Rossi vs. Darden aftermath discussions

MY - Patience.

Quote from maryyugo

I mean, how improbable does something have to be before you (and McKubre) reject it?

Improbability is never a valid metric for rejecting a claim. To evaluate a claim, I look only at experimental evidence, and whether it has a high signal to noise ratio, and how much it has been replicated. Improbability should not be considered because --

Many important discoveries seemed improbable when they were first made. People often refused to believe they were real, even after overwhelming proof was revealed. Even experts doubted them, sometimes for years after they were proven real. Well documented examples include steamships, which Napoleon dismissed as "ships with bonfires under the deck," photographs, telegraphs, telephones, x-rays, radioactivity, airplanes, nuclear bombs, lasers and -- of course! -- cold fusion.

Improbability is subjective. What seems improbable to one person may seem probable to another, especially to an expert who knows many things that ordinary people do not know, such as the principles of special relativity or quantum mechanics. On a less exalted level, I know many things about computers and the Japanese language that non-experts find extraordinary, unbelievable, or inexplicable. I have often mentioned some minor detail about Japanese only to find that the person I am talking to is astounded. Or he doesn't believe me. For example, I might mention that Japanese has no person or number, and that Japanese speakers usually do not distinguish between blue and green, unless they have a reason to. Whereas in Russian, blue and navy blue are two different colors. The Russians have difficulty understanding why we call them both "blue."

I believe many languages make no distinction between blue and green, although they tend to be not widely spoken and/or dying out.

TTM - I was here to counter the offensive effort to trash my good friend Tom Darden. Some of you guys suffered collateral damage in the process which was somewhat unfortunate. The next show is about to begin - the fun is not over.

Your boys are still trashing my good friend TD. Going to be a little different this time.

It is an absolute

Quote from IH Fanboy

Real science doesn't carve out reputation traps for areas of research involving intriguing results, particularly when the potential upside to humanity far outweighs any potential negatives that might come about by devoting some resources to further clarify those results.

That IH money would have been 11 million times more effective in providing any return to humanity, in any area, than if given to virtually any "cause" other than Rossi-- that is indeed a shame.

It's possible, I suppose, that Dewey's gnomic utterances refer to a chance that evidence has been discovered that could be the basis of a criminal fraud prosecution.

That would be satisfying!

Quote from IH Fanboy

Real science doesn't carve out reputation traps for areas of research involving intriguing results, particularly when the potential upside to humanity far outweighs any potential negatives that might come about by devoting some resources to further clarify those results.

There have been 0 intriguing results in LENR/CF. An "intriguing" result in real science would be one that has been replicated by at least two independent, reputable sources without any failures. A failed experiment which results in an unexpected exothermal chemical event does not count as a success in real science. Since LENR experiments are only successful when the person claiming the excess heat has involvement in them, the results are uninteresting.

Quote from lenrisnotreal

There have been 0 intriguing results in LENR/CF. An "intriguing" result in real science would be one that has been replicated by at least two independent, reputable sources without any failures. A failed experiment which results in an unexpected exothermal chemical event does not count as a success in real science. Since LENR experiments are only successful when the person claiming the excess heat has involvement in them, the results are uninteresting.

The key difference between skeptics and LENR advocates here is about how such unreliable results should be interpreted. There is a wide range of views.

It is of course true that a single anomalous result, or a partially replicable anomalous result, could be either something new and interesting, or unexplained but uninteresting experimental error. The issue is in how you rate the probabilities of these two interpretations, since both must always have non-zero probability.

It is also true that not fully replicable results that are expected are more likely to be accepted as probably not error than not fully replicable results which are unexpected. That makes sense in Bayesian terms, because prior probabilities must influence the likelihood of explanations. (The maths needed for this is simply that however probabilities are computed obeys very simple common sense rules and hence Bayes Theorem).

I think where things get complex is in the area of expectation.

• Many LENR advocates would claim that a whole set of not fully replicable results, each individually weak, together leads to the expectation of a class of phenomena typical of LENR and that therefore this individually weak evidence becomes collectively strong.
• A few LENR advocates, like Jed, would say that the strength of individual experiments with anomalous results is such as to make some non-chemical energy level anomaly proven.
• Skeptics would look at the way that LENR characteristics conveniently align with the sort of things that might happen due to random - or in some cases systematic - errors, especially when experimental results are subject to a "select experiments that give LENR positive results" filter and a "select results from experiments that are LENR positive" filter. These two filters acting together can make things otherwise random look systematic. They would say that therefore there is no reason to view the collective set of LENR results as more convincing than any one single result - and these then do not convince due to being not fully replicable.

