I still find it fairly implausible that the government would be directly involved in orchestrating the attack just because it has historically been quite difficult to keep something like that secret for a long period—the chances of someone involved or aware of what happened being sufficiently outraged to become a whistle-blower seems too high. I don’t rule it out but I think it fairly unlikely.
I do however find it quite plausible that the government would go to some length to cover up the disappearance of a large amount of gold and silver as they could justify it to themselves as necessary for preserving financial stability and so national security. That seems like sufficient reason for a cover-up from their point of view even without their direct involvement.
I’m coming at this from a different direction to you I think—an interest in the financial crisis and the place that gold and silver have in the unfolding fallout from that rather than any previous knowledge of or interest in 9/11 conspiracy theories.
I still find it fairly implausible that the government would be directly involved in orchestrating the attack just because it has historically been quite difficult to keep something like that secret for a long period—the chances of someone involved or aware of what happened being sufficiently outraged to become a whistle-blower seems too high. I don’t rule it out but I think it fairly unlikely.
This argument comes up again and again but there is so much wrong with it:
What would you expect from a whistle-blower? If tomorrow someone steps forward claiming to be an ex-CIA agent who knows what happened, how could he prove his point, who would take him seriously, why should he risk his life for nothing? Most whistle-blowers only come forward if they can be assured that they will be protected from prosecution, so who will blow the whistle against the state?
There are lots of books and websites that expose similar conspiracies, some are from or with the participation of ex-government people.
There are some actual whistle-blowers, one is dead the other has fled to Argentina, that are at least two I know of.
The argument has a degree of circularity: if the government did it there would be more whistle-blowers, therefore the government didn’t do it, therefore I can ignore all evidence in that direction and the few whistle-blowers that have come forward.
Regardless if there are whistle-blowers or not you can still evaluate all the evidence at hand and draw your own conclusions. The argument “there are not enough whistle-blowers” is not an excuse to discount all evidence for a government conspiracy.
Whistle-blowers are not taken seriously because what they write doesn’t appear on the mainstream press but rather on some web page or maybe a book.
If you really knew history you should know that there has been a lot of exposition of conspiracies going on, its just neither taken seriously nor is it part of the mainstream knowledge of what you learn in school.
The fact that the WMD in Iraq claim was complete bogus and the people in charge Bush et. al knew it. Tony Blair has made Millions in deals with Oil companies in relation to Iraq.
Let’s try and get on the same page here. Putting aside the whole 9/11 question for a moment do you accept the existence of ‘conspiracy theories’ as a phenomenon? Do you accept that there is a class of ideas and explanations for historical events that includes such things as The Illuminati, Faked Moon Landings and Area 51 / government cover up of aliens amongst other things? If so do you recognize that certain common features of ‘conspiracy theories’ play to certain human psychological tendencies and epistemic biases? I assert that there is such a phenomenon and that it is rational to take that into account when weighing evidence provided to you by others.
Despite this I do acknowledge that some things that sound like conspiracy theories are nonetheless true. Here are some things that I believe have > 30% probability of being true that some people would dismiss as conspiracy theories (I don’t consider all of these equally likely):
The CIA funded their operations in Latin America by selling cocaine in the US.
Roosevelt had some advance knowledge of Pearl Harbor but chose not to intervene in order to persuade the rest of the US to support entry into WWII.
Hitler did not die in his bunker in Berlin but escaped to Argentina and lived there for some years after the war.
The bailouts during the financial crisis were deliberately designed to funnel money to certain favoured interests at the expense of other parties and not primarily to stabilize the financial system as claimed.
So I do believe conspiracies have existed and I do think some conspiracy theories are more likely than is generally accepted. I think it is certainly a possibility that 9/11 was a conspiracy that involved the US government but I think it is less likely than any of the theories I listed above. I think a government cover-up or a wider non US government conspiracy than the official story are both more likely explanations than a government conspiracy and move into the ‘plausible but unlikely’ category for me.
