipulate the process and claim consensus even when it is obvious that, by the ordinary meanings of the word, there is no-consensus.) In fact, look at what Enric Naval put on your User page. He appears to believe that there rwas actually a ban, even though ban policy was not followed, at all. Even though the last discussion he points to ended with some arbitrator comments that demolished the JzG position and confirmed that JzG was "involved" and therefore should never have touched you and your content with his tools.) The Wikipedia community, writing the policy, was largely naive about the 20th century experience with consensus process, and what it takes. Among other things, it takes a ton of discussion, as normally structured. And many in the Wikipedia community, from its origins, disliked deep discussions....
But the Arbitration Committee always -- not just this time -- avoided dealing with the problem of factions, particularly of factions including administrators. I think the cause is that they had no clue how to deal with the problem, so they kept punting. "The community will solve the problem." Probably not without leadership!
Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
If you would't post unsigned messages, why did you not use your named account, which would simplify signatures?
I didn't bother to learn how to do that.
Right. You never bothered to learn how to use Wikipedia, in the most elementary way. Create an account. Add "~~~~" to the end of a post to sign it. This is explicitly given as a tool in the edit window. It signs and date-stamps. Yeah, it's easy to miss. My first comments I "signed" by manually adding a name and time stamp. Then I noticed the instructions. Duh!
You can customize your signature in your profile, you can make it basically anything you want, but the software will track all your posts under your account name. Anyone can look, and this is an important MediaWiki feature, allowing the community to supervise itself.
Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
You have it wired that they win, in advance. In fact, the faction picks editors off, one at a time.
Why would I participate in such a dysfunctional process? Why would anyone? It is a cult. Let the cult members do as the please.
Why should you participate with the human community, seeing how "dysfunctional" it is. It's all group-think, a bunch of idiots!
And what is the end of those who think like this? The meaning of a communication is the effect. What is the effect?
There is no "should." There are effects from what we do. A powerful stand is that we are responsible for the effects we create. We choose them. Well? Your argument would certainly apply to voting in the present structures. Why should one participate in such a dysfunctional mess? I get the argument, but the effect of voting is not only in the outcome, it is in the process itself and how it creates our relationship with power. Whatever I do is likely to be done by many like me. How I make my choices is not just about my own vote, but about many, many votes. How I think is communicated to everyone around me. Do I take responsibility? If I do, I generate power iin all areas of my life. If I don't, I'm a leaf blown in the wind, complaining about where the wind takes it. Damn wind!
Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
I stopped posting at e-catworld when I figured out they were sometimes deleting my messages.
The problem is that there was no "they." You mistook the actions of a few for a "site decision."
This seems out of context. I was talking about Wikipedia. I looked back and see that Jed brought up e-cat world at the end of his post, so my response allowed him to context it as about E-catworld.
Who cares whether it is a person or a "site decision"? What the hell difference does that make? Deleted is deleted. I will not go to the trouble to write messages which are then deleted. For that matter, if a software glitch was deleting them, I still wouldn't bother. I don't care what causes the problem..
No. There are levels of deletion. True deletion is what, say, a moderator may be doing here, if he deletes a post of mine, as he has, I cannot read it, AFAIK. (Actually, maybe I can ... I think I've been able to recover such, but I'm not sure at this moment.) It appears that a "deleted" e-Catworld post is still visible in the user profie. At least to the user. Pending posts are also visible. It is easy to confuse a pending post with one being deleted, it can look like that. "I know I saved this post, and it's not here! It must have been deleted, the jerks!"
On Wikipedia, there is a process for hiding posts to a talk page, like those of Jed's as IP. It is called "revision deletion" and may not have existed back then except through something very cumbersome. It was made easier, but revision deletion is heavily deprecated, not to be used by administrators in a situation like that of JzG and Jed. Normally, all these posts are visible, like any edits to any page. And, if caught quickly, any user could single-button and a save, bring the edit back in. So the problem with Jed was that he was operating outside of community traditions, and with no support. And blamed "wikipedia" for that.
