User talk:Tothwolf/rescued essays/Majority POV-pushing

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Mathsci wrote: The userspace essay User:Abd/Majority POV-pushing seems to be a deliberate attempt to justify ignoring consensus.


 * Actually, it's a version of WP:NOTAVOTE. The situation with the JzG RfC 3 is an example of where a 2/3 majority was not what the overall community would decide. Local consensus is only a kind of temporary consensus. It should not be ignored, it should be respected, but may be appealed through WP:DR. Thanks for sharing. --Abd (talk) 11:30, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Mathsci's comment got me thinking, and I added a section, "The inclusiveness spectrum", to this essay as a result. I'm interested in comments on it.  Abd, would it be OK with you if I invite several other editors to this discussion? ☺ Coppertwig (talk) 16:34, 23 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Of course, Coppertwig. I don't mind if the essay is chopped into little pieces and composted. Hopefully there is some useful organic material there. The original version, which is chatty, focuses on a single example, Cold fusion, one which is currently in flux and turmoil. For the long run, I'm not sure how much example should be there, in user space it's okay, but for an essay in WP space, probably much less so.


 * I'm of the school that discourages philosophizing without examples to keep it grounded. I'll do it, sometimes, but it's hard enough to communicate with even clear examples, because too many will leap ahead to some desired or imagined conclusion and thus support or oppose without first examining the underlying principles. --Abd (talk) 17:47, 25 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Oh, and as to the new section: great minds think alike. Well said. --Abd (talk) 17:48, 25 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I've invited MastCell, Woonpton, Verbal, Enric Naval, Blackworm, Jakew and Mathsci to participate in this discussion. ☺ Coppertwig (talk) 13:39, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Great. I will remind these folks, if necessary, that this is my space, leased, so to speak, under a restricted agreement with Wikipedia that allows me certain special rights here, but they are all welcome as my guests at this particular party, assuming that they behave with decorum and respect, which I do assume. If anyone wants to see this essay, or a different approach to the problem, hosted elsewhere, whether in other user space, or in WP space, I don't own the content, it's been donated. In the space of another user, it would be under that other user's quasi-administrative authority, and in WP space, subject to ordinary community action and consensus. --Abd (talk) 14:50, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Apparently I made a faux pas in posting those invitations. I naively assumed they would be correctly interpreted as an attempt to encourage discussion, and didn't think through how they would seem. Apparently they've been interpreted as a form of criticism; but in fact nothing can be inferred from my posting of the invitations other than that I would be interested in reading those editors' opinions of my addition to this essay; I selected the recipients for divers reasons. I'm sorry for any offense or inconvenience, and am willing to delete the invitation from user talk pages if asked by the user. Thanks to Jakew and Verbal for apparently interpreting the invitation in the spirit in which it was intended. ☺ Coppertwig (talk) 11:54, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I was just pointed here by a message from Coppertwig on my talk. The above doesn't accurately characterize my response to the invitation at all.  I declined because I'm not really an editor at Wikipedia, just an outside observer, and because I had no interest in participating in a dicussion on Abd's talk page, since I don't find Abd's communication style very conducive to communication.  In no way did I take the invitation as criticism (why would I take it as criticism?) nor was I offended in any way by the invitation, nor did I respond in a way that should have been interpreted as taking offense.  I simply said "thanks but no thanks."  Woonpton (talk) 13:55, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Great! Thanks for clarifying. ☺ Coppertwig (talk) 18:25, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

"debunked" vs "not proven"
I think Abd's point here is that "fringe" is not a binary switch. There is a big difference between something that has been thoroughly debunked and disproven, vs something that is poorly understood. The former is pseudoscience, the latter is not.

Of course there is controversy around cold fusion, but the fact remains that something unexplained seems to be happening in those experiments. Until the phenomenon of excess heat is fully explained, I think it's fair to document that some researchers are actively investigating this effect despite the scientific consensus that it is not worth pursuing.

