Evidence No One Wants To Know About

[bid_em_up]

I wonder why I am wondering if the same principle applies to sperm donors.

No, silly. That would be the Peter principle. ;)

[Lobowolf]

So while we know that there where tons of aircraft fuel burning, we now need mysterious people who carried tons of thermite into the building to create a 2nd fire that caused the collapse.

No, you just store it in there gradually and have a guy waiting 'round the clock get it burning when a plane hits the building.

 

 

Wait, or is theory also that a plane didn't hit the building?

[Al_U_Card]

The symbolism of the attacks was clear. WTC, Pentagon and Whitehouse (plane 4).

 

Why Dick Cheney had assumed "command" of NORAD and the "simulated" emergency air-response to incoming hijacked airplanes for that one day...(and that he held off on response to the incoming plane until it was too late to intercept)...interesting coincidence. Also that the EPA happened to be having a "simulation" for emergency response in New York at that time.

 

That both towers suffered exactly the same type of destruction despite being hit in different ways at different times....tend to indicate an underlying and more important factor in their demise.

 

Circumstantial evidence is just that. It depends on the circumstance and when there are too many coincidences, even the improbable can become not only possible but definitive.

[vuroth]

Circumstantial evidence is just that. It depends on the circumstance and when there are too many coincidences, even the improbable can become not only possible but definitive.

More definitive than scientific evidence? Coincidence is a great STARTING point for a quest for knowledge, not a definitive endpoint.

[brianshark]

So are we saying that Cheney and co hired a bunch of Arabs to suicidally crash a few planes into the WTC, White House and Pentagon, hid explosives in the World Trade Centre buildings just in case the planes didn't do the job toppling them, detonated them on the day, all while Cheney himself personally took over NORAD and stopped them intercepting the planes in question just for the day?

[Lobowolf]

Best I can come up with, in Devil's Advocate mode, would be that "they" found out about the plot, figured it would be a great idea (because it would provide an excuse to go to war?), nobody involved took any action to thwart it or expose it (you'd probably have to assume that some people would have, and were killed by "them"; it seems less likely that every single person who knew about it was on board), all materials needed to ensure that the towers would go down in the event that the planes hit the towers but didn't demolish them were smuggled, then "they" all sat back and hoped that the hijackers pulled it off.

 

I'd score that about a 1/2 in the MSC, only if it were an open game in a club where there's always that one guy who does something insane. Theories that ignore the fact that, well, planes were intentionally crashed score a -5.

 

Hijackers committed to a cause involving the harming of Americans and American interests took over planes and crashed them, thereby causing all apparent resulting damage = 12.

[vuroth]

So are we saying that Cheney and co hired a bunch of Arabs to suicidally crash a few planes into the WTC, White House and Pentagon, hid explosives in the World Trade Centre buildings just in case the planes didn't do the job toppling them, detonated them on the day, all while Cheney himself personally took over NORAD and stopped them intercepting the planes in question just for the day?

More or less. Doesn't seem like the planes thing is for sure, though.

 

Also, Marvin Bush took over the WTC security and disabled their anti-aircraft defense.

 

V

[jdonn]

Per what it seems to you, well it can seem to you whatever you want. It seems to me the explosive theory is about on par with "the moon landing was faked" theory. And so yes, I give it all the credit it deserves. Mostly by ridiculing it

 

I can understand that. But what is the reason for dismissing evidence? It would be somewhat like finding a second rifle behind the grassy knoll in Dallas and then ignoring the find.

 

Other than conjecture, can you explain the microscopic red and gray particles found by the authors?

You don't understand. By even considering this 'evidence' I would be lending credibility to ridiculousness. There was plenty of 'evidence' that the moon landing was faked too.

[Al_U_Card]

Past results are no indication of future performance... ;)

 

Project Northwood?

 

The PNAC (Cheney, Wolfowitz etc.) said that a new crisis was needed and that perpetual war was the goal. Clearly and without equivocation.

 

Did anyone believe (at the time) that Hitler staged the burning of the Reichstag?

 

WMD?

 

As Eisenhower said, the greatest enemy of the American people is the military-industrial complex...only exceeded by the complacency of the American people ;)

[vuroth]

I am surprised there was not a single - "well, that's interesting", or "that's worth looking into".  Instead, it's been "let's ridicule the finding regardless if it is important or not".