In my opinion you put too much effort into understanding things like Wikipedia. I don't see the point to trying to understand it in detail. All I need to know is that the cold fusion article is run by a clique of anti-cold fusion people who erase messages, and the management at Wikipedia will not stop them. It may be that other articles are not run by cliques, but I have no desire to contribute to other articles
Well, when I was funded last year, it was out of writing about Wikipedia. That you don't see the point of something shows lack of imagination, nothing more. I've also been paid as a consultant re Wikipedia.
In general, Wikipedia articles are "run by" those who edit them and who continue to watch them. Those who give up and go away are not actually excluded, but they exclude themselves. I showed, here, how, in May, a factional editor lost a dispute, while complaining about "revert warring" which wasn't revert warring. It was normal process. The "management of Wikipedia" has almost no power, when it comes to day-to-day management of articles. Wikipedia is an adhocracy, which is, more or less, "government by those who show up." If you don't show up, you have no power. And you cannot effectively complain to the "management," since they don't actually exist. Previously the faction had tried to exclude mention of the Current Science Special Section. They lost. If they had insisted, this could have been taken to RfC, and key would be attracting general editors, not just factional ones. There are ways. Aside from this, key, as well, would be making sure that knowledgeable editors maintain focus on the article. It takes one button push to revert an edit. It takes very little to give a brief reason. It takes more to discuss, but it is not necessary that everyone discuss. Anyone can do it, and users can express support very easily.
But if users walk away in despair, this never happens. The faction wins, because they often show long-term persistence.
In theory, Wikipedia is managed by the WikiMedia Foundation, but it almost totally stays out of content disputes. They intervened, through OTRS, to delete your Talk page because you made a legal request.
You claim to be interesting in promoting LENR, but if it involves setting aside personal pique, forget about it. You are not abnormal in this, at all. However, if we intend to transform the planet, what is required of us is extraordinary.
Jed, I wouldn't bother telling you all this if I didn't have high respect for you. I want you to be fully successful, and I see that as quite possible. This is not about "Wikipedia," which is a detail. It's about everything.
And this is not just about you. If the LENR community had taken an interest in the Wikipedia article, had created intelligent cooperation, starting with thorough understanding of Wikipedia and Wikipedia policies, and fulfilling them, not denying them as stupid, the article would be vastly improved, and would have been years ago. That faction only had power in opposition to weak, disorganized fringe "believers," who generally set themselves up to be sanctioned.
Pcarbonn was shot down, and his "violation" was? How did that happen? To know, I'd have to study the ArbComm case. However, I know enough. He was only temporarily banned by the AC, and because JzG had presented an "insider's case," something that was actually harmless but could be made to look bad. Inadequate support showed up. He was later permanently banned "by the community," in a discussion that radically disregarded policy, that could easily have been taken to ArbComm. But did anyone do that? What do you think?
I know exactly what I did that caused the responses I got. That, in fact, is part of how I'm able to advise others. I learn from what I've done. Do I want to edit Wikipedia again myself? No, I have better things to do at the moment. But will I say, that I "can't"? No. I can. As to improving Wikipedia, they also serve who only stand and watch. But "can't" freezes and paralyzes.
Ah, we would have free energy, but we can't, because they won't let us.
Cold Fusion Times : Previous US gov't classified &other, documents from early &mid-years of the Cold Fusion coverup now public through FOIA &FairUse
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Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
I understand it is cesspool. Anyone can see that. Who cares about the details? How it got that way, who is shoveling all that crap into it, and why they are shoveling makes no difference to me.I doubt there is any "policy." With all those contradictory rules, policy is whatever the reigning nitwit says it is.
