Rossi-Blog Comment Discussion

Quote from Adrian Ashfield

Eric Walker wrote:

your idiosyncratic notion of "science as innocence until guilt is proven,"

AA wrote: You are suffering from Bob's disease. I never sad that. What I said was I don't automatically assume the man is wrong until the facts are in, unlike you.

Ok — your clarification makes sense. My apologies for misconstruing your original position. I was not intending to quote you literally, but I see also that it was confusing in this regard and that my summary was not what you intended.

Which does not bear directly on my valid point that you are advising people to adopt an inverse scientific attitude in approaching Rossi.

You also wrote, "You [Eric] have a very strange view of science. Normally it works by someone making a hypothesis: they work on that to make it a theory: if over time no objections are found it becomes a law." This does not rescue your inverse scientific position, as I have explained above, nor do you explain why I have a strange view of science. I would be grateful if you could do so.

Quote from axil

A science experiment is designed to support or refure a theory. Rossi's show is a demonstration of a product, a black box, no theory involved, does the produce work or not: apples and oranges.

Right. Like in the Gullstrom & Rossi report.

Quote from zorud

Don't worry, this is all gone.

Rossi stated meanwhile he has reached SIgma 5 (that includes btw millions of real and simulated equivalent test procedures, so fails / safety problems can be excluded with more than 99% probability...). I think we cannot expect to see this kind of stuff on Nov. 24th, more a product that shall be ready to go to his robotized lines, if he is right with his claims....

That's too bad. It reminds me of Tony Stark (Iron Man) building his reactor in a cave with some scrap parts.

But at least it was big show how he did escape from the cave in his scrap parts amor... so lets hope for a good show on Nov. 24

Quote from Eric Walker

Quoting AA: "You have a very strange view of science. Normally it works by someone making a hypothesis: they work on that to make it a theory: if over time no objections are found it becomes a law."

That is theoretical science, not experimental science. In experimental science people do experiments and make observations. The observations often turn out to be inaccurate or incomplete at best, or flat out wrong at worst. As Stan Pons says, if we are right half the time we are doing a great job.

I think that description of experimental science with the smooth progression from hypothesis to theory to law is romanticized. There is a lot more blundering. There are more reversals and mistakes. Most theories turn out to be incomplete or wrong. Sooner or later they are replaced, or at least modified.

In engineering, you must "plan to throw one [version] away" and you must assume that you will take "two steps forward and one step back." Those are chapter titles in Frederick Brooks book, The Mythical Man Month. That is about programming. Programs, as first written by skilled people, are mostly wrong and a little right, as I said. The Obamacare rollout was an example of a program written by unskilled people. It was a first version that they had to throw away.

Science is not about dismissing out of hand. Science is not about running an experiment, getting one or a few failures, and forthwith declaring that a phenomena is non-existent. This is what the scientific establishment largely did with cold fusion in the years following the P&F era. There are a small band of us that refuse to let that happen in the NiH era. We will inspect every possibility. We will support the MFMP in their attempts to replicate and verify. We will inform others about what is happening in the space. We will refute pathological skepticism. We will post on forums across the Internet. We will be early purchasers and adopters of any products that come to market. We will battle regulators on ideological fronts: because we have the moral higher ground. We will not give up.

That is all fine and well. But it bears upon MFMP, who take a scientific approach and provide evidence. It does not bear upon Rossi, whose supporters seem to ask us to ignore science and suspend disbelief. MFMP are very different from Rossi in that regard. As I said, it's good and desirable to ask "where's the beef?" Indeed, this is exactly what MFMP have done.

Given what we know, there's lot of (scientific) reason to believe that Rossi is mistaken or worse. There is some (scientific) reason to believe that he has something (e.g., Levi et al.), but this work is quite controversial and contested. In a normal scientific context, I can only guess that it would not make the cut. In order to give Rossi the benefit of the doubt, one must take a leap of faith unknown in other contexts (except perhaps religion) to assume he has something. Assuming he is mistaken or worse is different than dismissing his claims out of hand.

Quote from Adrian Ashfield

No, You assume he might have made a mistake. That is quite different from assuming he is wrong.

I strongly disagree. People who do science, engineering or programming your way end up creating stuff like the Obamacare roll-out, which was a programming nightmare. A once-in-a-generation-scale nightmare, caused by people who assumed there were no mistakes.

It is better by far to assume Rossi is wrong because most people are wrong, most of the time. I mean in experimental science or when writing new programs. Not in work-a-day things such as building a house. People usually get that right. On the other hand, if it were not for building inspectors who find mistakes during construction, many houses would fall down or burn down. Sewage and rainwater would be flooding everywhere. That is the situation with a house under construction a few houses down from mine.