 

It seems to me "Don't confuse me with facts when my mind is made up."

An interesting rebuttal, linked off of JREF

 

http://www.911myths.com/html/traces_of_the...at_the_wtc.html

 

Another: http://wtc7lies.googlepages.com/stevene.jo...ethermateclaims

[Al_U_Card]

At least it is a debate that would necessitate further investigation and not a whitewash..

 

Saying that it might be something else is not the same as explaining what it was doing there. Not proof but circumstantial evidence. Proof is needed and without further and continual pressure to conduct more investigations, this will go the way of most of the other "sensitive" issues like JFK, RFK, MLK, WMD, etc.

[Al_U_Card]

So are we saying that Cheney and co hired a bunch of Arabs to suicidally crash a few planes into the WTC, White House and Pentagon, hid explosives in the World Trade Centre buildings just in case the planes didn't do the job toppling them, detonated them on the day, all while Cheney himself personally took over NORAD and stopped them intercepting the planes in question just for the day?

More or less. Doesn't seem like the planes thing is for sure, though.

 

Also, Marvin Bush took over the WTC security and disabled their anti-aircraft defense.

 

V

btw, who was at the heart of the Siverado S&L scandal back during the last banking crisis?...Neil Bush.

[luke warm]

The symbolism of the attacks was clear. WTC, Pentagon and Whitehouse (plane 4).

 

Why Dick Cheney had assumed "command" of NORAD and the "simulated" emergency air-response to incoming hijacked airplanes for that one day...(and that he held off on response to the incoming plane until it was too late to intercept)...interesting coincidence. Also that the EPA happened to be having a "simulation" for emergency response in New York at that time.

 

That both towers suffered exactly the same type of destruction despite being hit in different ways at different times....tend to indicate an underlying and more important factor in their demise.

 

Circumstantial evidence is just that. It depends on the circumstance and when there are too many coincidences, even the improbable can become not only possible but definitive.

i'd like for you, or someone, to list what would be required for this to have happened as a u.s.-backed (or sanctioned) conspiracy

[Lobowolf]

So while we know that there where tons of aircraft fuel burning, we now need mysterious  people who carried tons of thermite into the building to create a 2nd fire that caused the collapse.

No, you just store it in there gradually and have a guy waiting 'round the clock get it burning when a plane hits the building.

 

 

Wait, or is theory also that a plane didn't hit the building?

This question and answer is irrelevant.

 

There is only one question to consider: are these 7 people right? Did they truly find real evidence of nano-thermite it the dust from the collapse of the WTC towers?

 

Yes or No.

 

If not, then there is nothing to discuss. But if the answer is yes, then we have to determine from whence it came and for what purpose it was there.

It's actually not irrelevant; it's just a different argument. I could bring someone forward to testify, disputedly and controversially, that he found Legos on Neptune, and you could use that testimonial evidence to build a case that people have been on Neptune (and, of course, we all know what the next step is for everyone who believes the findings of this article; it's surely not an end to itself).

 

Conversely, though, you could use the premise that it's a ridiculous notion that anyone has ever been on Neptune to call into question the validity of any evidence that Legos were found there.

[jdonn]

You don't understand. By even considering this 'evidence' I would be lending credibility to ridiculousness.

 

But Josh, isn't this the very definition of closemindedness - that your mind is made up that the task would have been impossible so no evidence can be credible?

I said ridiculous, not impossible. Anyway if you suggest that not listening to every argument from everyone about every loony theory about everything makes me closed minded, then I hope you are wrong. If you do listen to and consider all such things then I think you live in a world where people have longer days and many more brain cells to spare than in mine.

[Lobowolf]

This is simply a presentation that this group claims to be fact

This is exactly the sense in which I am using the word "argument."

[Lobowolf]

I have no degrees to challenge the authenticity of the writers - do you have expertise that surpasses that of the authors?

Certainly not from a scientific perspective; however, apparently there are those with scientific credentials who are not entirely convinced (see Vuroth's link earlier in this thread). They lead with the same thing that occurred to me. The starting point was, "Five guys sent in some material and said it was dust from 9-11," which they found questionable.

 

But let's not try to keep a straight face and pretend that this is an abstract question; it's clearly a preliminary to "something other than the crashing of the airplanes and the burning jet fuel brought down the towers."

