

How Thinking Goes Wrong: Fallacies That Lead Us to Believe Weird Things - tokenadult
http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/sherm3.htm

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nazgulnarsil
too disorganized. I prefer these linked lists, I collectively call them the
skeptic's bible.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases>

~~~
tokenadult
Thanks for the Wikipedia lists link. I like Shermer's writings for the
examples that they give as he discusses general principles.

After edit:

Oh, and there is some doubt that the Hawthorne effect (mentioned in the link
you kindly shared)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect#Interpretation...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect#Interpretations_and_criticisms_of_the_Hawthorne_studies)

is a genuine phenomenon.

~~~
tlb
Really? You don't believe such an effect ever happens? It's one thing to say
that particular results are not due to the effect, but the effect itself seems
like a pretty likely source of error in any not-very-rigorous experiment.

~~~
tokenadult
I spent most of my youth believing that there is a Hawthorne effect as
described in the usual anecdote, but then on Usenet in the 1990s a
psychologist referred me to a peer-reviewed article that actually went back to
the data gathered by the original researchers. The article said that it is
more likely that the change in worker performance was due to operant
conditioning based on changed working conditions that were going on at the
same time as the changes in factory lighting and so forth that the anecdote is
about. Is there any replication

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

of a straight-up Hawthorne effect anywhere else in the peer-reviewed
literature?

~~~
tlb
OK, fair enough. It hasn't been convincingly demonstrated. But maybe you'll
agree that it's still a good idea to watch out for the Hawthorne effect when
doing human performance research, because it seems like a possible source of
error. You wouldn't tell experimenters "there is no Hawthorne effect, so stop
worrying about it."

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tlb
About cold fusion, he says: _Maybe fifty years of physics will be proved wrong
by one experiment, but don't throw out your furnace until that experiment has
been replicated_.

Pons and Fleischman's announcement can hardly be described as telling people
to throw out their furnaces. They announced that they had measurements which
were not explainable by the prevailing theories, and the new theory it
suggested would be hugely valuable. Some journalists made it seem even more
exciting than that, but I don't think you can blame scientists for the way
they are reported in the popular press any more than you can blame politicians
for what's reported on Fox News. Of course, it turned out that their numbers
were better explained by some subtle measurement errors, but it took hundreds
of chemists years to convincingly refute the theory.

It was not an unreasonable decision to announce it publicly, in order to
mobilize the resources necessary to get to the bottom of it.

~~~
tokenadult
_it took hundreds of chemists years to convincingly refute the theory_

Some observers were skeptical from the beginning because the neutron output of
a genuine fusion process was never found by the persons who announced their
discovery of "cold fusion."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion>

It's also a matter of opinion whether the errors in measurement of total
system energy inputs and outputs were subtle or gross. Being the son of an
industrial engineer who studied chemistry, I'm of the opinion that the errors
were inexcusably sloppy for researchers who held a press conference to
announce their results.

~~~
tlb
Oh, but the lack of neutron output was the most interesting part! If there had
been neutrons, people would have assumed there was an obscure sort of inertial
confinement fusion going on at some particular kind of defect in the crystal
structure, perhaps a microscopic Farnsworth Fusor. Such an effect would be
intriguing if it existed, but not very fundamental and probably not that
useful.

Cold Fusion was important because it raised the possibility of a previously
unknown mass/energy conversion mechanism, or at least a manifestation of a
poorly understood one like neutrino emission or absorption.

Neutrinos are a good lesson in how much we actually understand the world. The
neutrino flux from the sun is thought to be 10^12 particles per square meter
per second, yet its mass is "Unknown, probably nonzero" [Wikipedia]. They
don't seem to interact with ordinary matter much, but we can't rule out them
interacting strongly with particular molecular structures in Palladium-
Deuterium alloys. Nor can we rule out the presence of particles that interact
even more weakly than neutrinos. The 1995 Nobel was awarded for finding
evidence of neutrinos that are now thought to have been antineutrinos.
Particle physics is not a solved problem.