No article on CF would be complete without a thorough treatment of the controversy and the overwhelming scientific opinion against it being a nuclear process (not to mention the fiasco of the original announcement and premature labelling as "fusion" in the 80s), but to treat CF on the same level as thoroughly debunked pseudoscience is equally wrong. I agree with Abd. ATren (talk) 12:46, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Exactly: "fringe" is not a binary switch. "Fringe" doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as "tiny minority". Whether a minority POV is mentioned in an article depends on the level of detail in that article.  A small minority POV might not be mentioned in a summary article, but might be mentioned briefly in a more detailed article on a subtopic, where there's more room for such things.  On the talk page of an article about a "fringe" topic, I see no point in debating whether a given source is a "fringe" source or not: either way, it needs to be presented in the article with prose attribution. Wikipedians don't have a special authority to classify sources as "fringe" sources. ☺ Coppertwig (talk) 16:34, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Right to both of you. Cold fusion presents a rather unusual -- though not unheard-of -- problem. The "mainstream" clearly rejected cold fusion twenty years ago, to the point that most scientists, mention cold fusion, the response is "Wasn't that proven to be experimental error?" What this shows, in fact, is that "most scientists" may be little more informed than the general public. Cold fusion wasn't ever proven to be experimental error, though the neutron findings of Fleischmann were certainly shown to be wrong. The excess heat never was; rather, various hypothesis were advanced as to possible non-nuclear causes for it and assumed to be the cause; but this involved neglecting much of the research, where there was evidence adequate to refute these alternate explanations. At least that's how I've come to see it from my relatively intense review of the field since January, when I was a skeptic on this like nearly everyone else. Now with true pseudoscience, such as N-rays or polywater, the cause of the original observations is found, and, with that, the field dies; there are sometimes holdouts, but publication rates decline within a few years to zero. That never happened with cold fusion. There is a remarkable graph at http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf (see page 11, nowiki link courtesy of the meta blacklist). This shows peer-reviewed publication from the Britz database (Britz is a skeptic.) Publication rates became low, but then bounced back in the last few years, and some of the recent publications have been quite notable, particularly the Mosier-Boss paper on finding neutrons published in Naturwissenschaften which is, in fact, a mainstream journal. One can see from the graph that negative papers outnumbered positive papers two to one in 1989. Most of these negative papers are on the order of "We didn't see anything." And the most likely explanation of them is that, indeed, they didn't see anything. The effect was very difficult to reproduce, not the simple experiment it was made out to be by the original hype. Then, in 1990, the positive and negative papers were in balance. While publication frequency declined greatly, positive papers greatly outnumbered negative ones every year after 1990, with sustained publication rate until about 2000, when it started to decline. Given that publication record, how was the opinion maintained that the Fleischmann work had never been replicated (still being said in major media this year)?

The chart doesn't show the huge amount of work presented at conferences, for those papers aren't peer-reviewed, though some of the work is of high quality (and some isn't!). For many years, researchers were simply trying to get a handle on the experimental variables. One of the experimenters told a reporter from Wired that he'd keep trying to do what he ordinarily does as an experimenter, change the experimental variables, to see what would happen, and what would happen was that the effect would go away totally; take a bar of palladium break it into three pieces, and one piece would show the effect and two wouldn't. Gradually, the experimenters learned how to condition the palladium to make it work most of the time, and there are some groups which now report 100% reproducibility. After almost twenty years. There is a huge amount of reliable source out there on the history of this, and we are using only a tiny fraction of it, because there is such a constant push against giving this field "undue weight." But, normally, we judge what is undue weight by the number of reliable sources, though we also consider "mainstream" secondary source giving opinions about the field. I.e., if a newspaper says that "cold fusion is dead," we use that to claim that anything positive would create undue weight if we use it, and, further, secondary sources that say the opposite are discounted as "fringe." Ipso facto. So we have, on one side, an overall negative article presenting what one finds in tertiary sources, or newspapers, popular publications, and the like, but the scientific primary and secondary sources (peer-reviewed papers, and peer-reviewed reviews of the field) exist, but we can't use them because of "undue weight."

What I've been pushing for is treating reliable sources as reliable sources. If it's a book published by a major science publisher, we can use it, even if the author is allegedly "fringe." If it's a review published in a peer-reviewed journal, we can use it. To be sure, because the field is clearly controversial, we need to attribute opinions and review conclusions, but suppressing what is in peer-reviewed publications and other academic sources, in favor of generalities from pop media publications that don't show actual investigative reporting, simply perpetuates ignorance and assumption that previous conclusions were correct. We should also report that popular position. We need to balance fringe opinion from reliable sources with sources of equivalent reliability on the "mainstream side," instead of excluding the fringe opinion on an argument of undue weight.

