paulraphael said:
True enough, it's not that big a deal. It's certainly possible to obsess too much about minutiae. I'm a hell of a lot more worried about nuclear war too.
Still, while I have a few minutes before I go try to rework a composition that's been bugging me for months, let me say something on a point that I don't think has been addressed explicitly, and that's the necessary distinction between neutrality and objectivity.
In this setting, neutrality would mean treating any competing possibilities as potentially equally valid, and objectivity would mean treating the possibility with the most and best backing evidence as being intrinsically more plausible. Objectivity would also mean treating possibilities that have little or no good supporting evidence, or that seem actually to contradict the available evidence, as intrinsically implausible. A claim that is intrinsically implausible is an "extraordinary" claim, in the sense I mentioned in an earlier post, and therefore requires extraordinary evidence. It is therefore not at all closed-minded or antiscientific to be skeptical of such extraordinary claims in the absence of evidence. That is in fact the most rational and sensible position to take; it would be less rational to regard two possibilities as equally likely if the evidence so far overwhelmingly favors one. The only thing that would be closed-minded would be if good evidence for the opposing position were produced, and one refused to accept it out of prejudice.
As an example of the distinction between neutrality and objectivity, consider the following (admittedly exaggerated) scenario:
Hypothesis A: The sun will rise in the east tomorrow.
Hypothesis B: The sun will rise in the west tomorrow.
Question: Where will the sun rise tomorrow?
Neutral answer: Well, since it hasn't happened yet, we don't have any proof, so it could be either east or west.
Objective answer: All the available evidence says east, and none of it says west, so I'm going with east. If the sun does come up in the west tomorrow after all, I'll admit my theory is wrong, or at least incomplete, and work on revising it.
It's true that when in the course of performing an experiment, you need to be both neutral and objective. But when assessing results, what you need is to be objective. If the data point one way, then that's how they point.
How does this relate to power cables? Well, I think the assumption you and several others have seemed to make (if I'm misrepresenting this, my apologies) is that the possibility that power cables make a difference is just as intrinsically plausible as the possibility that they don't. IOW, you view the two neutrally. I (and other, it seems) view the two objectively: we believe a neutral view is not sensible in this case, because the data so far appear to strongly favor one possibility over the other. IOW, the two possibilities are not equally plausible and should not be regarded as such. If you want to convince us that what seems the less likely possibility is actually just as likely or more so, then you gotta bring some evidence.
Basically, well-supported theories deserve a presumption in their favor, and poorly supported theories do not--they deserve skepticism. That skepticism, if it is to be overcome, is overcome by good evidence, not by repeated assertions or what-ifs. I know quite well that science hasn't always gotten things right; sometimes the theory that's poorly supported at first turns out to be right. But when science fixes its own mistakes, it does so on the basis of rigorous testing, not general impressions or unsupported beliefs.