So the most effective tactic you could employ to raise my estimate that there was a conspiracy is to explain why you think this conspiracy theory is not like Faked Moon Landings and how it differs from the prototypical conspiracy theory. Your list of reasons whistle-blowers are unlikely in this case is the right sort of argument but doesn’t well address why this is not just another conspiracy theory.
I assert that there is such a phenomenon and that it is rational to take that into account when weighing evidence provided to you by others.
I agree that there is such a phenomenon, as for weighing the evidence you have to be careful. What kind of evidence are you talking about? Should you weigh the evidence of an eye-witness who reported hearing explosions differently based on your assumption that you are dealing with a conspiracy theory?
I think it is certainly a possibility that 9/11 was a conspiracy that involved the US government but I think it is less likely than any of the theories I listed above. I think a government cover-up or a wider non US government conspiracy than the official story are both more likely explanations than a government conspiracy and move into the ‘plausible but unlikely’ category for me.
Less likely, more likely, where did you get these estimates from? I have the impression you are arguing more based on a general feeling of certainty/uncertainty than from the actual facts and evidence.
So the most effective tactic you could employ to raise my estimate that there was a conspiracy is to explain why you think this conspiracy theory is not like Faked Moon Landings and how it differs from the prototypical conspiracy theory.
I think the mistake you and others are making is to just complete a pattern: it seems to be just like a prototypical conspiracy theory so it probably is one. And you estimate the truth-value of the theory by how much it resembles other theories that belong to the set instead of focusing at the specific facts.
I’d rather approach it from a completely different angle. Forget for a moment that there is such a thing as conspiracy theories and just analyze the facts and evidence of the case at hand. At what conclusions do you arrive?
One way to make this easier which I was attempting to do is to break the problem down into smaller parts and to just address those, like the question “Where there explosives planted in the WTC?” A positive answer doesn’t have to imply that there was a government conspiracy. Yet a lot of people here seem to conflate these issues.
Remember Eliezer’s post about the bottom line? Reason forward from the evidence towards your conclusion. You seem to be going the other way, by starting with the bottom line “another conspiracy theory” and therefore discounting all evidence that supports it. You should go the other way: analyze the evidence first and then arrive at a conclusion namely if this is just another conspiracy theory or not.
I’d rather approach it from a completely different angle. Forget for a moment that there is such a thing as conspiracy theories and just analyze the facts and evidence of the case at hand. At what conclusions do you arrive?
The irony is nearly overwhelming. It’s these conspiracy websites you keep linking us to that do exactly the opposite of this. One bloke who says he heard an explosion amidst the chaos doesn’t even get noticed until you start looking for evidence of a conspiracy. But we have a series of innate biases that lead us to generate a conspiracy as a hypothesis automatically, regardless of the evidence. And once we do evidence starts turning up everywhere.
One way to make this easier which I was attempting to do is to break the problem down into smaller parts and to just address those, like the question “Where there explosives planted in the WTC?” A positive answer doesn’t have to imply that there was a government conspiracy. Yet a lot of people here seem to conflate these issues.
People conflate these issues for the same reason people conflate theism with Christianity: they’re both so unlikely as to be interchangeable in most circumstances and the people who advocate one are almost always advocating the other.
Here’s an example of what you can notice being shaped by the premises you start with. The relevant bit is about five minutes into the podcast.
Background: Cory Maye was living in a duplex. There was a drug dealer in the other half. A SWAT team made a wrong door raid on him, he assumed it was a robbery, and he shot and killed one of the police. He surrendered with bullets still in his gun. He was black, the cop was white, and Maye was convicted of capital murder—the deliberate killing of a police officer.
Radley Balko reported on this case as a gross injustice. When the crime reporter from the New York Times wrote up the state of the war on drugs in that county, he didn’t even notice that there was something fishy about the conviction. Until Radley pointed it out, the NYT reporter just wrote about how drugs were hurting the county, and the police needed to come down harder.
People conflate these issues for the same reason people conflate theism with Christianity: they’re both so unlikely as to be interchangeable in most circumstances and the people who advocate one are almost always advocating the other.
There is probably an analogy we could use in which the chief antagonists in one are not a counter-example in the other!