Principles that come into legitimate play when there is conflict of sources are abused to exclude alleged fringe material, when there is no contradiction. For example, if I assert a secondary source from Frontiers of Physics in China, a peer-reviewed publication with a very reputable publisher, it's criticized on the basis that it hasn't been cited often. But that's a measure of relative reliability, and is only important when there is contradiction. If group A conducts a set of experiments with palladium deuteride and finds nothing, and group B conducts a similar set and finds something, these results do not contradict each other, and science is built by attempting to explain all the results. The operating hypothesis with the result variation described is that something was different about the work of A and B. In fact, at the 2008 Condensed Matter Nuclear Science conference, a paper was presented that used Bayesian analysis to predict, from experimental descriptions in positive and negative papers, whether or not the group would find excess heat. In other words, when you know what to look for, excess heat is reliable, i.e., predictable.

There is no contradiction between the results of 1989 and 1990 and present work on Cold fusion, for the most part. Rather, the work all, in hindsight, builds a picture more complete than looking just at one side or another. That's how science is supposed to work, but it broke down in 1989-1990, and we have books written about how and why, such as one by sociologist Simon, Undead Science (2002).

There is a lot of work to do on the topic, here. Mostly, we should be telling the history. Only the slimmest of slivers of it have made it from reliable sources into the encyclopedia. Taubes and Huizenga, highly skeptical authors (both "involved") produced books chock-full of detail on what happened and when, and we have a great deal of material as well (though published less reputably, pin some cases) from the other side. --Abd (talk) 18:56, 25 May 2009

Peer review by ChyranandChloe
Coppertwig posted an invitation on MastCell's talk, since I was waiting for a response on another thread, I happened to read through your essay. I hope I'm not interloping, but this looks like Madison's Federalist 10 and Federalist 51. "Majority POV-pushing" came to be called at the time "tyranny by majority", and during the ratification of the Constitution this left the country in a heated debate so far as Whiskey rebellion and Shays' Rebellion. Madison envisioned a government that would both permit majority rule while protecting minority rights as he developed safeguards within the federal government. Wikipedia founded similar safeguards when Wales declared decision by consensus (WP:CON) and neutral point of view (WP:NPOV). Neutral point of view moves the discussion in an objective direction: we are uninvolved observers—we look at the dispute and say, this is what we see, not this is what we believe should be written. Consensus first removes the decision from being made by a simple majority. This inturn allows minorities the ability to digress the discussion, civility then forces the discussion to be resolved by the reason on either side consistent with the content policies, acting as a barrier against edit wars and personal attacks. Your comments are very long, and verbosity severely damages the central focus of a comment. With the above in mind; this is what I am making the following two recommendations: (1) solve exactly one issue at the time. Whether this may be a single reliable source or the wording of a single paragraph, and use a cool down period if the number of issues exceed that. (2) Address only what is necessary. These two recommendation reduces the number of points you need to present to a minimum, and ultimately reduces the size of your comment. This also allows digression to work its way through as both parties run out of central points to dispute, allows administrators to check civility with ease, ensures article stability, and allows the dispute to be resolved by reasonable means. One paragraph is usually the most you can go before the reader starts loosing focus. This is what I see. I hope it helps. ChyranandChloe (talk) 21:55, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks, ChyranandChloe, general agreement. As to your recommendation re brevity and focus, it's easier said than done, sometimes, but I certainly agree with the goal. There really are two kinds of discussion: polemic, where there is an outcome being advocated, and background, where there may be no specific point. Both can be important for developing editorial consensus, but the latter is not for everyone, it's only for those who are willing to explore a topic in detail. Then the smaller group that have discussed in this way will make polemic proposals, where brevity is truly necessary. --Abd (talk) 18:17, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Chill
WP:NPOV requires presenting (significant) minority POVs in articles, with due weight, but there is a chill against trying to do so. Editors who work to present minority POVs in articles, or who are seen as doing so, are subjected to comments such as in the last sentence here. ☺ Coppertwig (talk) 18:55, 2 August 2009 (UTC)