Downvoting you isn’t committing scientific fraud. That sort of hyperbolic claim is why you are getting downvoted. You got downvoted repeatedly because you made claims that were demonstrably extremely unlikely and your attempts to marshal evidence for your claims relied on very poor fact checking. Downvoting for such reasons isn’t “scientific fraud.”
Moreover, science isn’t the process of comments threads. Even in as an educated/intelligent group as the commentators on LessWrong, these are still blog comments threads. Science is not conducted in blog comments threads. We can update our probability estimates in threads and even discuss interesting or new ideas. But to call this science is to vastly overestimate the gravity of these discussion threads. Maybe lightening up might help matters slightly.
You decided to go off on an ad hominem attack which I will simply ignore with the exception of remarking that the one comment of mine I mentioned above was very specific and didn’t contain a single word of mine but just a link which pointed directly to prima-facie evidence, edits were added later and marked as such.
Science is not what happens inside the lab. If you are suppressing evidence(and downvoting is a form of suppression) you are not being scientific. It’s as simple as that.
And you’re getting even more off-topic—it doesn’t matter what you call it, you have to either make your case on an object level or shut up. Complaining that people aren’t listening to you doesn’t work.
Wikipedia lists several types of ad hominems among them is the Ad hominem abusive.
“involve pointing out factual but ostensible character flaws or actions which are irrelevant to the opponent’s argument.”
In this sense I meant ad hominem attack.
Edit: note that I didn’t write ad hominem argument.
Yes, but there’s no ad hominem in explaining to someone that historical comments were downvoted because of specific flaws. Incidentally, the ad hominem abusive is only a fallacy in the limited sense that there’s an implicit “and therefore the argument is wrong” attached to it. That’s more due to general human convention. Consider for example if one said to someone “you’re a drunk idiot who couldn’t factor a 2 digit integer given a caculator and your statement X is correct.” That would be an ad hominem abusive but wouldn’t in any way be an ad hominem in a logically rude fashion. So this seems to miss the point at two levels.
Yes, but there’s no ad hominem in explaining to someone that historical comments were downvoted because of specific flaws.
Sigh, I’ll have to quote myself again: “involve pointing out factual but ostensible character flaws or actions which are irrelevant to the opponent’s argument.”(emphasis mine)
It is ad hominem because it is completely irrelevant to my arguments. I might have been downvoted years ago by making wrong claims about Teddy Bear, so what? Why would you want to bring that up in a discussion?
How come you even knew about my other comments in the past? Is it because you are a long time member here and remember past discussions and remember what I wrote in them? Maybe this is what caused you to argue based on the past history, based on what you knew about me and my past comments instead of sticking to the present comment and facts stated therein. If you argued based on what you knew about me, e.g. past comments, other than the one that was specifically mentioned this constitutes an ad hominem in the latin sense (meaning directed towards the person). You didn’t manage to stick to what was written but brought in your personal judgment about me about other comments I have written in the past. And that is totally irrelevant to my point. I’ve never claimed that all my comments in the past were correct. So other comments of mine in the past, be they correct or wrong are totally irrelevant to the point in question. I was very careful in choosing one specific comment which doesn’t even contain a single word of mine. I said this 3 times at least now. I was making my point with this comment, why couldn’t you stick to that one? We are now writing a lot of words that have nothing to do with my argument.
Btw, to make it simpler imagine that the Roland of today is another person than the Roland who wrote the past comments, lets call him “RolandPast”. Now I’ll paraphrase you: “RolandPast got downvoted repeatedly because RolandPast made claims that were demonstrably extremely unlikely and hist attempts to marshal evidence for his claims relied on very poor fact checking. Downvoting for such reasons isn’t “scientific fraud.”
I hope this makes things clearer. If not, I’ll paraphrase again this time using “X”:
“X got downvoted repeatedly because X made claims that were demonstrably extremely unlikely and his attempts to marshal evidence for hist claims relied on very poor fact checking. Downvoting for such reasons isn’t “scientific fraud.”
ad hominem abusive is only a fallacy in the limited sense that there’s an implicit “and therefore the argument is wrong” attached to it.
No, on the contrary, read the wikipedia section.: “This tactic is logically fallacious because insults and even true negative facts about the opponent’s personal character have nothing to do with the logical merits of the opponent’s arguments or assertions.”
So it seems that you are the one who missed it in two levels at least.
The ad hominem abusive would be a problem if I were trying to explain why your comment as you’ve said it is wrong. That’s not what has been happening. What has happened is that I’ve explained that your comments were downvoted because they were wrong.
Btw, to make it simpler imagine that the Roland of today is another person than
the Roland who wrote the past comments, lets call him “RolandPast”. Now I’ll
paraphrase you: “RolandPast got downvoted repeatedly because RolandPast
made claims that were demonstrably extremely unlikely and hist attempts to
marshal evidence for his claims relied on very poor fact checking. Downvoting for > such reasons isn’t “scientific fraud.”
Right. And if Roland made a claim about why RolandPast got downvoted then giving an alternative explanation for why RolandPast gotdownvoted (essentially exactly what you said above) isn’t an ad hominem of any form.
If you want people to believe your claims, you’re going about it the wrong way. Everyone would have believed the Wright brothers had built a successful heavier-than-air plane* if they just brought it to DC and buzzed the Mall, but that’s not what they did.
* No lie, I actually have this photograph as my desktop right now.
Is it possible that I’m not parsing what you’ve said correctly?
You wrote “if you downvote any evidence in support of my theory(edit: and that contradicts your theory) you are committing scientific fraud.” When I replied that edit was not yet present but it doesn’t actually add any information (since were on LessWrong I’m not going to bother dealing with the basic Bayesianism at work). So, can you explain how the statement ” “if you downvote any evidence in support of my theory you are committing scientific fraud.” is not a claim that downvoting you is committing scientific fraud?
I’m also curious where you think I engaged in an ad hominem attack. I don’t see it above.
I’m also curious as to how you classify downvoting as suppressing evidence. If I linked to a claimed set of pages about UFOs and psi that relied on personal evidence would downvoting that claim constitute “suppressing evidence”? If not, why not? If it would, is there any circumstance where you consider downvoting to be acceptable when the comment has non-spam content? If so, where do you draw the line and how?
You incidentally seem to be confusing science with rationality. They are not the same thing. Roughly speaking, science is a set of restricted methodologies that happens to include a lot of aspects of rationality. Rationality is what happens in that broader context. (Frankly, the “science is not what happens inside the lab” meme is annoying in that it oversimplifies a lot of very complicated stuff. Aside from the valid points it makes about how to reason, it ignores the fact that lots of even what is traditionally labeled science happens outside lab environments (this seems to be part of a general problem on LW of using physics as the representative for science as a whole.))
So, can you explain how the statement ” “if you downvote any evidence in support of my theory you are committing scientific fraud.” is not a claim that downvoting you is committing scientific fraud?
I would like to argue based on the specific comment of mine that I linked to in the comment above. As I said before this comment didn’t contain a single word of mine but just a video with eye-witness testimony. In my eyes, this is evidence. Not every comment of mine I regard as evidence, but this specific one, yes, and some others where evidence is linked(which might be scientific articles, pictures, videos, audios, etc...)
Again, not every comment I write on LW is evidence but some are because they contain links to hard facts. If you downvote one of those, you are suppressing evidence. So I never made the point that downvoting me is fraud, but downvoting evidence is and some comments are or contain links to evidence, specifically the one I mentioned in my previous comment.
Regarding the ad hominem attack:
You got downvoted repeatedly because you made claims that were demonstrably extremely unlikely and your attempts to marshal evidence for your claims relied on very poor fact checking.
In my previous comment I had linked to one, exactly one comment that didn’t contain a single word of mine(except in the edits that were added later and clearly marked as such). Instead of basing your arguments on what I wrote you go onto a general attack where you accuse me of making shaky claims in my past comments. That I consider ad hominem. Please now don’t lets get started with a long enumeration of comments and pointing out supposed mistakes in each of them. I’m not bothering wasting time on it.
I’m also curious as to how you classify downvoting as suppressing evidence. If I linked to a claimed set of pages about UFOs and psi that relied on personal evidence would downvoting that claim constitute “suppressing evidence”? If not, why not? If it would, is there any circumstance where you consider downvoting to be acceptable when the comment has non-spam content? If so, where do you draw the line and how?
I think it is ok to downvote when the content of the comment is wrong because it breaks certain rules of rationality like ad hominem attacks or self-contradictory comments, etc… It becomes hard if the comment is just a link to some outside evidence, lets say an eye-witness testimony. What then? Should you downvote based on the supposition that the testimony is probably wrong or forged? It’s a tough call, I don’t know if I can give a fully general answer in one comment and I won’t even try to do so. I think this is one topic that deserves to be discussed in a top level post. Btw, I’m not planning to do so.
The history of flight is one of Eliezer’s preferred themes here, so imagine if LW was a community in Europe in the beginning of the 20th century and there is one post by Lord Kelvin claiming “No balloon and no aeroplane will ever be practically successful.”. One guy has the audacity to link to an eye-witness testimony in his comment: “I saw two bicycle mechanics in the USA flying in a self-made airplane.” Is this evidence or not? Would it be justified to downvote this comment into oblivion?
You incidentally seem to be confusing science with rationality.
What is science? This is a never ending discussion. I was thinking primarily in terms of belief update via evidence. I guess regardless of your definition of science you will agree that suppressing evidence is anti-scientific. Am I right?
I would like to argue based on the specific comment of mine that I linked to in the
comment above.
Ok. There may be a minor miscomunication here. When I made my comment about why you were downvoted on some of your comments regarding 9/11 I was talking about the general history of comments not this specific comment. This made sense to me given that the context you seemed to be talking about was the general pattern of 9/11 comments you made being downvoted in the past.
Regarding eyewitness testimony, I believe that this has already been explained to you (although a click glance through doesn’t find the relevant comments) but eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable. This is especially the case in extreme situations. (I’m actually surprised there isn’t something in any of the sequences specifically devoted to this issue.) See This article for a short discussion of many of the issues in the context of criminal trials. Part of the point you seem to be possibly using a non-standard definition of suppression. Downvoting a comment doesn’t suppress anything in the sense that we normally use that term for (destroying evidence, refusing to publish results you don’t like etc.) . It simply sends a signal to the LessWrong readers that reading the statement is not likely to do anything useful and so that they will be less likely to click through to read the remarks. And given the unreliability of eye-witnesses testimony in crisis situations, most rationalists are going to give such evidence very low reliability. So in so far as this is a signal to the LW community, it is an accurate one.
To move to the flight example, flying didn’t occur during a crisis situation. People were not claiming that the Wright Brothers flew once briefly during an earthquake or a volcanic eruption or the middle of a pitched firefight. They demonstrated it repeatedly to different people. So such evidence is in fact the more reliable sort of eye witness evidence. The evidence is not by itself at all convincing of flight (magicians can do some pretty neat stuff and even there’s also the issue of the reliability of the witnesses), but it would make me stand up and take notice. That’s a very different claim then that a single or even a large group of eyewitnesses reported hearing something which isn’t even necessarily inconsistent with the standard hypothesis.