I care about cesspools. I worked at a sewage treatment plant for a time. Great job. What other people ignore, I study. Most people stay away from, say, childbirth. Messy. You can get blood all over you. I delivered about thirty babies, my ex-wife about 200, and we started a midwifery service with many people, and a school of midwifery that made a difference for many, and I worked with the state to develop licensing, and my ex-wife was licensed, with no formal education. We confronted the "establishment" and won. How did we do that? People who don't care won't know.It's been acknowledged that Wikipedia, cesspools and all, has power and influence. Yes. It's a boatload of work, shovelling all that shit. In fact, a path to community acceptance is shovelling a lot of shit, doing Recent Changes Patrol. The Wikipedia community is generally suspicious of Single Purpose Accounts with axes to grind. "Not encyclopedic." The good news about RCP is that it's like a video game, to be the first to spot vandalism and spam and clearly inappropriate edits. How do you think I survived as long as I did on Wikipedia? By being smarter than everyone else? That goes down to oblivion fast.
One of the things Pcarbonn did was to humiliate JzG. I brought this all out. People who are humiliated sometimes strike back. Ah, but he was such a tempting target, a blithering idiot at times. On Quora, one learns, quickly, not to say the obvious. Just let it be obvious, and don't argue with trolls, rather, Report them. (which is anonymous on Quora, the good news and the bad news. I.e., it cuts both ways. If there are a lot of reports, overworked administrators make mistakes. I've run into them. By normal practice, I'd have been blocked again and maybe banned, but I appealed. And some actions were reversed, plus I now have wide reputation and people who would complain if I'm actually blocked or banned. Still, Quora management is deliberately opaque. If criticized them, and they haven't retaliated. But ... what if some faction decides to Report? It's tricky, like dealing with any human community. It requires skill. Take-home lesson, do not humiliate people unless it is absolutely necessary. Myself, I reserve that for those who humiliate others, persistently.
QuoteAbd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
But the fact is, you can't edit it. Neither can I.
You can lock yourself in the box of "can't" if you like. I refuse. I could demonstrate it. If I do, I would predict that my edit would either stand or it would be reverted and then restored. The outcome would depend on the page edited and who is watching it. If I identify myself by name, I would self-revert, that is a process I invented back in about 2009 to allow banned editors to cooperate with the community. It worked, actually, quite well, but the faction, once they realized the danger, went after it hammer and tong. The faction actually rejects community power, that is something to understand about it. They operate, dependent upon inattention.In making a test edit, I would need to consider whether or not to sign it in some way. As it stands, I have not edited Wikipedia deliberately for a long time. That is a standard basis for requesting unban. If I create a violation of that, it could make it more difficult to obtain an unban. So I might not even make the edit, there is something else that I could do for a demonstration. Within policy.
QuoteAll this blather about the rules and details makes no difference. If they allowed me back in, anything I write will be instantly deleted.
You are directly denying what I've written, about a project where you acknowledge that you are a know-nothing. I can edit Wikipedia. I have, since being banned edited pages. Accidentally. WTF? Yes, it can happen. The wiki habit is if you see a typo, you fix it. So I read Wikipedia a lot. Mostly, now, I'm always logged in, they changed autologin to be global, it didn't used to be that way. So the Wikipedia software knows that I'm logged in if I have logged in, say, to Wikiversity. So it won't allow me to edit. And there is a feature added that connects my IP automatically with the user name, so even if I log out, it won't let me edit from the same IP.You would not be subject to this problem, by the way, if you edit from IP. But I do not recommend that at all. At the present moment, I would recommend you not edit Wikipedia at all, because that is what you promised, and I have not been suggesting that you edit. Rather, I have been suggesting that you realize and clearly declare that this is a product of your own choices, and that stand is not disempowering.
How to move around this limitation is obvious and I could trivially do it, so it is not that I "can't" edit Wikipedia, I can. I have seen the administrative community try with serious effort to stop particular users from editing, and it essentially fails. I'm not sure if it is still being maintained ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…a:Long-term_abuse/Scibaby
From that, the edits have slowed down, but ... he's merely losing interest, after ten years. At one point, I and another editor tried to establish contact with Scibaby. He was not responsive. It might be noticed that he is "considered banned." That means that there never was a ban process, and I know the history. This sock farm was the result of abuse by William M. Connolley and Raul654. The faction! (And it was much more concerned with global warming than with cold fusion, they really didn't care about cold fusion that much, it was a minor interest.) So it would have been possible to get Scibaby unblocked, if he'd wanted to cooperate. But, I think, he had discovered that trolling was much more fun.... "You can't make me!" is very appealing!
