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Re: More on appeal to authority.



Why haven't the two paragraphs after "piece." said it all? Joel
provides no support for the paragraphs that follow. If Joel wants hard
evidence of John's voltmeter, it may be available as a publication in a
refereed journal, or in some other way.
Regards,
Jack


On Mon, 13 Sep 2004, RAUBER, JOEL wrote:

Let add some more thought to John's thoughtful piece.

There is a grey area. One person's hard evidence is everybody else's soft
evidence. E.g. John has hard evidence that he can design a voltmeter with
input noise less than "root hbar". Presumably because he did it.

However, for me; the way I read John's piece, this can never be any better
than soft evidence, because it is merely some claim I've read over the
internet and indeed according to John it is an extraordinary claim as it
flouts authority and should require extraordinary evidence; which of course
I don't see.

There is a regime between hard evidence and soft evidence that deserves some
sort of classification. Namely something along the lines of the soft
evidence, logically and coherently presented, provided by trusted
authorities.

I think I'm questioning how far apart the top of the soft evidence is from
the bottom of the hard evidence. E.g. I may have some results in the lab
that contradict some careful work done by the best gurus at NIST. Is the
soft evidence of their work better or worse than my own hard evidence;
particularly when I consider the poor state of my experimental capabilities?

Some random quick musings for discussion

________________________
Joel Rauber
Department of Physics - SDSU

Joel.Rauber@sdstate.edu
605-688-4293



--
"Trust me. I have a lot of experience at this."
General Custer's unremembered message to his men,
just before leading them into the Little Big Horn Valley