Edit: Also regarding the ad hominem issue. I think you should reread RobinZ linked remark about what an ad hominem is. Explaining to someone why their comments were historically downvoted isn’t an ad hominem. It may make one feel uncomfortable, it may come across as condescending or patronizing. It may be deeply damaging to one’s ego. But that’s not an ad hominem attack. In this particular case, the response was an attempt at explaining why your comments have been downvoted. Interpreting that as an ad hominem attack requires some degree of abuse of the term “ad hominem.”
This made sense to me given that the context you seemed to be talking about was the general pattern of 9/11 comments you made being downvoted in the past.
No. I was very specific on purpose pinpointing exactly one comment.
Regarding eyewitness testimony, I believe that this has already been explained to you
Yeah, I’ve read articles about it. Btw, if you listened to the eye-witness testimony in question, the guy was trapped inside the building because the stairs were blown away and the electricity was turned off(so he couldn’t use the elevator). If you claim that his testimony is wrong you would have to explain why he was trapped inside the building and btw this happened before any of the main towers collapsed so you can’t say “he was in shock” or what not. Finally yes, eye-witness testimonies are unreliable but this doesn’t mean that you can discard them, that they are not evidence. So my point still stands.
Part of the point you seem to be possibly using a non-standard definition of suppression.
Ohhhh, please, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suppressing here is a whole list of definitions. If a comment gets downvoted to −3 it no longer appears on the comment page(you have to specifically click to make it appear again). If that is not supression we are speaking a different language here.
And given the unreliability of eye-witnesses testimony in crisis situations, most rationalists are going to give such evidence very low reliability. So in so far as this is a signal to the LW community, it is an accurate one.
Are you saying this justifies actively downvoting it into oblivion? I don’t buy your argument. The real reason why it was downvoted was because it contradicts the prevailing view here. You are just rationalizing it.
The real reason why it was downvoted was because it contradicts the prevailing view here.
Here is a comment that contradicts the prevailing view here. Seriously, there are maybe one or two other posters here who are sympathetic to your conspiracy mongering but no one agrees with Alicorn about ethics. It was at +6 (though of course it is by a woman so that’s probably why people upvoted).
Here is why your comment was voted into oblivion:
You linked to evidence that wasn’t anywhere close to the magnitude it needed to be given the extreme unlikelihood of the proposition it was marshaled to support. It is rather like linking to a video of someone recounting a religious experience or an alien abduction. It was clear from the context that you took yourself to be offering powerful evidence in favor the proposition that the 9/11 attacks were a government plot. The downvoters were telling you this wasn’t good enough evidence to justify a link and to stop wasting their time with noise.
Your past forays into this topic and subsequent inability to update when people rebut your position left people with no patience for that crap.
It was off-topic and flame bait.
You kept drawing attention to it, making sure everyone on the site saw it ensuring even more downvotes.
(Incidentally, I never bothered to downvote that particular comment)
I wouldn’t say I agree with her exactly but I disagree with her less than I disagree with the utilitarians who seem to be so common around here. I’m not sure you’re justified in your confidence about the absoluteness of disagreement with her ethics.
Here is a comment that contradicts the prevailing view here
I’ll admit that I just read a few words but I guess it is about philosophy and I think that people are much more willing to admit dissenting views, unlike in the realm of politics.
though of course it is by a woman so that’s probably why people upvoted.
Is this another ad hominem?
You linked to evidence that wasn’t anywhere close to the magnitude it needed to be given the extreme unlikelihood of the proposition it was marshaled to support.
The proposition was “Explosives were planted in the WTC.” The probability that the proposition is true is fairly high given the fact that the buildings collapsed in a manner consistent with the use of explosives. There is of course much more evidence besides this one eye witness, but lets not start another 9/11 thread.
It was clear from the context that you took yourself to be offering powerful evidence in favor the proposition that the 9/11 attacks were a government plot.
Well, I’d rather you evaluate the comment by its contents, regardless of what other things I might believe or not. The comment was just addressing the question of explosives. Interestingly a lot of people, you included, seem to conflate the two issues, explosives implying government involvement. Why is this the case, and does it have something to do with the fact that there is so much resistance towards this proposition?
Your past forays into this topic and subsequent inability to update when people rebut your position left people with no patience for that crap.
I’ve yet to see a good rebuttal. Btw, I’ve read a lot about this subject so I think I know what I’m talking about.
It was off-topic and flame bait.
Eliezer wrote:
I don’t believe there were explosives planted in the World Trade Center.
And I brought up evidence against it.
You kept drawing attention to it, making sure everyone on the site saw it ensuring even more downvotes.
Well, it’s certainly not my fault if people want to downvote evidence.
I still put a pretty low probability on 9/11 being some kind of conspiracy but I have to admit that seeing this linked to this recently did make my head spin a bit and raised my probability estimate a little.
There have been a lot of reports recently of manipulation in the gold and silver markets and of a large gap between the notional gold that exists in the forms of various paper claims on futures markets and in the form of various kinds of unallocated deposits and in the actual physical bullion backing these claims. Most of this is still unproven but there is a fair amount of evidence that something fishy is going on. The first article is an eyewitness report of Scotiabank’s bullion vault in Canada which appears to contain much less physical gold and silver than it should based on estimates of the outstanding claims supposedly backed by holdings in that vault.
So far this has nothing to do with 9/11. The 9/11 connection is that there has apparently been a long standing claim of 9/11 ‘truthers’ that a large amount of gold and silver that was stored in a vault underneath WTC 4 (one of the buildings that collapsed without being hit by a plane) appears to be unaccounted for based on discrepancies between news reports before and after the event. I had never heard of this until a commenter on an article about the recent Scotiabank story linked to it. The bit that made me do a double take is the fact that one of the largest depositors in the WTC 4 vault was… Scotiabank.
Up to $1 billion of missing gold and silver suddenly suggests plausible motives for a conspiracy of some kind where I hadn’t really seen one before.
Forgot to add, the reason why physical Gold is disappearing everywhere worldwide is because the central banks are involved in a scheme to artificially keep the price of Gold down, read more at:
Yes, this is the angle that led me to the 9/11 connection. I’ve followed the ongoing global fiat currency collapse for a while. I’m new to 9/11 conspiracies. GATA have a whiff of conspiracy theory about them but I think I put a > 50% probability on at least some of their claims being true.
WTC 4 (one of the buildings that collapsed without being hit by a plane)
Just a minor correction: WTC 4 didn’t collapse, it was damaged beyond repair and demolished. The only buildings that did collapse where the twin towers and WTC 7.
Up to $1 billion of missing gold and silver suddenly suggests plausible motives for a conspiracy of some kind where I hadn’t really seen one before.
You gotta be kidding me. I think the physical gold missing is not directly related to 9/11, remember the same happened in Canada, the same is happening in the London bullion market, some claim that even the gold in Fort Knox is long gone.
But if you want plausible motives for 9/11 I’ll give you a short list:
Government needed a pretext to start a never-ending war on terror, to raise military spending(after the end of the cold war a new enemy had to be created) and to pass new legislation through congress(Patriot act, etc...)
Silverstein had just recently bought the WTC complex and AFAIK it was condemned, it would have to be demolished more sooner than later. How convenient that he also made an insurance against terrorist attacks, this guy made billions from 9/11.
Silverstein had just recently bought the WTC complex and AFAIK it was condemned, it > would have to be demolished more sooner than later. How convenient that he also
made an insurance against terrorist attacks, this guy made billions from 9/11.
Yes, how convenient that someone would have insurance against terrorist attacks when that person owned a set of buildings which had been subject to a terrorist attack in the past.
Yes, how convenient that someone would have insurance against terrorist attacks when that person owned a set of buildings which had been subject to a terrorist attack in the past.
Point taken! Still you asked for plausible motives and there you have one, read more about Silverstein here:
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.
Since 9/11 was discussed the first time on OB I keep hearing this “the prior probability of a conspiracy is very low” or variations thereof. This is a totally meaningless statement, unless you can produce some actual numbers but no one made an effort to do so.
If you want to see something that can be backed up by numbers ask yourself: how many steel-frame buildings have collapsed due to fire previous to 9/11. According the official NIST report that investigated 9/11 the answer is ZERO. So what is the probability that 3 buildings collapsed in this manner in 9/11? But in spite of this people keep insisting that the prior for explosives is too low to take it into account.
Btw, again, explosives planted in the building doesn’t necessarily imply government conspiracy. Although, the fact that in the aftermath the government denied any explosives and even excluded this hypothesis from any investigation raises some interesting questions. The hypothesis was never falsified, I wonder why NIST refused to investigate it.
I’m generally sympathetic to the idea that the events behind 9/11 were insufficiently investigated, and that the full story is a bit more than the common narrative.
But I don’t see
how many steel-frame buildings have collapsed due to fire previous to 9/11.
As terribly relevant without the corresponding “how many steel-frame buildings were sprayed with massive amounts of aerosolized jet fuel and then ignited?”
Wow, posted a few minutes ago and already upvoted to 4?
As terribly relevant without the corresponding “how many steel-frame buildings were sprayed with massive amounts of aerosolized jet fuel and then ignited?”
WTC7 was not, yet it collapsed. It wasn’t hit by any plane. Why is this always conveniently not mentioned?
While your point here is superficially valid, the debris that hit WTC7 damaged 10-12 floors so badly that the gash was visible (according to the NIST report on WTC7). Large amounts of damage occurred to other floors. The fact that you more or less had large sections of another building dropped onto WTC7 massively damaged the structural stability such that the fires resulted in complete collapse. So for the Twin Towers you had less direct damage but lots of jet fuel, and for WTC7 you had large segments of a building fall onto it.
I’m also somewhat puzzled by how 9/11 Truthers like to point to the collapse of WTC7 so much. I would think that one would want to argue that the destruction of WTC7 was inadvertent. If not, you need to explain why the conspiracy bothered bringing down a much smaller, not very well-known building. Thus for example, the standard conspiratorial explanation of the government creating 9/11 fails massively to explain this. The only conspiracy explanation I’ve seen that remotely explain this tries to claim that the entire plot was designed to get rid of WTC7 since it had the SEC offices investigating Worldcom and ENRON. I don’t think I need to explain in detail why that seems unlikely.
There seems to be a problem going on here similar to the standard problem with creationists. They argue in the form “Anomaly → Evolution wrong → creationism.” There’s both a false dichotomy here and a general failure to properly apply Bayes’ theorem.
There were also fires in WTC7 that the Fire Department didn’t even attempt combat. They pretty much just let them burn for like six hours.
Also, the fire department knew building 7 was going to collapse. They pulled all their people away from building to protect them after they noticed signs of structural failure and there are a bunch of accounts from firefighters to this effect.
The fact that you more or less had large sections of another building dropped onto WTC7 massively damaged the structural stability such that the fires resulted in complete collapse.
Incorrect. There were damages, but none to the central supporting columns. Even after accounting for the fires they were not enough to explain the free fall speed collapse.
If not, you need to explain why the conspiracy bothered bringing down a much smaller, not very well-known building.
Slow down here. I’m trying to work forwards from the evidence and for all that I know it points to controlled demolition as the only plausible explanation and falsifies the theory of collapse by fire and structural damage. You again are conflating two or more separate questions: how did it collapse and who did it and for what reason.
