Yeah, what a hoot it has been watching this whole debacle slowly unfold! Someone should really write a long retrospective on the E-Cat controversy as a case-study in applying rationality to assess claims.
My priors about Andrea Rossi’s claims were informed by things such as:
He has been convicted of fraud before. (Strongly negative factor)
The idea of this type of cold fusion has been deemed by most scientists to be far-fetched. (Weakly negative factor. Nobody has claimed that physics is a solved domain, and I’m always open to new ideas...)
From there, I updated on the following evidence:
Rossi received apparent lukewarm endorsement from several professional scientists. (Weakly positive factor. Still didn’t mean a whole lot.)
Rossi dragged his feet on doing a clear, transparent, independently-conducted calorimetric test of his device—something that many people were willing to do for him, and which is not rocket science to perform. (Strongly negative factor—strongly pattern-matches with a fraudster).
Rossi claimed to have received independent contracts for licensing his device. First Defkalion in Greece, then Industrial Heat. Rossi also made various claims about NASA and Texas Instruments being involved. When investigated, the claims about the reputable organizations being involved turned out to be exaggerations, and the other partners were either of unknown reputation (Defkalion) that quickly disappeared, or had close ties to Rossi himself. Still no independent validation. (Strongly negative factor).
And now we arrive at the point where even Industrial Heat is breaking ties with Rossi. What a fun show!
Yeah, what a hoot it has been watching this whole debacle slowly unfold! Someone should really write a long retrospective on the E-Cat controversy as a case-study in applying rationality to assess claims.
My priors about Andrea Rossi’s claims were informed by things such as:
He has been convicted of fraud before. (Strongly negative factor)
The idea of this type of cold fusion has been deemed by most scientists to be far-fetched. (Weakly negative factor. Nobody has claimed that physics is a solved domain, and I’m always open to new ideas...)
From there, I updated on the following evidence:
Rossi received apparent lukewarm endorsement from several professional scientists. (Weakly positive factor. Still didn’t mean a whole lot.)
Rossi dragged his feet on doing a clear, transparent, independently-conducted calorimetric test of his device—something that many people were willing to do for him, and which is not rocket science to perform. (Strongly negative factor—strongly pattern-matches with a fraudster).
Rossi claimed to have received independent contracts for licensing his device. First Defkalion in Greece, then Industrial Heat. Rossi also made various claims about NASA and Texas Instruments being involved. When investigated, the claims about the reputable organizations being involved turned out to be exaggerations, and the other partners were either of unknown reputation (Defkalion) that quickly disappeared, or had close ties to Rossi himself. Still no independent validation. (Strongly negative factor).
And now we arrive at the point where even Industrial Heat is breaking ties with Rossi. What a fun show!