[Lobowolf]

We all important presuppositions into our assessments of proffered evidence, including presuppositions that are not scientific. For example, when it was pointed out that the article you referenced was published in a journal of questionable evidentiary value, you introduce the idea that perhaps more reputable journals wouldn't touch it because of its subject matter, not its scientific merit. This presupposition is imported to bolster the claims made by the authors of the article.

 

Nothing wrong with that. The science, according to the links provided by Vuroth, and also according to one of your earlier posts, is inconclusive. And I'm certainly not going to learn enough about the science to know more than the authors about it.

 

I certainly know enough to know that there are scientists making contradictory claims about the Towers' demise. By logical necessity, some people who know a lot more than I do about the science of the question are flat-out incorrect or lying. It's interesting that you brought up admissible courtroom evidence. In courtrooms, scientists make claims regularly about their expert opinions and tests they've run and what they conclude must have happened. But ultimately, those questions are decided by a jury of non-scientists, who are deemed competent to adjudge their credibility and the plausibility of their claims. You can find a Ph.D.'s to tell you that X could not have happened, and another to tell you that X must have happened. And "X" either happened, or it didn't; so if 2 layman listen to them, and believe different experts, then one of the laymen is right, and one of the Ph.D.'s is wrong.

 

It's like the joke about the (insert ethnic minority here) found dead with 12 gunshot wounds in his back and the (insert stereotypically racist county here) coroner calls it a suicide. He's the M.D.; do we have to believe him?

 

It wouldn't take that long to find a physicist who'll tell you that the collapse of the towers is entirely consistent with the airplanes hitting them and the burning jet fuel, and it wouldn't take that long to find one who'll tell you that it's inconsistent. Does that make us unqualified to hold an opinion, because whichever guy we disagree with knows more about the science than we do? Of course not.

[jdonn]

You don't understand. By even considering this 'evidence' I would be lending credibility to ridiculousness.

 

But Josh, isn't this the very definition of closemindedness - that your mind is made up that the task would have been impossible so no evidence can be credible?

I said ridiculous, not impossible. Anyway if you suggest that not listening to every argument from everyone about every loony theory about everything makes me closed minded, then I hope you are wrong. If you do listen to and consider all such things then I think you live in a world where people have longer days and many more brain cells to spare than in mine.

I understand. I simply thought that this strong of presentation in an (albeit not great) peer-reviewed journal would at least get a "Hmmm. That's weird" rather than disregard or blanket ridicule.

 

If secondary analysis confirms the findings, would that change your view?

Would that secondary finding also be published by a "not great" journal but nothing better?

[PassedOut]

If secondary analysis confirms the findings, would that change your view?

In my case, if a very well-done study by reputable experts contradicted my opinion on this, I'd have to give it another look.

 

However, there are a great many claims of one kind or another, and we all have to perform a triage to determine which claims are worth looking at. For any number of reasons, I don't consider it worth the time to look into any more claims that the 9/11 attack was not conducted pretty close to the way we've understood it.

[Lobowolf]

It is ccurious - a couple of years ago or so the big critique was that no one was publishing their findings in scientific peer-reviewed publications; now that the peer-reviewed publications are publishing, the critique is that opinion can be found to contradictory.

That's not the critique. The critique is of your earlier post asking if I had scientific credentials that surpasses those of the authors. Should only the scientists have opinions? Whatever position you hold, there are scientists more qualified than you on the other side.

[jdonn]

I only say this: if it is bad science, attack the science with science. But do not attack the science with an opinion.

I'll stick to ridicule thanks.

[hrothgar]

I originally quoted the following in a discussion about climate change...

It seems equally appropriate here (I suspect that some of what Josh is driving at is contained within)

 

http://www.juliansanchez.com/2009/04/06/cl...tive-fallacies/

 

Come to think of it, there’s a certain class of rhetoric I’m going to call the “one way hash” argument. Most modern cryptographic systems in wide use are based on a certain mathematical asymmetry: You can multiply a couple of large prime numbers much (much, much, much, much) more quickly than you can factor the product back into primes. A one-way hash is a kind of “fingerprint” for messages based on the same mathematical idea: It’s really easy to run the algorithm in one direction, but much harder and more time consuming to undo.  Certain bad arguments work the same way—skim online debates between biologists and earnest ID afficionados armed with talking points if you want a few examples: The talking point on one side is just complex enough that  it’s both intelligible—even somewhat intuitive—to the layman and sounds as though it might qualify as some kind of insight. (If it seems too obvious, perhaps paradoxically, we’ll tend to assume everyone on the other side thought of it themselves and had some good reason to reject it.) The rebuttal, by contrast, may require explaining a whole series of preliminary concepts before it’s really possible to explain why the talking point is wrong. So the setup is “snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems” vs. “rebuttal I probably don’t have time to read, let alone analyze closely.”