Slow down here. I’m trying to work forwards from the evidence and for all that I know it points to controlled demolition as the only plausible explanation and falsifies the theory of collapse by fire and structural damage.
I think you are falling victim to a subtle reasoning error here. Imagine a doctor is asked to examine a dead body and determine the cause of death. He observes almost certainly fatal injuries that are consistent with those caused by a bullet and reasonably concludes the man was shot.
If he is then informed that a grenade went off in the vicinity of the man and he fell to the ground shortly afterwards he will conclude that in fact the man was probably killed by shrapnel, even if the injury looks more like injuries he has previously observed from gunshots than from shrapnel.
I recognize that you are claiming the injuries look much more like the injuries you would expect from a bullet than they do the injuries you would expect from shrapnel but I think it is important for you to consider that the fact that the grenade is known to have gone off nearby just before the man fell to the ground is very relevant to the probabilities you assign to the two possible explanations. It is not appropriate merely to ‘work forwards from the evidence’ without acknowledging this fact.
Hahaha, I think it is funny that every comment against the 9/11 orthodoxy is voted down while every comment in favor of it is voted up, is it possible that the audience is a bit biased here?
But on to your point.
First I think the example is a bit misleading because in the reader’s mental model a grenade will cause death in a manner similar with the firing of bullets. Not so in the case of 9/11, for all that is known, a building sustaining some amount of structural damage and fire will not collapse the way WTC7 did, which is why from the start you should place a higher probability on explosives being involved.
But back to your example:
A man is dead after a grenade exploded in his vicinity. His wounds are consistent with bullet wounds which usually look different that shrapnel wounds. Now, what killed the man, was it the grenade or bullets(he could have been fired at when the grenade went off). One way to distinguish the causes of death would be to examine the body for bullets or shrapnel. We might find one or the other or even both. If you only find shrapnel you falsify the hypothesis of death-by-gun, if on the other hand you only find bullets it’s the other hypothesis that is falsified.
I assume you accept that the buildings collapsed in a manner consistent with the use of explosives. This already nullifies one argument that was repeated several times here on LW, that the prior for explosives is too low to even be seriously considered. Now this is of course not enough to prove that it were explosives and here is where additional evidence has to come in like:
can structural damage(e.g. as happened in 9/11 to WTC7) and fire explain a collapse in almost free fall speed? No
were there eye-witness testimonies of explosions? Yes, lots of them.
is there evidence for explosives in the rubble/dust? Yes. As a side note, NIST didn’t even bother to look for this evidence:
“12. Did the NIST investigation look for evidence of the WTC towers being brought down by controlled demolition? Was the steel tested for explosives or thermite residues? The combination of thermite and sulfur (called thermate) “slices through steel like a hot knife through butter.”
NIST did not test for the residue of these compounds in the steel.”
It is not appropriate merely to ‘work forwards from the evidence’ without acknowledging this fact.
The fact that a grenade went off is part of the evidence.
I assume you accept that the buildings collapsed in a manner consistent with the use of explosives.
Yes, to the extent of my limited knowledge of the issue. Part of my problem judging the evidence (and I think this affects many people) is that I feel like a doctor who has seen lots of gunshot wounds but no shrapnel wounds. I have seen many videos of buildings collapsing due to a controlled demolition and to the best of my layman’s ability to judge they look similar to the 9/11 footage. I have never seen any other footage of a building being hit by a large jet airliner with a full fuel load.
You are correct that there was likely not that much damage to the central columns. However, damage may have occurred and other damage to the south side may have contributed. See in particular pages L-34 and L-35 of the NIST progress report: http://wtc.nist.gov/progress_report_june_04/appendixl.pdf Moreover, claims of collapse at free fall speeds for both the WTC7 and the main towers are both false. In the case of the WTC7, the east penthouse started collapsing a full 6 seconds before the rest of the building.
As to your claim that I’m “conflating two or more separate questions” the questions are fundamentally interrelated. If you are trying to claim that WTC7 was brought down by controlled explosives, that claim becomes fundamentally less likely if you don’t have a plausible motive for that.
I’m going to have to make a comparison to the creationists again who love to make “peer reviewed journals” (there are I think in the US now at least 2 such entities). Constructing y journals does not make something science. Making journals of people who agree with a fringe belief and then claiming peer review doesn’t make that peer reviewed science. And the claim that they had to do so because the mean editors and reviewers at other journals wouldn’t let them play is textbook from the ID movement. Now, of course, making a claim that is similar in form to that made by someone else doesn’t mean they share the same truth value. But it should raise a red flag. The fact that all the editors are people who are convinced that the standard account must be false also should raise a red flag.
If you are trying to claim that WTC7 was brought down by controlled explosives, that claim becomes fundamentally less likely if you don’t have a plausible motive for that.
I actually think most people don’t understand how hard it is to bring down a building the size of WTC7 (much less the towers!) with demolition explosives. Any evidence put forward to show that it would be unlikely for the buildings to collapse due to fire and structural damage is also evidence for how hard it is to implode them with explosives. It’s not like the movies where the secret agent can go in with three detonators the size of baseballs that stick to the walls, we’re talking days, even weeks of preparation with a full crew drilling into support columns, loading them with dynamite, RDX, connecting blasting caps, and wiring the whole thing up.
Here’s an account of what it took to demolish a steel structure building 300 feet shorter than WTC7 (but 300,000 square feet larger in total floor space):
CDI’s 12 person loading crew took twenty four days to place 4,118 separate charges in 1,100 locations on columns on nine levels of the complex. Over 36,000 ft of detonating cord and 4,512 non-electric delay elements were installed in CDI’s implosion initiation system, some to create the 36 primary implosion sequence and another 216 micro-delays to keep down the detonation overpressure from the 2,728 lb of explosives which would be detonated during the demolition.
The east penthouse collapsed 6 seconds earlier. So what? The relevant question is how much time did the entire building take to collapse, the time the roofline took to hit the floor? The only way it could be so fast is if all the supporting columns were destroyed. I don’t see how the collapse of the penthouse is relevant to that. It would only be relevant if said collapse would destroy the supporting columns but then we would have seen that effect much earlier. What we see is the penthouse collapsing but the building still standing still.
Moreover, claims of collapse at free fall speeds for both the WTC7 and the main towers are both false. In the case of the WTC7, the east penthouse started collapsing a full 6 seconds before the rest of the building.
Roland:
There are plenty of videos of the collapse, so I’ll let you watch and decide for yourself:
Do you not see why the fact that your video doesn’t contain the penthouse collapse because of angle or timing problematic in this context? Putting aside the fast rate of collapse once the rest of the building is going down the fact that there is visible evidence of the structural integrity of the building failing before the whole thing comes down is very strong evidence against a controlled demolition.
visible evidence of the structural integrity of the building failing before the whole thing comes down is very strong evidence against a controlled demolition.
Even in a controlled demolition explosive charges go off before the building comes down and already start doing structural damage, if you watched some videos(there are plenty on youtube) you will see for yourself.
Yes, there was some damage done to the building by falling debris and fire which of course was before the collapse and no one is denying this. But the key is: what kind of structural damage would be necessary for the whole building to collapse at approximately free-fall speed(counting from the moment the rooftop starts moving down)? For that to happen all supporting columns underneath would have to be destroyed. For this to happen in a random fashion through fires or whatever is highly unlikely. Btw, if you watch the NIST videos again you will see that their model is not convincing exactly because not all supporting columns are destroyed and you see the building folding instead of coming down vertically and yes, this is the case in both models of NIST.
So the natural conclusion from 3. is that at least the hypothesis of explosives being planted in the building should have been examined by NIST, why wasn’t it done?
Just to reiterate my point which I suspect was long lost in the discussion: I think the controlled demolition hypothesis is the most likely given the facts(regardless if there was a government conspiracy or not). Is it the only possible explanation? No. But I didn’t see any explanation that is consistent with the evidence and at the same time the use of explosives was never falsified, on the contrary NIST simply refused to even examine the rubble/dust for evidence thereof.
I think the model that includes the fire damage basically matches what I see in the video. It might not be perfect, but it is good enough for government work. As discussed before, I think the priors for controlled demolition are insanely low and that the the video evidence is consistent with NIST’s explanation. If some other commenter wants to arbitrate, that’d be fine (though please look at past exchanges on this topic, not just this thread), but otherwise I’m done. I think my position is clear and convincing to anyone reading this exchange (if such people disagree they’re welcome to ask me anything) and so much so that I’m comfortable leaving roland the last word…
You are right that that sort of collapse would require all the supporting columns to fail simultaneously, but that is not a surprising event. Large building collapses are not intuitive. Once a building starts to collapse, it introduces major vibrations and other forces that could, under the right circumstances, destroy all the supporting columns simultaneously, especially if they’d already been weakened by high temperatures.
Phlogiston made specific testable predictions about mass and combustion. Phlogiston theory was thrown out not because it was useless but because it was wrong. In this respect, phlogiston was good science.
(The fact that what you said isn’t a substantive reply to jimrandomh’s remark is a separate issue)
As to your claim that I’m “conflating two or more separate questions” the questions are fundamentally interrelated. If you are trying to claim that WTC7 was brought down by controlled explosives, that claim becomes fundamentally less likely if you don’t have a plausible motive for that.
Less likely? I think the claim can be stated and proven independently of the motive. A motive certainly will give it more plausibility but not necessarily make it more likely in a Bayesian way. I’m trying to answer a question of how, whereas the motive would be relevant to a question of why, for what reason.
JFK was assassinated and it is certainly possible to reconstruct how it happened: how many bullets where fired, from which angles, etc… The next question would be, who did it, for what reason, etc...
Second, you seem to be operating under the assumption that if the plane attacks were executed by terrorists they couldn’t also have planted explosives?
Less likely? I think the claim can be stated and proven independently of the motive. A > motive certainly will give it more plausibility but not necessarily make it more likely in > a Bayesian way. I’m trying to answer a question of how, whereas the motive would be > relevant to a question of why, for what reason.
On the contrary, motive is a perfectly relevant Bayesian modifier. I’m also not sure what you mean by saying that the motive can make something more plausible but not necessarily more likely. What is plausibility if not a metric of likelyhood given the evidence?
Second, you seem to be operating under the assumption that if the plane attacks > were executed by terrorists they couldn’t also have planted explosives?
And they would have done so when exactly? Moreover, why bother? The entire success of using planes in this way is that you don’t need to bother with bombs in your target. The planes themselves do the work. Setting explosives makes the plan for more complicated with little gain.
On the contrary, motive is a perfectly relevant Bayesian modifier. I’m also not sure what you mean by saying that the motive can make something more plausible but not necessarily more likely. What is plausibility if not a metric of likelyhood given the evidence?
Person X drops down dead with a perforation of his head. Claim: he was killed by a bullet. This can be examined independently of the question: Who had a motive to do so? Do you agree that it would be wrongheaded to start the investigation with: X was a well known and popular person and so no one would have a motive to kill X therefore the claim of death by bullet is extremely unlikely and we shouldn’t even bother investing much time in its investigation.
