[extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings

[Ben Goertzel]

>
> It just amazes me how such otherwise intelligent people can be so  
> incredibly
> gullible. Some jackass you've never heard of posts some data on the  
> net
> claiming to have found heat from cold fusion and that sequence of  
> ASCII
> characters gets everybody all excited.  The only thing it tells me  
> is that
> the man had enough money to buy a computer. No, I'm wrong, it  
> doesn't even
> tell me that, it could be a homeless man with BO who just wandered  
> into a
> public library and posted some shit.  Sometimes the crackpot even  
> manages to
> get his ASCII sequence printed on a dead tree, but his article is  
> never
> cited by real scientists, and even the "journal" he writes in is never
> cited.
>


To use your felicitous phrase, this is actually "mega-bullshit", John.

Fleischmann and Pons may have been wrong (though it looks like they were
**probably** right on their most important points), but clearly they  
were not
**crackpots** according to anything resembling the common usage of that
term.   They were well respected scientists with many publications,  
official
positions and honors.

But by this point, their work has been replicated by so many others  
that their
particular personal characteristics are beside the point anyway.

Again, I find that in this dialogue you are consistently ignoring the  
facts of the
situation.  In the above paragraph you are making demonstrably and
intentionally distorted statements regarding the discoverers of CF.

I find your comments uninteresting in terms of their intellectual  
content, but
quite fascinating  sociologically.

The folks who originally trashed the CF research did a remarkably  
good job --
in the sense that not only are their own mis-statements and  
distortions being
repeated now (almost 20 years later), but new mis-statements and  
distortions
are being propagated (such as in the above paragraph of yours) going  
beyond
the original ones.

-- Ben G