But I could also edit as Abd again, if I wanted to. I don't, not at this point, anyway. It's been suggested I go back, and I will continue to consider it. But, banned, I am not tempted to mix it up with what can be a pile of idiots, and I can contact any editor I want. My email is not blocked on en.Wikipedia. At one point, in fact, there was a problem and I emailed JzG. He fixed it, though he did announce what he was doing. After all, he wouldn't want to be accused of being a meat puppet for Abd! I don't hate JzG. It's not his fault he was dropped on his head as a baby.... Actually, the reason JzG was not fully sanctioned is that he worked his butt off for the community, at one point, and most of the people he was grossly uncivil to were, ah, trolls. It was just that there were some exceptions.
I can support any editor, then, with information and suggested edits. If I choose. Realizing that this is all within choice is important. If I do it, or don't do it, I am responsible. I do not have to personally edit to create what I choose, and I could also personally edit if needed. If I choose.
I would never do this to frustrate the community purpose, as expressed in policies that have consensus. My opinion is that communities have the right to regulate themselves, always. (Like Socrates....) Even if they disagree with me. If a structure is owned, the owner has the right, and that is why I never messed with the ban on vortex-l. The owner was an idiot, that list will have no owner if he disappears, so the community that did not join newvortex (started before he banned me! when the list was down) will have no recourse and vortex-l would die, unless Beatty changes his position, and he mostly doesn't care, but is unwilling to surrender full control. Very common. And if people accept it, what they get is what they get.
But would my edits be reverted? Any editor's edits can be reverted. The Wikipedia structure is grossly inefficient, it does not value editor labor. (Quora is vastly better, though it also has problems. Quora attracts some of the best writers on the planet, and quite sensibly so. Wikipedia does not attract writers, generally, because it does not respect writing, as such, but "editing." Famous dogs and cats: editors and writers.)
None of Jed's edits were actually deleted, except possibly edits to articles or other pages that have been deleted. (And any admin could restore those, and there are admins who will do this on simple request, moving the article into user space, and any of this could then be transwikied to Wikiversity by request to an admin there, and it would be done, almost certainly.) Here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Cold_fusion&diff=261068696&oldid=261011619 was Jed's removal of the IP editor's edit, based on a claim, explained on the Talk page, that this was you. The edit was not "deleted," but it was removed from the Talk page, which can be done with a legitimately banned user. But you were not banned. You were not even blocked. Was the edit disruptive? Most of all, it was not signed by you, and you always signed your edits. This wasn't you, this was obvious, and I knew that at the time and brought it up in the case against JzG.JzG simply thought that anything showing knowledge of cold fusion must be from Pcarbonn, his nemesis, or from you, as a meat puppet for Pcarbonn. Basically, an idiot, can we agree on that?
The material was certainly not deleted. Here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Cold_fusion&oldid=261011619#Why_was_reference_to_Szpak_et_al_.282004.29_and_.282005.29_removed.3F
What actually happened was that nobody had the balls to restore it. I was not yet involved with the article. I did restore an edit to Cold fusion by a user actually banned. It was ScienceApologist! It was a good edit! I was attacked by his supporter (Hipocrite!) but it went nowhere because there was not only no policy violation there, by me, it was clearly legitimate, not marginal. Hipocrite had deleted, arguing that he was banned, therefore RBI. This was actually a plot to humiliate neutral administrators, Hipocrite was SA's friend, and that was shown by the sequence, and ScienceApologist was then site-banned for three months, because his intentions had become clear.
Yes, Wikipedia is unreliable. But it is generally predictable, like all human society, if one studies society and how it works.