That’s a really bad analogy with multiple problems: First, stray bullets exist. Second, insane people shooting at random individuals exist. Third, the assumption that no would have a motivation to kill the person in question is an incredibly strong one. Moreover, even in that situation, if you did have a very high confidence that no one would deliberately shoot the individual, that would in fact reduce the confidence value that the person had been killed by a gunshot since it reduces the probability of certain gun-shot hypotheses being correct. You might think it doesn’t reduce it by enough to matter but it can’t no alter it if the presence of motivations would increase the probability. Conservation of evidence and all that.
Moreover, the notion you’ve constructed of not even bothering to investigate the hypothesis is a strawman. No one has said that alternate investigation might not have made sense at one point. But it simply isn’t a useful tool at this point. To extend your analogy, slightly differently, if the doctors all say that the person died from a random piece of shrapnel and have a lot of evidence for that claim (including videos of the shrapnel impact) then at a certain point it isn’t useful to spend resources investigating the bullet hypothesis. If you can’t construct a plausible motive for the shooter that becomes yet another reason to reduce confidence in the (already low) probability assigned to the bullet hypothesis.
How much explosive charge would it take to cause the failure observed? Where would it have to be installed? How many hours would that take, and how many workers? How many people would have to be displaced so as not to witness the building being prepared to blow? Where did the explosives come from? Who paid for them? Who delivered them, and to whom, where? Why would the project be timed to go on September 11th? Why would the denotation of the explosives be delayed to seven hours after the debris struck the building? Why didn’t the fire interfere with the operation of the explosives? How much noise would the explosives make? How quickly would the building collapse after the explosion?
Even if you think the official story is not well supported, I have to say it stacks up positively magnificently compared to the building-implosion theory.
It seems you have ignored my queries. In the spirit of staying as close to the original question as possible, however, I shall withdraw “Why would the project be timed to go on September 11th?” and “Why would the denotation of the explosives be delayed to seven hours after the debris struck the building?”, and ask again:
How much explosive charge would it take to cause the failure observed?
Where would it have to be installed?
How many hours would that take, and how many workers?
How many people would have to be displaced so as not to witness the building being prepared to blow?
Where did the explosives come from?
Who paid for them?
Who delivered them, and to whom, where?
Why didn’t the fire interfere with the operation of the explosives?
How much noise would the explosives make?
How quickly would the building collapse after the explosion?
In the art of rationality there is a discipline of closeness-to-the-issue—trying to observe evidence that is as near to the original question as possible, so that it screens off as many other arguments as possible.
Maybe I should have emphasized “screens off as many other arguments as possible”. You have a made a list of such arguments/questions. Mind you, they are all worth investigating but I’m screening them off the key question, namely:
“Were explosives planted in WTC7?” or “What caused WTC7 to collapse”(hat tip to Morendil).
Do you agree that this was a controlled demolition?
Do you agree that you can make this statement without having any of your listed questions answered?
If yes, you can then proceed to ask your previous list of questions:
How much explosive charge would it take to cause the failure observed?
Where would it have to be installed?
How many hours would that take, and how many workers?
How many people would have to be displaced so as not to witness the building being prepared to blow?
Where did the explosives come from?
Who paid for them?
Who delivered them, and to whom, where?
Why didn’t the fire interfere with the operation of the explosives?
How much noise would the explosives make?
How quickly would the building collapse after the explosion?
That video was pretty awesome, actually—a superb job of imploding a thirty-story building (the Landmark Tower in Fort Worth, Texas, March 18, 2006). And did you hear the noise of those explosive charges, and see those bright flashes as they detonated—it was most distinct!
And did you hear the noise of those explosive charges, and see those bright flashes as they detonated—it was most distinct!
Someone pointed this out a while ago and so the truthers decided that the buildings were brought down by thermite. Someone then pointed out that thermite can’t make horizontal cuts and that’s how the truthers figured out the government used nanothermite.
Roland, sorry to address you again after I disengaged. I don’t want to reenter the argument but I am curious: What do you believe was used to bring down the building? Presumably not thermite since you put all that effort into getting us to watch that video of the guy who heard an explosion…
The question in this case is: “Were explosives planted in WTC7?”.
No. Fool. They got hit by freaking planes. I saw it live on TV. You’re just WRONG and RIDICULOUSLY SO. It doesn’t matter which person you signal affiliation with. Or which works you link to. You’re still wrong.
Aside from the fact that ata is right and WTC7 was actually brought down from fires and structural damage caused by the falling tower, not the airplanes themselves, this strikes me as a reasonable response to persistent and uncorrectable wrongness. Do people disagree? If so, what is the appropriate response?
WTC7 was not one of the buildings that got hit by a plane.
(Lest anyone misinterpret my motives… I’m just correcting a statement of fact. I am absolutely not defending the claim that any of them were brought down by explosives, which I do not believe.)
Incorrect. There were damages, but none to the central supporting columns. Even after accounting for the fires they were not enough to explain the free fall speed collapse.
Calculated time for the building to collapse by NIST models were similar in magnitude to observations.
Edit: Page 85 in the document, “Table 3-1.” Says “43″ as the page number in lower right corner.
EDIT:
Interestingly the NIST models only show the initial phase of the collapse before ending abruptly but nevertheless there already are significant discrepancies with the actual collapse, and yes, they were the same way on NIST’s webpage were I first saw them a while ago but can no longer find them.
According to this video the model your video is comparing to the real collapse is is NISTs guess at what would have happened without the fire damage (poor scholarship which reflects on all the other truther claims) The second model in the clip I just linked to shows (according to the video) NIST’s model of the collapse+fire damage which approximately matches the actual fall. According to the model the supports buckle from the fire damage around the 7th floor and once that happens, yeah, 40 stories is going to fall pretty fast.
Did you actually watch the video I linked? It contains both NIST models.
NIST’s model of the collapse+fire damage which approximately matches the actual fall.
Why does NIST’s model end right at the beginning of the collapse? Even in the first few seconds that the model portrays you can already see discrepancies in the way the building is folding in some parts.
I read it, the table is about collapse below the roofline, not total time of collapse unless I misunderstood something.
Btw, NIST took several years to make a post facto model that would explain the collapse without explosives. They kept tweaking their model(took them years) until they came up with something that would come somewhat near the visual evidence, yet even so didn’t quite manage to do it. There were videos on the NIST page of their simulations and to me there were significant differences between the videos and the way WTC7 actually collapsed. I can no longer find the videos, the link on NIST’s webpage is misleading now.
“12. Did the NIST investigation look for evidence of the WTC towers being brought down by controlled demolition? Was the steel tested for explosives or thermite residues? The combination of thermite and sulfur (called thermate) “slices through steel like a hot knife through butter.”
NIST did not test for the residue of these compounds in the steel.”
The iconic building collapses of 9/11 were the twin towers.
As for the point about buildings collapsing by fire, there were even at the time historical cases of fires damaging fireproofed structural members: in the One Meridian Plaza fire of 1991, significant but non-total damage to structural members was observed. That One Meridian Plaza did not collapse when 7 World Trade Center did reflects the differences in the designs and in the parts of the buildings affected.
Since 9/11 was discussed the first time on OB I keep hearing this “the prior probability of a conspiracy is very low” or variations thereof. This is a totally meaningless statement, unless you can produce some actual numbers but no one made an effort to do so.
I didn’t actually say anything about my prior probability. I just said I went from a ‘pretty low’ probability of some kind of conspiracy to a slightly higher probability based on this new information.
Nonetheless, I think you are wrong to say this is a meaningless statement. I think there is a real phenomenon of ‘conspiracy theories’ which share certain features and which in my opinion tend to lead people to place unduly high probabilities on certain types of explanations for events by playing into natural biases in human thought. Because I believe in this pattern of poorly calibrated estimates, when I see a theory that fits the pattern I apply a discount factor to the arguments of people proposing it.
It is also difficult to organize and maintain a conspiracy so even independent of the effect I describe above an explanation that involves an elaborate conspiracy has a lower prior than an explanation that does not, all else being equal. It is not necessary for this to be quantified for it to be meaningful, a qualitative use of priors is still a useful aid to reasoning.
One reason the new information I mentioned above raised my estimate is that it overcame one major problem I have with the conspiracy theory explanations which is lack of a motive that I could understand. Given my broader understanding of geo-politics the disappearance of a large quantity of physical gold seems like a strong motive for some kind of government cover-up and a clearer motive for co-conspirators (government or otherwise) in the attack.
No. I was very specific on purpose pinpointing exactly one comment.
I really am not inclined to argue about intended communication issues because that simply isn’t a productive (or even amusing use of time) so I’m going to only address this issue once. You wrote:
Hahahahahaha. Ok I’ll bite. Yes, I was thinking about 9/11 related posts. But the
fact that I couldn’t convince anyone doesn’t bother me that much. What bothers me > is that just pointing to evidence that contradicts the established view on 9/11 here > is downvoted. See the following comment:
You used the phrase “9/11 related posts” and then made a generalization about posts with “evidence.” In standard discourse this would likely have been read as talking about a general problem and giving a specific example of that. This seems further supported by the fact that your previous comment had the remark that
I’ve also witnessed a certain disrespect for dissenters, comments that
contradicted certain established views where downvoted
There may be a communication issue here. Let me ask then, are you only arguing that this single post in question was downvoted when it should not have been?
if you listened to the eye-witness testimony in question, the guy was trapped
inside the building because the stairs were blown away and the electricity was
turned off(so he couldn’t use the elevator). If you claim that his testimony is wrong > you would have to explain why he was trapped inside the building and btw this
happened before any of the main towers collapsed so you can’t say “he was in
shock” or what not.
I’m a bit confused by this claim. Trapped inside the building works perfectly well after the airplane crash without any explosion from a pre-planted device. Regarding your last remark, do you mean to imply that someone trapped without electricity in a burning building isn’t going to have any shock issues or issues contributing to reliability simply because the building hasn’t collapsed?
Ohhhh, please, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suppressing here is a > whole list of definitions. If a comment gets downvoted to −3 it no longer appears on > the comment page(you have to specifically click to make it appear again). If that is > not supression we are speaking a different language here.
Well, it seems empirically that a lot of people click through on this thread (most obviously one can look at the karma scores within this subthread to verify that people are clicking through). We may in this case be speaking different languages in that I have trouble seeing how requiring an extra click constitutes suppression. The linked to dictionary seems to agree with me (with the usual caveats about dictionaries being descriptive not proscriptive objects).
The definitions listed are:
1 : to put down by authority or force : subdue
Doesn’t seem relevant.
2 : to keep from public knowledge: as a : to keep secret b : to stop or prohibit the
publication or revelation of
2b could very weakly maybe apply if you stretched it (is requiring an extra click prohibiting publication? I’d think not).
3 a : to exclude from consciousness b : to keep from giving vent to
Irrelevant. 4,5,6 are also irrelevant.
Finally yes, eye-witness testimonies are unreliable but this
doesn’t mean that you can discard them, that they are not evidence. So my point
still stands.
No it really doesn’t. You don’t seem to have actually responded to any of my points about why we have a downvoting system. If evidence is sufficiently weak (such as this evidence where it isn’t even obvious that it actually favors an alternative hypothesis over the currently judged as most likely hypothesis) then downgrading lets LW readers know that the comment is likely to not be useful for improving the correspondence between their map and the territory.
The remainder of your remark is contentless repetition of what you’ve already said.