I’d rather approach it from a completely different angle. Forget for a moment that there is such a thing as conspiracy theories and just analyze the facts and evidence of the case at hand. At what conclusions do you arrive?
This would be a failure of rationality. It’s important when making observations and doing reasoning to remember that you’re running on corrupted hardware; always be aware that you are subject to particular, systemic cognitive biases and always be aware that you’re probably not doing enough to correct for them.
If you make visual observations through warped glass, and draw conclusions forgetting for the moment that the glass is warped, then your conclusions will be flawed.
Your analysis of your warps is also made through warped glass, so it’s reasonable (unless you have a very clean understanding of the warps [1]) to look at matters both ways.
[1] Knowing how far off your estimates of how long it takes to do things are because you’ve observed it a number of times would be a clean observation.
I still find it fairly implausible that the government would be directly involved in orchestrating the attack just because it has historically been quite difficult to keep something like that secret for a long period—the chances of someone involved or aware of what happened being sufficiently outraged to become a whistle-blower seems too high. I don’t rule it out but I think it fairly unlikely.
I do however find it quite plausible that the government would go to some length to cover up the disappearance of a large amount of gold and silver as they could justify it to themselves as necessary for preserving financial stability and so national security. That seems like sufficient reason for a cover-up from their point of view even without their direct involvement.
I’m coming at this from a different direction to you I think—an interest in the financial crisis and the place that gold and silver have in the unfolding fallout from that rather than any previous knowledge of or interest in 9/11 conspiracy theories.
This argument comes up again and again but there is so much wrong with it:
What would you expect from a whistle-blower? If tomorrow someone steps forward claiming to be an ex-CIA agent who knows what happened, how could he prove his point, who would take him seriously, why should he risk his life for nothing? Most whistle-blowers only come forward if they can be assured that they will be protected from prosecution, so who will blow the whistle against the state?
There are lots of books and websites that expose similar conspiracies, some are from or with the participation of ex-government people.
There are some actual whistle-blowers, one is dead the other has fled to Argentina, that are at least two I know of.
The argument has a degree of circularity: if the government did it there would be more whistle-blowers, therefore the government didn’t do it, therefore I can ignore all evidence in that direction and the few whistle-blowers that have come forward.
Regardless if there are whistle-blowers or not you can still evaluate all the evidence at hand and draw your own conclusions. The argument “there are not enough whistle-blowers” is not an excuse to discount all evidence for a government conspiracy.
Whistle-blowers are not taken seriously because what they write doesn’t appear on the mainstream press but rather on some web page or maybe a book.
If you really knew history you should know that there has been a lot of exposition of conspiracies going on, its just neither taken seriously nor is it part of the mainstream knowledge of what you learn in school.
Just some examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Henry_Kissinger
The fact that the WMD in Iraq claim was complete bogus and the people in charge Bush et. al knew it. Tony Blair has made Millions in deals with Oil companies in relation to Iraq.
Let’s try and get on the same page here. Putting aside the whole 9/11 question for a moment do you accept the existence of ‘conspiracy theories’ as a phenomenon? Do you accept that there is a class of ideas and explanations for historical events that includes such things as The Illuminati, Faked Moon Landings and Area 51 / government cover up of aliens amongst other things? If so do you recognize that certain common features of ‘conspiracy theories’ play to certain human psychological tendencies and epistemic biases? I assert that there is such a phenomenon and that it is rational to take that into account when weighing evidence provided to you by others.
Despite this I do acknowledge that some things that sound like conspiracy theories are nonetheless true. Here are some things that I believe have > 30% probability of being true that some people would dismiss as conspiracy theories (I don’t consider all of these equally likely):
The CIA funded their operations in Latin America by selling cocaine in the US.
Roosevelt had some advance knowledge of Pearl Harbor but chose not to intervene in order to persuade the rest of the US to support entry into WWII.
Hitler did not die in his bunker in Berlin but escaped to Argentina and lived there for some years after the war.
The bailouts during the financial crisis were deliberately designed to funnel money to certain favoured interests at the expense of other parties and not primarily to stabilize the financial system as claimed.