Quote from Adrian Ashfield

In passing Rossi was acquitted completely for the Petrodraggon affair. (You accepted the bad info from MY.)

I have said nothing about the Petrodraggon affair, and I know nothing about it. Perhaps you confused me with someone else.

Quote from Adrian Ashfield

I am saying it is wrong to automatically assume the man is a liar. wait for the demo and look at the facts.

Not everyone is assuming that Rossi is automatically lying, although we have good reason to believe that he has lied in the past. One can stand back and say, "we don't have enough information to say, scientifically, one way or the other, whether Rossi is correct in his claims, for he will not provide adequate evidence to support them. And there are lots of reasons to assume he is, at minimum, mistaken." This is what the motto of the Royal Society, "nullia in verba," implies. It is a good motto. To ignore this motto would be to take a faith-based approach rather than a scientific one.

Quote from maryyugo

When it comes to an approach to extraordinary claims, I have little in common with either of you.

You are probably unfamiliar with my approach to so-called extraordinary claims. It is quite different from yours, and also from Axil's. I don't believe in them. That is to say, I don't make a distinction between ordinary and extraordinary, because I consider that distinction a state of mind of the observer (me, in this case), rather than a fact of nature. It is subjective, as I describe in the last paragraph, below.

Therefore, all claims, ordinary or extraordinary, must treated the same way, with the same level of rigor. This is an old-fashioned. It is very different from the New Age method practiced by you and Robert Park, which is to categorically reject every new claim without reading it. As I have often said, you are usually right because new claims are usually wrong. But your method takes no more thought, analysis or intelligence than a Magic 8 Ball possesses.

Quoting Melich and me:

Claim 1.5 [in the 2004 DoE review]. “As many have said, extraordinary results require extraordinary proof. Such proof is lacking.”

This is not a principle of science. It was coined by Carl Sagan for the 1980 “Cosmos” television series. Conventional scientific standards dictate that extraordinary claims are best supported with ordinary evidence from off-the-shelf instruments and standard techniques. All mainstream cold fusion papers present this kind of evidence.

Conventional standards also dictate that all claims and arguments must be held to the same standards of rigor. This includes skeptical assertions that attempt to disprove cold fusion, which have been notably lacking in rigor.

Laplace asserted that “The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.” “Weight of evidence” is a measure of how much evidence you have, not how extraordinary it is. There is more evidence for cold fusion than for previously disputed effects. . . .

Finally, the quality of being “extraordinary” is subjective. What seems extraordinary to one person seems ordinary to another. Many scientific phenomena that experts take for granted, such as quantum effects, seemed extraordinary when they were discovered, and still seem extraordinary to non-scientists.

@IHF: refuting pathological skepticism sounds like a worthwhile activity. Do you honestly believe that defending uncorroborated outlandish claims using nothing more than the fact that a serial liar said them in his little blog achieves that goal? Perhaps you should look up the word “refute”.

Quote from Bob

Evidently Adrian must have some misdiagnosis!

It would be amusing if not so sad, that a person tarnishes his legitimacy with childish word play and juvenile retort.

He keeps referring to "Bob's disease" but like most everything else he states, he cannot support what it is. If you ask him for links backing up his statements... he states he is not going to look it up for you! (Since he most likely cannot find them)

If you give him 8 definitive points to answer, he obsesses about a single word. Even when his misunderstanding was pointed out and attempts to clarify was made, he retreats to base insult!

He ignores the factual points that have backing. Even when links are provided, he turns to insults instead of intelligence.

He refuses to even acknowledge those points, because he cannot refute them.

Perhaps I should coin a phrase for Adrian's fallacy! Nah... I outgrew name calling many decades ago!

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It is possible as deminstated by the referenced post that Henry is incompetent to mount a argument based on the science that he purports to defends and Henry must descend to follow in the easy path, the lazy path of personal recrimination where fact don't matter. Let us raise the level of discourse to the arena of facts and not stroke ego with attacks on the person.

Quote from Eric Walker

One can stand back and say, "we don't have enough information to say, scientifically, one way or the other, whether Rossi is correct in his claims, for he will not provide adequate evidence to support them. And there are lots of reasons to assume he is, at minimum, mistaken."

Actually, for the 1-MW 1-year test, he inadvertently supplied definitive proof that it did not work, in the Penon report. This is one example of Rossi providing adequate support for a claim. Negative support.

Quote from Eric Walker

This is what the motto of the Royal Society, "nullia in verba," implies. It is a good motto. To ignore this motto would be to take a faith-based approach rather than a scientific one.

Amen!

(A most inappropriate word! Faith-based. But it is in the right spirit. After all, there must be some degree of faith in science too, that the universe is explicable. The goal is to reduce faith to the absolute minimum.)