There may be a communication issue here. Let me ask then, are you only arguing that this single post in question was downvoted when it should not have been?
No. I’m arguing that this is a general problem. However in order to make my point I chose one specific comment which hopefully portrays the problem very clearly. What could be better than a comment whose only content is a link to outside evidence? If the comment contained personal arguments I would have a much harder time defending it.
I’m a bit confused by this claim. Trapped inside the building works perfectly well after the airplane crash without any explosion from a pre-planted device. Regarding your last remark, do you mean to imply that someone trapped without electricity in a burning building isn’t going to have any shock issues or issues contributing to reliability simply because the building hasn’t collapsed?
Ohhh, sorry, I think that I get your point now. The eye witness in question was trapped inside WTC 7 which was not hit by any plane(it is not one of the twin towers). All this happened before the collapse of either twin tower and according to the official version there was no damage to WTC7 before their collapse, only afterwards did WTC7 catch fire that lead to a later collapse of itself. I guess that was the origin of the confusion, I hope this makes it clearer. Btw, if that really was the origin of the confusion and you weren’t aware of the facts that I just cited shouldn’t this ring an alarm bell, that maybe you know less about this particular testimony than you thought you knew?
As for the definition of suppress: the original meaning was “to press down” and a synonym is “to check” which among other things means: “to restrain or diminish the action or force of ”. Other than that I don’t think it makes much sense to fight over definitions.
If evidence is sufficiently weak (such as this evidence where it isn’t even obvious that it actually favors an alternative hypothesis over the currently judged as most likely hypothesis)
then downgrading lets LW readers know that the comment is likely to not be useful for improving the correspondence between their map and the territory.
Sure, there are cases where downvoting is justified. But when isn’t it, and how do you distinguish between these cases? That’s the hard question. And if you are downvoting evidence as opposed to normal comments you better be very sure about what you are doing.
Ok. If you are arguing about a general problem, then my remarks clearly stand even if a single other comment was poorly voted on. But, I’ve already explained why even in that individual case the voting was reasonable.
Ohhh, sorry, I think that I get your point now. The eye witness in question was
trapped inside WTC 7 which was not hit by any plane(it is not one of the twin
towers). All this happened before the collapse of either twin tower and according
to the official version there was no damage to WTC7 before their collapse, only
afterwards did WTC7 catch fire that lead to a later collapse of itself. I guess that
was the origin of the confusion, I hope this makes it clearer. Btw, if that really was > the origin of the confusion and you weren’t aware of the facts that I just cited
shouldn’t this ring an alarm bell, that maybe you know less about this particular
testimony than you thought you knew?
You have a valid point. I saw this testimony a while ago and must not have remembered it as well as I thought. If the witnesses testimony is accurate it presents problems with the standard account of events. The notion however that someone in that situation would be keeping very good track of timelines and the like isn’t at all obvious(yes less traumatic than being in one of the two towers but that’s not saying that much). Also, structural damage to WTC 7 is not by itself fatal to the standard account nor for that matter is it terribly strong evidence for conspiracy. So this doesn’t change the situation a lot.
Sure, there are cases where downvoting is justified. But when isn’t it, and how do > you distinguish between these cases? That’s the hard question. And if you are
downvoting evidence as opposed to normal comments you better be very sure
about what you are doing.
I don’t share your conviction that comments that claim to have evidence should somehow be privileged over comments that are more analytical. Moreover, even if I don’t have a perfect method for deciding when to downvote or upvote, that’s not an argument against any specific downvote or upvote. The general rule of thumb that comments with extremely weak evidentiary issues should be downvoted is not an unreasonable standard. Moreover, given how little this matters, the notion that I must “better be very sure” simply doesn’t hold. People can easily click through to read a comment if they want to. You seem to be taking the karma system much more seriously than necessary.
Downvoting you isn’t committing scientific fraud. That sort of hyperbolic claim is why you are getting downvoted. You got downvoted repeatedly because you made claims that were demonstrably extremely unlikely and your attempts to marshal evidence for your claims relied on very poor fact checking. Downvoting for such reasons isn’t “scientific fraud.”
Moreover, science isn’t the process of comments threads. Even in as an educated/intelligent group as the commentators on LessWrong, these are still blog comments threads. Science is not conducted in blog comments threads. We can update our probability estimates in threads and even discuss interesting or new ideas. But to call this science is to vastly overestimate the gravity of these discussion threads. Maybe lightening up might help matters slightly.
Sorry, but I didn’t say that.
You decided to go off on an ad hominem attack which I will simply ignore with the exception of remarking that the one comment of mine I mentioned above was very specific and didn’t contain a single word of mine but just a link which pointed directly to prima-facie evidence, edits were added later and marked as such.
Science is not what happens inside the lab. If you are suppressing evidence(and downvoting is a form of suppression) you are not being scientific. It’s as simple as that.
You’re not having a good day today.
And you’re getting even more off-topic—it doesn’t matter what you call it, you have to either make your case on an object level or shut up. Complaining that people aren’t listening to you doesn’t work.
Wikipedia lists several types of ad hominems among them is the Ad hominem abusive. “involve pointing out factual but ostensible character flaws or actions which are irrelevant to the opponent’s argument.”
In this sense I meant ad hominem attack. Edit: note that I didn’t write ad hominem argument.
Yes, but there’s no ad hominem in explaining to someone that historical comments were downvoted because of specific flaws. Incidentally, the ad hominem abusive is only a fallacy in the limited sense that there’s an implicit “and therefore the argument is wrong” attached to it. That’s more due to general human convention. Consider for example if one said to someone “you’re a drunk idiot who couldn’t factor a 2 digit integer given a caculator and your statement X is correct.” That would be an ad hominem abusive but wouldn’t in any way be an ad hominem in a logically rude fashion. So this seems to miss the point at two levels.
Sigh, I’ll have to quote myself again: “involve pointing out factual but ostensible character flaws or actions which are irrelevant to the opponent’s argument.”(emphasis mine)
It is ad hominem because it is completely irrelevant to my arguments. I might have been downvoted years ago by making wrong claims about Teddy Bear, so what? Why would you want to bring that up in a discussion?
How come you even knew about my other comments in the past? Is it because you are a long time member here and remember past discussions and remember what I wrote in them? Maybe this is what caused you to argue based on the past history, based on what you knew about me and my past comments instead of sticking to the present comment and facts stated therein. If you argued based on what you knew about me, e.g. past comments, other than the one that was specifically mentioned this constitutes an ad hominem in the latin sense (meaning directed towards the person). You didn’t manage to stick to what was written but brought in your personal judgment about me about other comments I have written in the past. And that is totally irrelevant to my point. I’ve never claimed that all my comments in the past were correct. So other comments of mine in the past, be they correct or wrong are totally irrelevant to the point in question. I was very careful in choosing one specific comment which doesn’t even contain a single word of mine. I said this 3 times at least now. I was making my point with this comment, why couldn’t you stick to that one? We are now writing a lot of words that have nothing to do with my argument.
Btw, to make it simpler imagine that the Roland of today is another person than the Roland who wrote the past comments, lets call him “RolandPast”. Now I’ll paraphrase you: “RolandPast got downvoted repeatedly because RolandPast made claims that were demonstrably extremely unlikely and hist attempts to marshal evidence for his claims relied on very poor fact checking. Downvoting for such reasons isn’t “scientific fraud.”
I hope this makes things clearer. If not, I’ll paraphrase again this time using “X”:
“X got downvoted repeatedly because X made claims that were demonstrably extremely unlikely and his attempts to marshal evidence for hist claims relied on very poor fact checking. Downvoting for such reasons isn’t “scientific fraud.”
No, on the contrary, read the wikipedia section.: “This tactic is logically fallacious because insults and even true negative facts about the opponent’s personal character have nothing to do with the logical merits of the opponent’s arguments or assertions.”
So it seems that you are the one who missed it in two levels at least.
The ad hominem abusive would be a problem if I were trying to explain why your comment as you’ve said it is wrong. That’s not what has been happening. What has happened is that I’ve explained that your comments were downvoted because they were wrong.
Right. And if Roland made a claim about why RolandPast got downvoted then giving an alternative explanation for why RolandPast gotdownvoted (essentially exactly what you said above) isn’t an ad hominem of any form.
I just finished writing a long reply were I address the ad hominem claim:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/218/what_is_missing_from_rationality/1xn4
I’m answering the comments, please stop reading if you consider it off-topic.
If you want people to believe your claims, you’re going about it the wrong way. Everyone would have believed the Wright brothers had built a successful heavier-than-air plane* if they just brought it to DC and buzzed the Mall, but that’s not what they did.
* No lie, I actually have this photograph as my desktop right now.
Is it possible that I’m not parsing what you’ve said correctly?
You wrote “if you downvote any evidence in support of my theory(edit: and that contradicts your theory) you are committing scientific fraud.” When I replied that edit was not yet present but it doesn’t actually add any information (since were on LessWrong I’m not going to bother dealing with the basic Bayesianism at work). So, can you explain how the statement ” “if you downvote any evidence in support of my theory you are committing scientific fraud.” is not a claim that downvoting you is committing scientific fraud?
I’m also curious where you think I engaged in an ad hominem attack. I don’t see it above.
I’m also curious as to how you classify downvoting as suppressing evidence. If I linked to a claimed set of pages about UFOs and psi that relied on personal evidence would downvoting that claim constitute “suppressing evidence”? If not, why not? If it would, is there any circumstance where you consider downvoting to be acceptable when the comment has non-spam content? If so, where do you draw the line and how?
You incidentally seem to be confusing science with rationality. They are not the same thing. Roughly speaking, science is a set of restricted methodologies that happens to include a lot of aspects of rationality. Rationality is what happens in that broader context. (Frankly, the “science is not what happens inside the lab” meme is annoying in that it oversimplifies a lot of very complicated stuff. Aside from the valid points it makes about how to reason, it ignores the fact that lots of even what is traditionally labeled science happens outside lab environments (this seems to be part of a general problem on LW of using physics as the representative for science as a whole.))
I would like to argue based on the specific comment of mine that I linked to in the comment above. As I said before this comment didn’t contain a single word of mine but just a video with eye-witness testimony. In my eyes, this is evidence. Not every comment of mine I regard as evidence, but this specific one, yes, and some others where evidence is linked(which might be scientific articles, pictures, videos, audios, etc...) Again, not every comment I write on LW is evidence but some are because they contain links to hard facts. If you downvote one of those, you are suppressing evidence. So I never made the point that downvoting me is fraud, but downvoting evidence is and some comments are or contain links to evidence, specifically the one I mentioned in my previous comment.
Regarding the ad hominem attack:
In my previous comment I had linked to one, exactly one comment that didn’t contain a single word of mine(except in the edits that were added later and clearly marked as such). Instead of basing your arguments on what I wrote you go onto a general attack where you accuse me of making shaky claims in my past comments. That I consider ad hominem. Please now don’t lets get started with a long enumeration of comments and pointing out supposed mistakes in each of them. I’m not bothering wasting time on it.
