3 ms·

Yeah but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Right now the easiest explanation is contamination, ordinary and easy to explain.

ncmncm 6y ago
No. Claims Require Evidence. Maybe it's contamination. Maybe it is something interesting. Ordinary evidence will reveal which. Demanding extraordinary evidence is just defending turf, and not science.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  The level of evidence required increases with the audacity of the claim. That's because outrageous new physics is almost never the case, for the same reason that miracles or aliens are almost never (or just never) the explanation for something.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    "Extraordinary evidence" is usually interpreted, nowadays, as unobtainable evidence, with the effect that any discovery incompatible with current consensus is reflexively discounted. This is less often harmful in cases where the current consensus is based more on actual evidence than on groupthink and conformity. So, in physics, there is actual evidence for most things observable. But there are plenty of fields where fashion prevails. Without citing current problem children, geology until quite recently forbade mention of catastrophic events like bolide strikes, and psychology filtered all hypotheses through behaviorism.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      It's evidence so incontrovertible and ironcland that the chance it is wrong (or faked) is less than the chance the outrageous claim is true. This could be close to unobtainable, for sufficiently outrageous claims. The argument I am making goes all the way back to Hume's "Of Miracles". In the specific case of Cold Fusion and the like, the evidence is further impeached by the lack of progress. What's happening looks just like a pseudoscientific study of nothing that spits out bad results that never goes anywhere.
      - ncmncm 6y ago
        That presupposes a correct probability, implicitly assuming the consensus model is correct. That begs the question, a fundamental cognitive mistake. The current consensus model does not deserve any privilege over any other model that also accounts for the same body of evidence. The degree of privilege afforded to it is exactly the inertia that prevents progress. Science does not need for there to be a consensus model. Nature doesn't have one. Insistance on a single model when more than one meets requirements is purely human pigheadedness, and a primary impediment to progress. None of this means that low-energy fusion happens, or doesn't. But the vociferous attacks on reports of what looks like it are the absolute antithesis of science. Science says only, "Try it again, more carefully." Ordinary evidence.
        pfdietz 6y ago
        The sort of scientific nihilism you are advocating there is obviously unworkable. Decisions have to be made based on SOMETHING. Science encodes the condensed wisdom of experience, so if you say don't use what we know, what process do you propose to use to decide what is worthy of investigation? Cold Fusion requires not just one "miracle", but a stack of multiple miracles, all in contravention of existing knowledge. It requires that fusion can occur when QM calculations show it can't. It requires that excited nuclei not emit gamma radiation. It requires that energy go not into energetic charged particles (which would produce detectable secondary radiation) but somehow immediately go into the lattice of a solid, spread over large numbers of atoms. Stack on top of that another coincidence: that despite P&F's initial results being shown to be shit, that somehow there was a pony in there somewhere anyway. The simplest and cleanest explanation for all this LENR work is that it's nonsense driven by some combination of almost pathologic wishful thinking, incompetence, and even outright fraud.
        ncmncm 6y ago
        I don't understand what is supposed to be nihilistic about treating evidence as evidence. If it's fraud, the evidence will say so. If it's nonsense, the evidence will say so. Sometimes the evidence is fine, but is being misinterpreted, and sometimes then indicates something more interesting than had been guessed. Guessing wrong is not fraud. Reporting exactly the results you got is what is supposed to be expected, whatever the results suggest. It took much longer than it should have to converge on the unit charge, just because everyone after Millikan was afraid to report a result too far from his.

ncmncm 6y ago

No. Claims Require Evidence. Maybe it's contamination. Maybe it is something interesting. Ordinary evidence will reveal which. Demanding extraordinary evidence is just defending turf, and not science.

pfdietz 6y ago
The level of evidence required increases with the audacity of the claim. That's because outrageous new physics is almost never the case, for the same reason that miracles or aliens are almost never (or just never) the explanation for something.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  "Extraordinary evidence" is usually interpreted, nowadays, as unobtainable evidence, with the effect that any discovery incompatible with current consensus is reflexively discounted. This is less often harmful in cases where the current consensus is based more on actual evidence than on groupthink and conformity. So, in physics, there is actual evidence for most things observable. But there are plenty of fields where fashion prevails. Without citing current problem children, geology until quite recently forbade mention of catastrophic events like bolide strikes, and psychology filtered all hypotheses through behaviorism.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    It's evidence so incontrovertible and ironcland that the chance it is wrong (or faked) is less than the chance the outrageous claim is true. This could be close to unobtainable, for sufficiently outrageous claims. The argument I am making goes all the way back to Hume's "Of Miracles". In the specific case of Cold Fusion and the like, the evidence is further impeached by the lack of progress. What's happening looks just like a pseudoscientific study of nothing that spits out bad results that never goes anywhere.
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      That presupposes a correct probability, implicitly assuming the consensus model is correct. That begs the question, a fundamental cognitive mistake. The current consensus model does not deserve any privilege over any other model that also accounts for the same body of evidence. The degree of privilege afforded to it is exactly the inertia that prevents progress. Science does not need for there to be a consensus model. Nature doesn't have one. Insistance on a single model when more than one meets requirements is purely human pigheadedness, and a primary impediment to progress. None of this means that low-energy fusion happens, or doesn't. But the vociferous attacks on reports of what looks like it are the absolute antithesis of science. Science says only, "Try it again, more carefully." Ordinary evidence.
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        The sort of scientific nihilism you are advocating there is obviously unworkable. Decisions have to be made based on SOMETHING. Science encodes the condensed wisdom of experience, so if you say don't use what we know, what process do you propose to use to decide what is worthy of investigation? Cold Fusion requires not just one "miracle", but a stack of multiple miracles, all in contravention of existing knowledge. It requires that fusion can occur when QM calculations show it can't. It requires that excited nuclei not emit gamma radiation. It requires that energy go not into energetic charged particles (which would produce detectable secondary radiation) but somehow immediately go into the lattice of a solid, spread over large numbers of atoms. Stack on top of that another coincidence: that despite P&F's initial results being shown to be shit, that somehow there was a pony in there somewhere anyway. The simplest and cleanest explanation for all this LENR work is that it's nonsense driven by some combination of almost pathologic wishful thinking, incompetence, and even outright fraud.
        ncmncm 6y ago
        I don't understand what is supposed to be nihilistic about treating evidence as evidence. If it's fraud, the evidence will say so. If it's nonsense, the evidence will say so. Sometimes the evidence is fine, but is being misinterpreted, and sometimes then indicates something more interesting than had been guessed. Guessing wrong is not fraud. Reporting exactly the results you got is what is supposed to be expected, whatever the results suggest. It took much longer than it should have to converge on the unit charge, just because everyone after Millikan was afraid to report a result too far from his.