 

If we don’t sometimes defer to the expert consensus, we’ll systematically tend to go wrong in the face of one-way-hash arguments, at least outside our own necessarily limited domains of knowledge.  Indeed, in such cases, trying to evaluate the arguments on their merits will tend to lead to an erroneous conclusion more often than simply trying to gauge the credibility of the various disputants. The problem, of course, is gauging your own competence level well enough to know when to assess arguments and when to assess arguers. Thanks to the perverse phenomenon psychologists have dubbed the Dunning-Kruger effect,  those who are least competent tend to have the most wildly inflated estimates of their own knowledge and competence. They don’t know enough to know that they don’t know, as it were.

[Winstonm]

I originally quoted the following in a discussion about climate change...

It seems equally appropriate here (I suspect that some of what Josh is driving at is contained within)

 

http://www.juliansanchez.com/2009/04/06/cl...tive-fallacies/

 

Come to think of it, there’s a certain class of rhetoric I’m going to call the “one way hash” argument. Most modern cryptographic systems in wide use are based on a certain mathematical asymmetry: You can multiply a couple of large prime numbers much (much, much, much, much) more quickly than you can factor the product back into primes. A one-way hash is a kind of “fingerprint” for messages based on the same mathematical idea: It’s really easy to run the algorithm in one direction, but much harder and more time consuming to undo.  Certain bad arguments work the same way—skim online debates between biologists and earnest ID afficionados armed with talking points if you want a few examples: The talking point on one side is just complex enough that  it’s both intelligible—even somewhat intuitive—to the layman and sounds as though it might qualify as some kind of insight. (If it seems too obvious, perhaps paradoxically, we’ll tend to assume everyone on the other side thought of it themselves and had some good reason to reject it.) The rebuttal, by contrast, may require explaining a whole series of preliminary concepts before it’s really possible to explain why the talking point is wrong. So the setup is “snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems” vs. “rebuttal I probably don’t have time to read, let alone analyze closely.”

 

If we don’t sometimes defer to the expert consensus, we’ll systematically tend to go wrong in the face of one-way-hash arguments, at least outside our own necessarily limited domains of knowledge.  Indeed, in such cases, trying to evaluate the arguments on their merits will tend to lead to an erroneous conclusion more often than simply trying to gauge the credibility of the various disputants. The problem, of course, is gauging your own competence level well enough to know when to assess arguments and when to assess arguers. Thanks to the perverse phenomenon psychologists have dubbed the Dunning-Kruger effect,  those who are least competent tend to have the most wildly inflated estimates of their own knowledge and competence. They don’t know enough to know that they don’t know, as it were.

Richard,

 

That is quite a useful post (to me). It helps me grasp the reason for the arguments of Josh, PassedOut, and Lobowolf. It also makes me aware that I have no expertise in these matters - at the same time I have not seen critiques that open themselves to peer-reviewed rebuttals either. From what I have seen the rebuttals are inferior to and much less well-documented than the charges.

 

I like to think of myself as openminded - if sufficient evidence is presented to me, I am willing to change my mind - and I have not reached a conclusion about the collapses on 9-11 other than I do not rule out sabotage, nor have I ruled more natural causes.

[jdonn]

Richard,

 

That is quite a useful post (to me).  It helps me grap the reason for the arguments of Josh, PassedOut, and Lobowolf.  It also makes me aware that I have no expertise in these matters - at the same time I have not seen critiques that open themselves to peer-reviewed rebuttals either.  From what I have seen the rebuttals are inferior to and much less well-documented that the charges.

In all seriousness, I think you might take that as a sign that experts don't view the charges as worth being taken seriously. Rather than using it as a point to suggest the charges may be correct...