I think it is ok to downvote when the content of the comment is wrong because it breaks certain rules of rationality like ad hominem attacks or self-contradictory comments, etc… It becomes hard if the comment is just a link to some outside evidence, lets say an eye-witness testimony. What then? Should you downvote based on the supposition that the testimony is probably wrong or forged? It’s a tough call, I don’t know if I can give a fully general answer in one comment and I won’t even try to do so. I think this is one topic that deserves to be discussed in a top level post. Btw, I’m not planning to do so.
The history of flight is one of Eliezer’s preferred themes here, so imagine if LW was a community in Europe in the beginning of the 20th century and there is one post by Lord Kelvin claiming “No balloon and no aeroplane will ever be practically successful.”. One guy has the audacity to link to an eye-witness testimony in his comment: “I saw two bicycle mechanics in the USA flying in a self-made airplane.” Is this evidence or not? Would it be justified to downvote this comment into oblivion?
In 1906, skeptics in the European aviation community had converted the press to an anti-Wright brothers stance. European newspapers, especially in France, were openly derisive, calling them bluffeurs (bluffers).
What is science? This is a never ending discussion. I was thinking primarily in terms of belief update via evidence. I guess regardless of your definition of science you will agree that suppressing evidence is anti-scientific. Am I right?
Ok. There may be a minor miscomunication here. When I made my comment about why you were downvoted on some of your comments regarding 9/11 I was talking about the general history of comments not this specific comment. This made sense to me given that the context you seemed to be talking about was the general pattern of 9/11 comments you made being downvoted in the past.
Regarding eyewitness testimony, I believe that this has already been explained to you (although a click glance through doesn’t find the relevant comments) but eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable. This is especially the case in extreme situations. (I’m actually surprised there isn’t something in any of the sequences specifically devoted to this issue.) See This article for a short discussion of many of the issues in the context of criminal trials. Part of the point you seem to be possibly using a non-standard definition of suppression. Downvoting a comment doesn’t suppress anything in the sense that we normally use that term for (destroying evidence, refusing to publish results you don’t like etc.) . It simply sends a signal to the LessWrong readers that reading the statement is not likely to do anything useful and so that they will be less likely to click through to read the remarks. And given the unreliability of eye-witnesses testimony in crisis situations, most rationalists are going to give such evidence very low reliability. So in so far as this is a signal to the LW community, it is an accurate one.
To move to the flight example, flying didn’t occur during a crisis situation. People were not claiming that the Wright Brothers flew once briefly during an earthquake or a volcanic eruption or the middle of a pitched firefight. They demonstrated it repeatedly to different people. So such evidence is in fact the more reliable sort of eye witness evidence. The evidence is not by itself at all convincing of flight (magicians can do some pretty neat stuff and even there’s also the issue of the reliability of the witnesses), but it would make me stand up and take notice. That’s a very different claim then that a single or even a large group of eyewitnesses reported hearing something which isn’t even necessarily inconsistent with the standard hypothesis.
Edit: Also regarding the ad hominem issue. I think you should reread RobinZ linked remark about what an ad hominem is. Explaining to someone why their comments were historically downvoted isn’t an ad hominem. It may make one feel uncomfortable, it may come across as condescending or patronizing. It may be deeply damaging to one’s ego. But that’s not an ad hominem attack. In this particular case, the response was an attempt at explaining why your comments have been downvoted. Interpreting that as an ad hominem attack requires some degree of abuse of the term “ad hominem.”
No. I was very specific on purpose pinpointing exactly one comment.
Yeah, I’ve read articles about it. Btw, if you listened to the eye-witness testimony in question, the guy was trapped inside the building because the stairs were blown away and the electricity was turned off(so he couldn’t use the elevator). If you claim that his testimony is wrong you would have to explain why he was trapped inside the building and btw this happened before any of the main towers collapsed so you can’t say “he was in shock” or what not. Finally yes, eye-witness testimonies are unreliable but this doesn’t mean that you can discard them, that they are not evidence. So my point still stands.
Ohhhh, please, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suppressing here is a whole list of definitions. If a comment gets downvoted to −3 it no longer appears on the comment page(you have to specifically click to make it appear again). If that is not supression we are speaking a different language here.
Are you saying this justifies actively downvoting it into oblivion? I don’t buy your argument. The real reason why it was downvoted was because it contradicts the prevailing view here. You are just rationalizing it.
Here is a comment that contradicts the prevailing view here. Seriously, there are maybe one or two other posters here who are sympathetic to your conspiracy mongering but no one agrees with Alicorn about ethics. It was at +6 (though of course it is by a woman so that’s probably why people upvoted).
Here is why your comment was voted into oblivion:
You linked to evidence that wasn’t anywhere close to the magnitude it needed to be given the extreme unlikelihood of the proposition it was marshaled to support. It is rather like linking to a video of someone recounting a religious experience or an alien abduction. It was clear from the context that you took yourself to be offering powerful evidence in favor the proposition that the 9/11 attacks were a government plot. The downvoters were telling you this wasn’t good enough evidence to justify a link and to stop wasting their time with noise.
Your past forays into this topic and subsequent inability to update when people rebut your position left people with no patience for that crap.
It was off-topic and flame bait.
You kept drawing attention to it, making sure everyone on the site saw it ensuring even more downvotes.
(Incidentally, I never bothered to downvote that particular comment)
I wouldn’t say I agree with her exactly but I disagree with her less than I disagree with the utilitarians who seem to be so common around here. I’m not sure you’re justified in your confidence about the absoluteness of disagreement with her ethics.
It was a bit of hyperbole to make my point.
I’ll admit that I just read a few words but I guess it is about philosophy and I think that people are much more willing to admit dissenting views, unlike in the realm of politics.
Is this another ad hominem?
The proposition was “Explosives were planted in the WTC.” The probability that the proposition is true is fairly high given the fact that the buildings collapsed in a manner consistent with the use of explosives. There is of course much more evidence besides this one eye witness, but lets not start another 9/11 thread.
Well, I’d rather you evaluate the comment by its contents, regardless of what other things I might believe or not. The comment was just addressing the question of explosives. Interestingly a lot of people, you included, seem to conflate the two issues, explosives implying government involvement. Why is this the case, and does it have something to do with the fact that there is so much resistance towards this proposition?
I’ve yet to see a good rebuttal. Btw, I’ve read a lot about this subject so I think I know what I’m talking about.
Eliezer wrote:
And I brought up evidence against it.
Well, it’s certainly not my fault if people want to downvote evidence.
I still put a pretty low probability on 9/11 being some kind of conspiracy but I have to admit that seeing this linked to this recently did make my head spin a bit and raised my probability estimate a little.
Whats the connection?
There have been a lot of reports recently of manipulation in the gold and silver markets and of a large gap between the notional gold that exists in the forms of various paper claims on futures markets and in the form of various kinds of unallocated deposits and in the actual physical bullion backing these claims. Most of this is still unproven but there is a fair amount of evidence that something fishy is going on. The first article is an eyewitness report of Scotiabank’s bullion vault in Canada which appears to contain much less physical gold and silver than it should based on estimates of the outstanding claims supposedly backed by holdings in that vault.
So far this has nothing to do with 9/11. The 9/11 connection is that there has apparently been a long standing claim of 9/11 ‘truthers’ that a large amount of gold and silver that was stored in a vault underneath WTC 4 (one of the buildings that collapsed without being hit by a plane) appears to be unaccounted for based on discrepancies between news reports before and after the event. I had never heard of this until a commenter on an article about the recent Scotiabank story linked to it. The bit that made me do a double take is the fact that one of the largest depositors in the WTC 4 vault was… Scotiabank.
Up to $1 billion of missing gold and silver suddenly suggests plausible motives for a conspiracy of some kind where I hadn’t really seen one before.
Forgot to add, the reason why physical Gold is disappearing everywhere worldwide is because the central banks are involved in a scheme to artificially keep the price of Gold down, read more at:
http://www.gata.org/
Yes, this is the angle that led me to the 9/11 connection. I’ve followed the ongoing global fiat currency collapse for a while. I’m new to 9/11 conspiracies. GATA have a whiff of conspiracy theory about them but I think I put a > 50% probability on at least some of their claims being true.
Just a minor correction: WTC 4 didn’t collapse, it was damaged beyond repair and demolished. The only buildings that did collapse where the twin towers and WTC 7.
You gotta be kidding me. I think the physical gold missing is not directly related to 9/11, remember the same happened in Canada, the same is happening in the London bullion market, some claim that even the gold in Fort Knox is long gone.
But if you want plausible motives for 9/11 I’ll give you a short list:
Government needed a pretext to start a never-ending war on terror, to raise military spending(after the end of the cold war a new enemy had to be created) and to pass new legislation through congress(Patriot act, etc...)
Silverstein had just recently bought the WTC complex and AFAIK it was condemned, it would have to be demolished more sooner than later. How convenient that he also made an insurance against terrorist attacks, this guy made billions from 9/11.
Yes, how convenient that someone would have insurance against terrorist attacks when that person owned a set of buildings which had been subject to a terrorist attack in the past.
Point taken! Still you asked for plausible motives and there you have one, read more about Silverstein here:
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/silverstein.html
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.
Since 9/11 was discussed the first time on OB I keep hearing this “the prior probability of a conspiracy is very low” or variations thereof. This is a totally meaningless statement, unless you can produce some actual numbers but no one made an effort to do so.
If you want to see something that can be backed up by numbers ask yourself: how many steel-frame buildings have collapsed due to fire previous to 9/11. According the official NIST report that investigated 9/11 the answer is ZERO. So what is the probability that 3 buildings collapsed in this manner in 9/11? But in spite of this people keep insisting that the prior for explosives is too low to take it into account.
Btw, again, explosives planted in the building doesn’t necessarily imply government conspiracy. Although, the fact that in the aftermath the government denied any explosives and even excluded this hypothesis from any investigation raises some interesting questions. The hypothesis was never falsified, I wonder why NIST refused to investigate it.
I’m generally sympathetic to the idea that the events behind 9/11 were insufficiently investigated, and that the full story is a bit more than the common narrative.
But I don’t see
As terribly relevant without the corresponding “how many steel-frame buildings were sprayed with massive amounts of aerosolized jet fuel and then ignited?”
Wow, posted a few minutes ago and already upvoted to 4?
WTC7 was not, yet it collapsed. It wasn’t hit by any plane. Why is this always conveniently not mentioned?
While your point here is superficially valid, the debris that hit WTC7 damaged 10-12 floors so badly that the gash was visible (according to the NIST report on WTC7). Large amounts of damage occurred to other floors. The fact that you more or less had large sections of another building dropped onto WTC7 massively damaged the structural stability such that the fires resulted in complete collapse. So for the Twin Towers you had less direct damage but lots of jet fuel, and for WTC7 you had large segments of a building fall onto it.
I’m also somewhat puzzled by how 9/11 Truthers like to point to the collapse of WTC7 so much. I would think that one would want to argue that the destruction of WTC7 was inadvertent. If not, you need to explain why the conspiracy bothered bringing down a much smaller, not very well-known building. Thus for example, the standard conspiratorial explanation of the government creating 9/11 fails massively to explain this. The only conspiracy explanation I’ve seen that remotely explain this tries to claim that the entire plot was designed to get rid of WTC7 since it had the SEC offices investigating Worldcom and ENRON. I don’t think I need to explain in detail why that seems unlikely.