QuoteAbd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Damn right we would! And it is other people's fault. People such as Frank Close, Robert Park and the editors of the Sci. Am. are to blame. It is entirely their fault and not 1% my fault or the fault of any researcher. I do not buy Beaudette's allocation of the blame he puts on Fleischmann and Pons. I do not buy your feel-good kumbaya version of history either. Park and the rest of those people are filthy, corrupt bastards. They are evil. To preserves their status in what they saw as an academic bun fight, they accidentally killed millions of people. History should treat them as pariahs. But if I know anything about history books, they will end up taking credit for cold fusion.
Ah, doesn't reality suck? God made such a mistake! And he just keeps making them! I could do such a better job! If only everyone would listen to me, then we would have free energy and full prosperity and everyone would be deleriously happy. But they won't, the idiots!Yes, millions of people can die from errors in a rejection cascade. Many women died needlessly because few paid attention to Semmelweiss. Now, who is to "blame" for that? The very concept of blame is disempowering. If we can find someone to blame -- other than ourselves -- we then are free of any responsibility. It is not our problem, it is theirs. If only they would be good, everything would be okay. So, hey, if we keep blaming them, maybe they will change! Where does this idea come from? It almost never works in the real world, except in one context.
That context explains how we learned to do this.
I have been trained to recognize all this -- in myself! -- as quickly as possible, and to move into considering, not who is to blame and what is wrong, but "what is missing, the presence of which would make a difference," and I was trained to run that process as a demonstration of the technology. The shift can be astonishing. The leader in that process will guide participants to identify a state of being that is missing from the person himself or herself, not some condition. Lots of people will start out with "Money! That's what is missing!" However, if the person declares the possibility of getting a million dollars -- I've seen this -- the leader will point out the obvious. "We are not inspired." What is missing, not as a condition, but as a stand or state of being? In the case of the woman and the million dollars, she came up with "I am the possibility of being happy with what I have, and creating what I need." Or something like that. And she was actually inspired, it could be seen in her face. It completely changed her focus from what was wrong ("Poor!" -- she thought) that she could not directly control ("having a million dollars,") to what she could control (her own attitude). I've seen it again and again, she would then do well in the real world. (This "I am the possibility" is language from the Advanced Course, she was in a program for establishing community projects and that requires the Advanced Course as a prerequisite, so she already had some significant training.)
You will see this again and again in the stands I take around cold fusion. We have what we need to move forward and what we do not have, we can create. They are not stopping us. They aren't even trying, my observation. We are keeping ourselves stopped, by believing that there is a huge obstacle to overcome. It is almost entirely fantasy by now. Yes, there are people not ready to change, but there are others changing, major progress is being made. I have presented heavy skeptics with my heat/helium article, and those who have read it almost always come up with something like, "This is interesting. Great idea to actually confirm this!" Even as they are claiming I'm a stuck, crazy, fanatic "believer."
Jed, where is the killer article on cold fusion? Where is the article that clearly cuts through the noise, effectively and with high skill?
You created a video that was quite good. But where does it leave the viewer? Is there a call to action within what the viewer could do immediately? Once one starts the study of transformation, and how communities actually transform, what is still missing there becomes obvious. As a coach I was trained to identify this and support participants in moving beyond the limitations. What if someone objects to something in the video? Where would they go, specifically and clearly, to look into it? One can easily find pages that excoriate skeptics for being stupid and wrong. How many pages patiently guide?
Notice that there is a symmetry here. A genuine skeptic might notice how much skepticism is pseudoskepticism that would only alienate "believers," not guide them to discover their own errors. (Which is pretty much the only way that works, and you even know this, because you expect that the major skeptics will turn around and say something like, "At last they showed something real!" They will not collapse in a greasy pile of shame. People mostly don't do that. How, indeed does one truly communicate with people in difficult subjects? Do we just say whatever pops into our heads and then justify it?
All your edits are still there on Wikipedia. Because they are scattered among IP addresses, mostly, they are not easy to find unless one has direct database access, which is complicated, though it can be done. Whatever you edited as JedRothwell is trivial to see, an easy command and there they all are, except for edits to deleted pages, which will not show there. There is another public display that will reveal how many edits have been deleted (because the page was deleted, generally).