It is possible to identify these different interpretations, which will be genuinely held.

Quote from Adrian Ashfield

You left out a fourth group, to which you belong, that nothing Rossi claims to have done is believable by definition, and that as he is a con man nothing he says should be believed.

Somehow this is considered open minded skepticism.

I' m looking forward to Rossi's October demonstration with the hope that it will indicate if you are right or wrong.

The above classification has no relationship to Rossi.

To answer your non sequitur however:

Perhaps you could consider in advance what type of results would indicate I was right? I can't see any lying or obviously spoofed experiment from Rossi that has in the past caused those like you who think Rossi has it for real to think that?

My prediction: if Rossi claims the results are positive, no matter how much possibility for spoofing exists, you will view these results has extra confirmation of your views. And, also, Rossi will claim the results are positive.

This is not overly cynical. We have a history of more than a dozen demos from Rossi.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Many LENR advocates would claim that a whole set of not fully replicable results, each individually weak, together leads to the expectation of a class of phenomena typical of LENR and that therefore this individually weak evidence becomes collectively strong.

"Many" LENR advocates do not say this. In fact, I don't know any who say that. I have never read a formal paper saying that. I think that is ridiculous. I think THH has invented an absurd argument and put it in the mouth of "many" imaginary advocates.

People who claim that 100 W reactions with no input power and tritium at levels of 10E14 are "weak" are living in an alternative reality. You should ignore them.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Skeptics would look at the way that LENR characteristics conveniently align with the sort of things that might happen due to random - or in some cases systematic - errors,

These skeptics * never list a candidate cause or systematic error, so their explanation is not falsifiable. You can offer this same argument to disprove any scientific claim, going back to Newton's laws of motion. Unless you give specifics your argument means nothing. You can't just wave your hands and say there might be an error that by some fantastic coincidence only occurs with Pd-D, produces massive levels of tritium at times, and helium commensurate with the heat. That would be the most astounding "coincidence" in the history of experimental science.

* Courtesy Disclaimer. Apart from Shanahan! His claims are impossible and the data clearly shows they never happen. But at least in one case he does list an actual error (a moving heat source) that can be falsified -- and is easily falsified, with existing data.

Quote from THHuxleynew

My prediction: if Rossi claims the results are positive, no matter how much possibility for spoofing exists, you will view these results has extra confirmation of your views.

It isn't just the possibility of spoofing. In the case of the 1-year demo, we have iron-clad proof from Rossi himself that the results were fraud, in the form of the Penon report. He himself tacitly admitted this when he made up the absurd story of the invisible mezzanine heat exchanger that does not appear in photos.

AA said: You left out a fourth group, to which you belong, that nothing Rossi claims to have done is believable by definition, and that as he is a con man nothing he says should be believed.

Somehow this is considered open minded skepticism.

This statement encodes so many different errors that they need to be disentangled. I'm correcting your straw man, and suggest that you state which of the points below you disagree with, and what is your evidence for that.

(1) Nothing Rossi has shown gives support to belief in his claims, not by definition, but by long past observation. The only positive tests that look remotely plausible (Ferrara) are conducted by people (Rossi and Levi) who have provably shown themselves incompetent in that they have ignored obvious errors even when these are pointed out.

(2) I've never been clear that he is a con-man. Specifically, he is good at convincing scientists that he is a genuine deep thinker and inventor. While a con-man could do this, it also, better, fits a deluded inventor whose motivation is not just money but also the plaudits he gets from fans. Rossi, you will notice, has squirreled away a lot of money (consistent with a materialist con-man) but also spends time 24/7 on his blog - consistent with someone motivated by fans. There are shades of duplicity between these two extremes and while sigmoidal and I might have slightly different emphases here, it makes no difference, because wherever he sits on this line he is undoubtedly a liar, and also undoubtedly a master at rigging tests.

(3) In fact most of what Rossi says should be believed. He very rarely lies. The one possible bare-faced lie is the heat exchanger, but even then he may have been doing something in that Mezzazine that could bear some loose resemblance to what he claims. However, although he does not exactly lie, he misdirects so strongly, and repeatedly, that it is as good as lying. Unless you are attuned to Rossi-speak you will be caught out. thus he talks about the JMP customer in the third person although in fact said customer is himself! Those words are quite clearly intended to deceive, even if they can viewed as not untrue in some twisted sense.

(4) Given (3), extreme care is needed in evaluating anything Rossi says or claims. So much care that you get a better approximation to reality by assuming he lies, than by believing him, even if formally this is not the case (and, personally, I don't do either of these things).