There seems to be a problem going on here similar to the standard problem with creationists. They argue in the form “Anomaly → Evolution wrong → creationism.” There’s both a false dichotomy here and a general failure to properly apply Bayes’ theorem.
There were also fires in WTC7 that the Fire Department didn’t even attempt combat. They pretty much just let them burn for like six hours.
Also, the fire department knew building 7 was going to collapse. They pulled all their people away from building to protect them after they noticed signs of structural failure and there are a bunch of accounts from firefighters to this effect.
As usual, this is all accessible by google.
Incorrect. There were damages, but none to the central supporting columns. Even after accounting for the fires they were not enough to explain the free fall speed collapse.
Slow down here. I’m trying to work forwards from the evidence and for all that I know it points to controlled demolition as the only plausible explanation and falsifies the theory of collapse by fire and structural damage. You again are conflating two or more separate questions: how did it collapse and who did it and for what reason.
If you want more science about the subject here is a good link: http://www.journalof911studies.com/
I think you are falling victim to a subtle reasoning error here. Imagine a doctor is asked to examine a dead body and determine the cause of death. He observes almost certainly fatal injuries that are consistent with those caused by a bullet and reasonably concludes the man was shot.
If he is then informed that a grenade went off in the vicinity of the man and he fell to the ground shortly afterwards he will conclude that in fact the man was probably killed by shrapnel, even if the injury looks more like injuries he has previously observed from gunshots than from shrapnel.
I recognize that you are claiming the injuries look much more like the injuries you would expect from a bullet than they do the injuries you would expect from shrapnel but I think it is important for you to consider that the fact that the grenade is known to have gone off nearby just before the man fell to the ground is very relevant to the probabilities you assign to the two possible explanations. It is not appropriate merely to ‘work forwards from the evidence’ without acknowledging this fact.
Hahaha, I think it is funny that every comment against the 9/11 orthodoxy is voted down while every comment in favor of it is voted up, is it possible that the audience is a bit biased here?
But on to your point.
First I think the example is a bit misleading because in the reader’s mental model a grenade will cause death in a manner similar with the firing of bullets. Not so in the case of 9/11, for all that is known, a building sustaining some amount of structural damage and fire will not collapse the way WTC7 did, which is why from the start you should place a higher probability on explosives being involved.
But back to your example: A man is dead after a grenade exploded in his vicinity. His wounds are consistent with bullet wounds which usually look different that shrapnel wounds. Now, what killed the man, was it the grenade or bullets(he could have been fired at when the grenade went off). One way to distinguish the causes of death would be to examine the body for bullets or shrapnel. We might find one or the other or even both. If you only find shrapnel you falsify the hypothesis of death-by-gun, if on the other hand you only find bullets it’s the other hypothesis that is falsified.
I assume you accept that the buildings collapsed in a manner consistent with the use of explosives. This already nullifies one argument that was repeated several times here on LW, that the prior for explosives is too low to even be seriously considered. Now this is of course not enough to prove that it were explosives and here is where additional evidence has to come in like:
can structural damage(e.g. as happened in 9/11 to WTC7) and fire explain a collapse in almost free fall speed? No
were there eye-witness testimonies of explosions? Yes, lots of them.
is there evidence for explosives in the rubble/dust? Yes. As a side note, NIST didn’t even bother to look for this evidence:
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm
“12. Did the NIST investigation look for evidence of the WTC towers being brought down by controlled demolition? Was the steel tested for explosives or thermite residues? The combination of thermite and sulfur (called thermate) “slices through steel like a hot knife through butter.”
NIST did not test for the residue of these compounds in the steel.”
The fact that a grenade went off is part of the evidence.
Yes, to the extent of my limited knowledge of the issue. Part of my problem judging the evidence (and I think this affects many people) is that I feel like a doctor who has seen lots of gunshot wounds but no shrapnel wounds. I have seen many videos of buildings collapsing due to a controlled demolition and to the best of my layman’s ability to judge they look similar to the 9/11 footage. I have never seen any other footage of a building being hit by a large jet airliner with a full fuel load.
You are correct that there was likely not that much damage to the central columns. However, damage may have occurred and other damage to the south side may have contributed. See in particular pages L-34 and L-35 of the NIST progress report: http://wtc.nist.gov/progress_report_june_04/appendixl.pdf Moreover, claims of collapse at free fall speeds for both the WTC7 and the main towers are both false. In the case of the WTC7, the east penthouse started collapsing a full 6 seconds before the rest of the building.
As to your claim that I’m “conflating two or more separate questions” the questions are fundamentally interrelated. If you are trying to claim that WTC7 was brought down by controlled explosives, that claim becomes fundamentally less likely if you don’t have a plausible motive for that.
I’m going to have to make a comparison to the creationists again who love to make “peer reviewed journals” (there are I think in the US now at least 2 such entities). Constructing y journals does not make something science. Making journals of people who agree with a fringe belief and then claiming peer review doesn’t make that peer reviewed science. And the claim that they had to do so because the mean editors and reviewers at other journals wouldn’t let them play is textbook from the ID movement. Now, of course, making a claim that is similar in form to that made by someone else doesn’t mean they share the same truth value. But it should raise a red flag. The fact that all the editors are people who are convinced that the standard account must be false also should raise a red flag.
I actually think most people don’t understand how hard it is to bring down a building the size of WTC7 (much less the towers!) with demolition explosives. Any evidence put forward to show that it would be unlikely for the buildings to collapse due to fire and structural damage is also evidence for how hard it is to implode them with explosives. It’s not like the movies where the secret agent can go in with three detonators the size of baseballs that stick to the walls, we’re talking days, even weeks of preparation with a full crew drilling into support columns, loading them with dynamite, RDX, connecting blasting caps, and wiring the whole thing up.
Here’s an account of what it took to demolish a steel structure building 300 feet shorter than WTC7 (but 300,000 square feet larger in total floor space):
There are plenty of videos of the collapse, so I’ll let you watch and decide for yourself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv7BImVvEyk
Your video is missing the 6 seconds in question. Oranges?
More in this comment:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/218/what_is_missing_from_rationality/1y36
I think I missed your point before.
The east penthouse collapsed 6 seconds earlier. So what? The relevant question is how much time did the entire building take to collapse, the time the roofline took to hit the floor? The only way it could be so fast is if all the supporting columns were destroyed. I don’t see how the collapse of the penthouse is relevant to that. It would only be relevant if said collapse would destroy the supporting columns but then we would have seen that effect much earlier. What we see is the penthouse collapsing but the building still standing still.
Uhh.
JoshuaZ:
Roland:
Do you not see why the fact that your video doesn’t contain the penthouse collapse because of angle or timing problematic in this context? Putting aside the fast rate of collapse once the rest of the building is going down the fact that there is visible evidence of the structural integrity of the building failing before the whole thing comes down is very strong evidence against a controlled demolition.
Even in a controlled demolition explosive charges go off before the building comes down and already start doing structural damage, if you watched some videos(there are plenty on youtube) you will see for yourself.
Yes, there was some damage done to the building by falling debris and fire which of course was before the collapse and no one is denying this. But the key is: what kind of structural damage would be necessary for the whole building to collapse at approximately free-fall speed(counting from the moment the rooftop starts moving down)? For that to happen all supporting columns underneath would have to be destroyed. For this to happen in a random fashion through fires or whatever is highly unlikely. Btw, if you watch the NIST videos again you will see that their model is not convincing exactly because not all supporting columns are destroyed and you see the building folding instead of coming down vertically and yes, this is the case in both models of NIST.
The following video has both models: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuyZJl9YleY
So the natural conclusion from 3. is that at least the hypothesis of explosives being planted in the building should have been examined by NIST, why wasn’t it done?
Just to reiterate my point which I suspect was long lost in the discussion: I think the controlled demolition hypothesis is the most likely given the facts(regardless if there was a government conspiracy or not). Is it the only possible explanation? No. But I didn’t see any explanation that is consistent with the evidence and at the same time the use of explosives was never falsified, on the contrary NIST simply refused to even examine the rubble/dust for evidence thereof.
I think the model that includes the fire damage basically matches what I see in the video. It might not be perfect, but it is good enough for government work. As discussed before, I think the priors for controlled demolition are insanely low and that the the video evidence is consistent with NIST’s explanation. If some other commenter wants to arbitrate, that’d be fine (though please look at past exchanges on this topic, not just this thread), but otherwise I’m done. I think my position is clear and convincing to anyone reading this exchange (if such people disagree they’re welcome to ask me anything) and so much so that I’m comfortable leaving roland the last word…
You are right that that sort of collapse would require all the supporting columns to fail simultaneously, but that is not a surprising event. Large building collapses are not intuitive. Once a building starts to collapse, it introduces major vibrations and other forces that could, under the right circumstances, destroy all the supporting columns simultaneously, especially if they’d already been weakened by high temperatures.
Is this the Phlogiston theory of building collapse?
Sigh. I’m not going to bother reposting the entire thing so I’ll just link:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/is/fake_causality/1vy8
Phlogiston made specific testable predictions about mass and combustion. Phlogiston theory was thrown out not because it was useless but because it was wrong. In this respect, phlogiston was good science.
(The fact that what you said isn’t a substantive reply to jimrandomh’s remark is a separate issue)
1:09 in: ”...but by 5:20 p.m. most of the fires had been extinguished.”
Citation needed.
Less likely? I think the claim can be stated and proven independently of the motive. A motive certainly will give it more plausibility but not necessarily make it more likely in a Bayesian way. I’m trying to answer a question of how, whereas the motive would be relevant to a question of why, for what reason.
JFK was assassinated and it is certainly possible to reconstruct how it happened: how many bullets where fired, from which angles, etc… The next question would be, who did it, for what reason, etc...
Second, you seem to be operating under the assumption that if the plane attacks were executed by terrorists they couldn’t also have planted explosives?
On the contrary, motive is a perfectly relevant Bayesian modifier. I’m also not sure what you mean by saying that the motive can make something more plausible but not necessarily more likely. What is plausibility if not a metric of likelyhood given the evidence?
And they would have done so when exactly? Moreover, why bother? The entire success of using planes in this way is that you don’t need to bother with bombs in your target. The planes themselves do the work. Setting explosives makes the plan for more complicated with little gain.
Person X drops down dead with a perforation of his head. Claim: he was killed by a bullet. This can be examined independently of the question: Who had a motive to do so? Do you agree that it would be wrongheaded to start the investigation with: X was a well known and popular person and so no one would have a motive to kill X therefore the claim of death by bullet is extremely unlikely and we shouldn’t even bother investing much time in its investigation.
That’s a really bad analogy with multiple problems: First, stray bullets exist. Second, insane people shooting at random individuals exist. Third, the assumption that no would have a motivation to kill the person in question is an incredibly strong one. Moreover, even in that situation, if you did have a very high confidence that no one would deliberately shoot the individual, that would in fact reduce the confidence value that the person had been killed by a gunshot since it reduces the probability of certain gun-shot hypotheses being correct. You might think it doesn’t reduce it by enough to matter but it can’t no alter it if the presence of motivations would increase the probability. Conservation of evidence and all that.
