User:Abd

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If you are reading this on an archive, be sure to check the original URL for possible corrections.

My introduction to the LW community:

I'm Abd ul-Rahman Lomax, introducing myself. I have six grandchildren, from five biological children, and I have two adopted girls, age 15 from China, and age 15 from Ethiopia.

Born in 1944, Abd ul-Rahman is not my birth name, I accepted Islam in 1970. Not being willing to accept pale substitutes, I learned to read the Qur'an in Arabic by reading the Qur'an in Arabic. (Yes, it is possible to learn to read the book that way. In fact, it is probably easier than learning "Arabic."

Back to my teenage years, I was at Cal Tech for a couple of years, being in Richard P. Feynman's two years of undergraduate physics classes, the ones made into the textbook. I had Linus Pauling for freshman chemistry, as well. Both of them helped create how I think.

I left Cal Tech to pursue a realm other than "science," but was always interested in direct experience rather than becoming stuffed with tradition, though I later came to respect tradition (and memorization) far more than at the outset. I became a leader of a "spiritual community," and a successor to a well-known teacher, Samuel L. Lewis, but was led to pursue many other interests.

I delivered babies (starting with my own) and founded a school of midwifery that trained midwives for licensing in Arizona.

Self-taught, I started an electronics design consulting business, still going with a designer in Brazil.

I became known as one of the many independent inventors of delegable proxy as a method of creating hierarchical communication structure from the bottom up. Social structure, and particularly how to facilitate collective intelligence, has been a long-term interest.

I was a Muslim chaplain at San Quentin State Prison, serving an almost entirely Black community. In case you haven't guessed, I'm not black. I loved it. People are people.

So much I'm not saying yet.... I became interested in wikis early on, but didn't get to Wikipedia until 2005, becoming seriously active in 2007. Eventually, I came across an abusive blacklisting of a web site, a well-known archive of scientific papers on cold fusion. I'd been very aware of the 1989 announcement and some of the ensuing flap, but had assumed, like most people with enough knowledge to know what it was about, that the work had not been replicated. (But my original actions on Wikipedia was based solely on Wikipedia policy, not any "belief" in cold fusion.

Later, when I looked, I became interested enough to buy a number of major works in the area (including almost all of the skeptical literature).

Among those who have become familiar, cold fusion (a bit of a misnomer; at the least it was prematurely named), is an ultimately clear example of how pseudoskepticism came to dominate a whole field, for over fifteen years. The situation flipped in the peer-reviewed journals beginning about twelve years ago, but that's not widely recognized, it is merely obvious if one looks at what has been published in that period of time (and publication rates, having decreased as predicted by Langmuir's "pathological science criteria," began to increase substantially. It is still a very difficult field, experimentally, and there is no satisfactory theory of mechanism.

Showing this is way beyond the scope of this introduction, but I assume it will come up. I'm just asserting what I reasonably conclude, having become familiar with the evidence, (and I'm working with the scientists in the field now, in many ways) (and I proposed new research to confirm some basic findings, and that has been fully funded ($12 million) and is under way at Texas Tech, under the supervision of Robert Duncan.

As to rational skepticism, I was known to Martin Gardner, who quoted a study of mine on the so-called Miracle of the Nineteen in the Qur'an, the work of Rashad Khalifa, whom I knew personally.

I naively thought, for a couple of days, that a rational-skeptic approach to cold fusion might be welcome on RationalWiki. Definitely not. Again, that's another story. However, I'm not banned there and have sysop privileges (like most users). (That later changed, as a result of an attack of sock puppets. Again, long story, told elsewhere. I have a blog, [http:coldfusioncommunity.net ColdFusionCommunity], and reported extensively and in person on the trial for Rossi v. Darden, the first major lawsuit involving alleged cold fusion.

On RationalWiki, however, I came across the work of Yudkowsky, and this blog. Wow! In some of the circles in which I've moved, I've been a voice crying in the wilderness, with only a few echoes here and there. Here, I'm reluctant to say anything, so commonly cogent is comment in this community. I know I'm likely to stick my foot in my mouth.

However, that's never stopped me, and learning to recognize the taste of my foot, with the help of my friends, is one way in which I've kept my growth alive. The fastest way to learn is generally to make mistakes.

I'm also likely to comment, eventually, on the practical ontology and present reality of Landmark Education, with which I've become quite familiar, as well as on the myths and facts which widely circulate about Landmark. To start, they do let you go to the bathroom.

Meanwhile, I've caught up with HPMOR, and am starting to read the sequences. Great stuff, folks.

I've now got a few day's experience with LW. I'm seeing that certain conversations are unwelcome, to some degree, it's hard to tell. (The whole conversation gets downvoted, not just my participation.) It's all experimental, and it's silly to draw conclusions from narrow experience, it's even silly to expect particular results to continue, beyond the possibility of forming tentative hypotheses. It's really way too soon for that. I know that rational thinking is present on LW, commonly present, but that doesn't make it ubiquitious. --Abd 21:08, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

Specific interests and/or expertise

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