there are case where communities of scientist were locked in groupthink, often locally because until recently science was not globally judged.
N-Ray was very popular in french science. Wegener was very Impopular LENR is unpopular What can lock people who seems honest is "Groupthink". http://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/Groupthink%20IOM%202012_07_02%20BW.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/REP_4_BW_nolinks_corrected%201.pdf It works that way. first you take people who analyse a situation, and given partial data, invest asset into an hypothesis... their career, their budget, their investments... When new data dissent with the hypothesis there is good reason to doubt on it. But human mostly optimize their impression of wealth, not the wealth itself, and they can avoid data and deform what they see. If the people who invested in the error, can benefit alone from their realism, they will accept the data and take benefit , harming the others but without damage for themselves. If the people who invested in the error, need the support and acceptance of the others to benefit from their realism more than what they lose as dream, if they can be harmed by believers, if there is nothing to win and all to lose then they enter "groupthink mode". they then have huge incentive to harass and silent the dissenters, making them mindguard like who they are... quickly a full community of deluded minguard is created who implement it's own motivation. what is funny is that like the boss of Enron, the IS bombs, the suicide sect victims, people can finally pay a huge price to their beliefs... anyway until then they have a very comfortable mental life, where behaving like a monster is good, where all is simple and clear. How can you interpret the behavior of white-knight like those who harassed Bockris ? never say a whole community cannot be deluded to the point of terrorizing dissenters despite evidences. You are the holder of the Evidence as our respected Librarian. 2015-12-14 20:55 GMT+01:00 Jed Rothwell <[email protected]>: > Bob Higgins <[email protected]> wrote: > > For fear of being branded a card carrying republican, I hate to comment on >> such topics. I believe the "global warming movement" is a false flag - >> just another lie being broadcast as propaganda to achieve some government's >> pet objective. >> > > Scientists often do rotten things. They can be political animals. Few > people have as much direct experience of their shenanigans as I do, or > greater contempt for them. But one thing they have never done, in the > history of science, is what you describe here. They have NEVER organized a > large scale conspiracy to fool the public. They are not capable of it. > Three reasons: that violates the rules of science; scientists are inept at > communicating or convincing the public of anything (look at the cold fusion > researchers for proof of that); and their social skills are so undeveloped > they could not conspire their way out of a paper bag. > > Furthermore, as I said before, one of the most important lessons of cold > fusion is that experts are usually right, and you should not listen to > strange people from outside the scientific establishment. The mainstream > researchers who confirmed cold fusion are right. > > If experts in climatology say there is global warming induced by humans, > you can be sure they mean it, and you can be pretty sure they are right. > People outside the field of climatology -- including you -- do not know the > details and your critiques are probably wrong. I have seen many critiques > of cold fusion written by scientists outside the field, including > distinguished experts in physics and plasma physics. These critiques had no > merit. They had glaring errors, omissions and misunderstandings in them. > Some are outrageous nonsense, such as some the DoE panel comments: > > http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/DOEusdepartme.pdf > > Critiques by scientists who have not done their homework or have no > knowledge of calorimetry are wrong. Even when they are supportive of cold > fusion, they usually miss the point. Needless to say, critiques written by > Wikipedia-style amateurs are beyond the pale. Years ago when I reviewed the > Wikipedia article I could not find a single accurate substantive assertion > about cold fusion. Not one! Everything from tritium to reproducibility was > nonsense. > > I cannot judge climatology, but I can see that it is complicated science. > It seems likely to me that all of the outside critiques are as bad as the > Wikipedia-style critiques of cold fusion. > > Science works. In the end it gets things right, or mostly right. No one > should disagree with this. It is self evident. No one would dispute that > engineering works. Airplanes do not fall out of the sky; bridges do not > collapse; your computer CPU does a billion operations a second without a > single failure for months on end. Science and engineering are closely > allied and closely comparable to one another. They both work, for similar > reasons. > > Weather forecasting is different from long term climatology in some ways, > yet closely related in others. They both use data from satellites and earth > station observations. They use the same basic physical models. They deal > with an enormous number of variables and gigantic databases. Weather > forecasting is astoundingly accurate and reliable compared to how it was 20 > or 50 years ago. It is undeniable that great progress has been made in it. > It is foolish to imagine that similar progress has not been made in long > term climatology. > > - Jed > >