So I do believe conspiracies have existed and I do think some conspiracy theories are more likely than is generally accepted. I think it is certainly a possibility that 9/11 was a conspiracy that involved the US government but I think it is less likely than any of the theories I listed above. I think a government cover-up or a wider non US government conspiracy than the official story are both more likely explanations than a government conspiracy and move into the ‘plausible but unlikely’ category for me.
So the most effective tactic you could employ to raise my estimate that there was a conspiracy is to explain why you think this conspiracy theory is not like Faked Moon Landings and how it differs from the prototypical conspiracy theory. Your list of reasons whistle-blowers are unlikely in this case is the right sort of argument but doesn’t well address why this is not just another conspiracy theory.
Possibly related: xkcd
Downvoted for being an obvious link to a belabored point with no rhetorical value in this conversation and only a tenuous link to its parent.
Good comic, though.
I agree that there is such a phenomenon, as for weighing the evidence you have to be careful. What kind of evidence are you talking about? Should you weigh the evidence of an eye-witness who reported hearing explosions differently based on your assumption that you are dealing with a conspiracy theory?
Less likely, more likely, where did you get these estimates from? I have the impression you are arguing more based on a general feeling of certainty/uncertainty than from the actual facts and evidence.
I think the mistake you and others are making is to just complete a pattern: it seems to be just like a prototypical conspiracy theory so it probably is one. And you estimate the truth-value of the theory by how much it resembles other theories that belong to the set instead of focusing at the specific facts.
I’d rather approach it from a completely different angle. Forget for a moment that there is such a thing as conspiracy theories and just analyze the facts and evidence of the case at hand. At what conclusions do you arrive?
One way to make this easier which I was attempting to do is to break the problem down into smaller parts and to just address those, like the question “Where there explosives planted in the WTC?” A positive answer doesn’t have to imply that there was a government conspiracy. Yet a lot of people here seem to conflate these issues.
Remember Eliezer’s post about the bottom line? Reason forward from the evidence towards your conclusion. You seem to be going the other way, by starting with the bottom line “another conspiracy theory” and therefore discounting all evidence that supports it. You should go the other way: analyze the evidence first and then arrive at a conclusion namely if this is just another conspiracy theory or not.
The irony is nearly overwhelming. It’s these conspiracy websites you keep linking us to that do exactly the opposite of this. One bloke who says he heard an explosion amidst the chaos doesn’t even get noticed until you start looking for evidence of a conspiracy. But we have a series of innate biases that lead us to generate a conspiracy as a hypothesis automatically, regardless of the evidence. And once we do evidence starts turning up everywhere.
People conflate these issues for the same reason people conflate theism with Christianity: they’re both so unlikely as to be interchangeable in most circumstances and the people who advocate one are almost always advocating the other.
Here’s an example of what you can notice being shaped by the premises you start with. The relevant bit is about five minutes into the podcast.
Background: Cory Maye was living in a duplex. There was a drug dealer in the other half. A SWAT team made a wrong door raid on him, he assumed it was a robbery, and he shot and killed one of the police. He surrendered with bullets still in his gun. He was black, the cop was white, and Maye was convicted of capital murder—the deliberate killing of a police officer.
Radley Balko reported on this case as a gross injustice. When the crime reporter from the New York Times wrote up the state of the war on drugs in that county, he didn’t even notice that there was something fishy about the conviction. Until Radley pointed it out, the NYT reporter just wrote about how drugs were hurting the county, and the police needed to come down harder.
There is probably an analogy we could use in which the chief antagonists in one are not a counter-example in the other!
This would be a failure of rationality. It’s important when making observations and doing reasoning to remember that you’re running on corrupted hardware; always be aware that you are subject to particular, systemic cognitive biases and always be aware that you’re probably not doing enough to correct for them.
If you make visual observations through warped glass, and draw conclusions forgetting for the moment that the glass is warped, then your conclusions will be flawed.
Your analysis of your warps is also made through warped glass, so it’s reasonable (unless you have a very clean understanding of the warps [1]) to look at matters both ways.
[1] Knowing how far off your estimates of how long it takes to do things are because you’ve observed it a number of times would be a clean observation.