Moreover, the notion you’ve constructed of not even bothering to investigate the hypothesis is a strawman. No one has said that alternate investigation might not have made sense at one point. But it simply isn’t a useful tool at this point. To extend your analogy, slightly differently, if the doctors all say that the person died from a random piece of shrapnel and have a lot of evidence for that claim (including videos of the shrapnel impact) then at a certain point it isn’t useful to spend resources investigating the bullet hypothesis. If you can’t construct a plausible motive for the shooter that becomes yet another reason to reduce confidence in the (already low) probability assigned to the bullet hypothesis.
Eliezer managed to write much more eloquently what I’m trying to say:
In the art of rationality there is a discipline of closeness-to-the-issue—trying to observe evidence that is as near to the original question as possible, so that it screens off as many other arguments as possible.
The question in this case is: “Were explosives planted in WTC7?”.
How much explosive charge would it take to cause the failure observed? Where would it have to be installed? How many hours would that take, and how many workers? How many people would have to be displaced so as not to witness the building being prepared to blow? Where did the explosives come from? Who paid for them? Who delivered them, and to whom, where? Why would the project be timed to go on September 11th? Why would the denotation of the explosives be delayed to seven hours after the debris struck the building? Why didn’t the fire interfere with the operation of the explosives? How much noise would the explosives make? How quickly would the building collapse after the explosion?
Even if you think the official story is not well supported, I have to say it stacks up positively magnificently compared to the building-implosion theory.
In the art of rationality there is a discipline of closeness-to-the-issue—trying to observe evidence that is as near to the original question as possible, so that it screens off as many other arguments as possible.
It seems you have ignored my queries. In the spirit of staying as close to the original question as possible, however, I shall withdraw “Why would the project be timed to go on September 11th?” and “Why would the denotation of the explosives be delayed to seven hours after the debris struck the building?”, and ask again:
How much explosive charge would it take to cause the failure observed?
Where would it have to be installed?
How many hours would that take, and how many workers?
How many people would have to be displaced so as not to witness the building being prepared to blow?
Where did the explosives come from?
Who paid for them?
Who delivered them, and to whom, where?
Why didn’t the fire interfere with the operation of the explosives?
How much noise would the explosives make?
How quickly would the building collapse after the explosion?
And how did They (whoever They are) get all of those presumably well-intentioned workers to keep quiet, before and after the operation?
Quoting myself again for the 3rd time:
Maybe I should have emphasized “screens off as many other arguments as possible”. You have a made a list of such arguments/questions. Mind you, they are all worth investigating but I’m screening them off the key question, namely: “Were explosives planted in WTC7?” or “What caused WTC7 to collapse”(hat tip to Morendil).
Look at the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79sJ1bMR6VQ
Do you agree that this was a controlled demolition? Do you agree that you can make this statement without having any of your listed questions answered? If yes, you can then proceed to ask your previous list of questions:
How much explosive charge would it take to cause the failure observed?
Where would it have to be installed?
How many hours would that take, and how many workers?
How many people would have to be displaced so as not to witness the building being prepared to blow?
Where did the explosives come from?
Who paid for them?
Who delivered them, and to whom, where?
Why didn’t the fire interfere with the operation of the explosives?
How much noise would the explosives make?
How quickly would the building collapse after the explosion?
That video was pretty awesome, actually—a superb job of imploding a thirty-story building (the Landmark Tower in Fort Worth, Texas, March 18, 2006). And did you hear the noise of those explosive charges, and see those bright flashes as they detonated—it was most distinct!
...wait.
Edit: Here’s another camera angle on the Landmark Tower, I believe.
Someone pointed this out a while ago and so the truthers decided that the buildings were brought down by thermite. Someone then pointed out that thermite can’t make horizontal cuts and that’s how the truthers figured out the government used nanothermite.
And so, small concession after small concession, nothing changes...
Roland, sorry to address you again after I disengaged. I don’t want to reenter the argument but I am curious: What do you believe was used to bring down the building? Presumably not thermite since you put all that effort into getting us to watch that video of the guy who heard an explosion…
No. Fool. They got hit by freaking planes. I saw it live on TV. You’re just WRONG and RIDICULOUSLY SO. It doesn’t matter which person you signal affiliation with. Or which works you link to. You’re still wrong.
Aside from the fact that ata is right and WTC7 was actually brought down from fires and structural damage caused by the falling tower, not the airplanes themselves, this strikes me as a reasonable response to persistent and uncorrectable wrongness. Do people disagree? If so, what is the appropriate response?
WTC7 was not one of the buildings that got hit by a plane.
(Lest anyone misinterpret my motives… I’m just correcting a statement of fact. I am absolutely not defending the claim that any of them were brought down by explosives, which I do not believe.)
Calculated time for the building to collapse by NIST models were similar in magnitude to observations.
Edit: Page 85 in the document, “Table 3-1.” Says “43″ as the page number in lower right corner.
I found the NIST wireframe model videos on youtube, with a comparison to the real collapse:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuyZJl9YleY
EDIT: Interestingly the NIST models only show the initial phase of the collapse before ending abruptly but nevertheless there already are significant discrepancies with the actual collapse, and yes, they were the same way on NIST’s webpage were I first saw them a while ago but can no longer find them.
According to this video the model your video is comparing to the real collapse is is NISTs guess at what would have happened without the fire damage (poor scholarship which reflects on all the other truther claims) The second model in the clip I just linked to shows (according to the video) NIST’s model of the collapse+fire damage which approximately matches the actual fall. According to the model the supports buckle from the fire damage around the 7th floor and once that happens, yeah, 40 stories is going to fall pretty fast.
Did you actually watch the video I linked? It contains both NIST models.
Why does NIST’s model end right at the beginning of the collapse? Even in the first few seconds that the model portrays you can already see discrepancies in the way the building is folding in some parts.
I read it, the table is about collapse below the roofline, not total time of collapse unless I misunderstood something.
Btw, NIST took several years to make a post facto model that would explain the collapse without explosives. They kept tweaking their model(took them years) until they came up with something that would come somewhat near the visual evidence, yet even so didn’t quite manage to do it. There were videos on the NIST page of their simulations and to me there were significant differences between the videos and the way WTC7 actually collapsed. I can no longer find the videos, the link on NIST’s webpage is misleading now.
For a more thorough debunking of the NIST report:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFpbZ-aLDLY
There is certainly more material on the web.
And the hard question remains, why didn’t NIST falsify the explosives hypothesis by simply looking for residues in the dust/rubble?
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm
“12. Did the NIST investigation look for evidence of the WTC towers being brought down by controlled demolition? Was the steel tested for explosives or thermite residues? The combination of thermite and sulfur (called thermate) “slices through steel like a hot knife through butter.”
NIST did not test for the residue of these compounds in the steel.”
Two reasons:
The natural assumption is that the collapses are related. (Obligatory xkcd reference to amuse the lurkers.)
The iconic building collapses of 9/11 were the twin towers.
As for the point about buildings collapsing by fire, there were even at the time historical cases of fires damaging fireproofed structural members: in the One Meridian Plaza fire of 1991, significant but non-total damage to structural members was observed. That One Meridian Plaza did not collapse when 7 World Trade Center did reflects the differences in the designs and in the parts of the buildings affected.
3. I don’t know about you but I’m on Silverstein’s payroll.
I didn’t actually say anything about my prior probability. I just said I went from a ‘pretty low’ probability of some kind of conspiracy to a slightly higher probability based on this new information.
Nonetheless, I think you are wrong to say this is a meaningless statement. I think there is a real phenomenon of ‘conspiracy theories’ which share certain features and which in my opinion tend to lead people to place unduly high probabilities on certain types of explanations for events by playing into natural biases in human thought. Because I believe in this pattern of poorly calibrated estimates, when I see a theory that fits the pattern I apply a discount factor to the arguments of people proposing it.
It is also difficult to organize and maintain a conspiracy so even independent of the effect I describe above an explanation that involves an elaborate conspiracy has a lower prior than an explanation that does not, all else being equal. It is not necessary for this to be quantified for it to be meaningful, a qualitative use of priors is still a useful aid to reasoning.
One reason the new information I mentioned above raised my estimate is that it overcame one major problem I have with the conspiracy theory explanations which is lack of a motive that I could understand. Given my broader understanding of geo-politics the disappearance of a large quantity of physical gold seems like a strong motive for some kind of government cover-up and a clearer motive for co-conspirators (government or otherwise) in the attack.
I really am not inclined to argue about intended communication issues because that simply isn’t a productive (or even amusing use of time) so I’m going to only address this issue once. You wrote:
You used the phrase “9/11 related posts” and then made a generalization about posts with “evidence.” In standard discourse this would likely have been read as talking about a general problem and giving a specific example of that. This seems further supported by the fact that your previous comment had the remark that
There may be a communication issue here. Let me ask then, are you only arguing that this single post in question was downvoted when it should not have been?
I’m a bit confused by this claim. Trapped inside the building works perfectly well after the airplane crash without any explosion from a pre-planted device. Regarding your last remark, do you mean to imply that someone trapped without electricity in a burning building isn’t going to have any shock issues or issues contributing to reliability simply because the building hasn’t collapsed?
Well, it seems empirically that a lot of people click through on this thread (most obviously one can look at the karma scores within this subthread to verify that people are clicking through). We may in this case be speaking different languages in that I have trouble seeing how requiring an extra click constitutes suppression. The linked to dictionary seems to agree with me (with the usual caveats about dictionaries being descriptive not proscriptive objects).
The definitions listed are:
Doesn’t seem relevant.
2b could very weakly maybe apply if you stretched it (is requiring an extra click prohibiting publication? I’d think not).
Irrelevant. 4,5,6 are also irrelevant.
No it really doesn’t. You don’t seem to have actually responded to any of my points about why we have a downvoting system. If evidence is sufficiently weak (such as this evidence where it isn’t even obvious that it actually favors an alternative hypothesis over the currently judged as most likely hypothesis) then downgrading lets LW readers know that the comment is likely to not be useful for improving the correspondence between their map and the territory.
The remainder of your remark is contentless repetition of what you’ve already said.
No. I’m arguing that this is a general problem. However in order to make my point I chose one specific comment which hopefully portrays the problem very clearly. What could be better than a comment whose only content is a link to outside evidence? If the comment contained personal arguments I would have a much harder time defending it.
Ohhh, sorry, I think that I get your point now. The eye witness in question was trapped inside WTC 7 which was not hit by any plane(it is not one of the twin towers). All this happened before the collapse of either twin tower and according to the official version there was no damage to WTC7 before their collapse, only afterwards did WTC7 catch fire that lead to a later collapse of itself. I guess that was the origin of the confusion, I hope this makes it clearer. Btw, if that really was the origin of the confusion and you weren’t aware of the facts that I just cited shouldn’t this ring an alarm bell, that maybe you know less about this particular testimony than you thought you knew?
As for the definition of suppress: the original meaning was “to press down” and a synonym is “to check” which among other things means: “to restrain or diminish the action or force of ”. Other than that I don’t think it makes much sense to fight over definitions.
I’ve shortly addressed this in the following comment: http://lesswrong.com/lw/218/what_is_missing_from_rationality/1xnz
Sure, there are cases where downvoting is justified. But when isn’t it, and how do you distinguish between these cases? That’s the hard question. And if you are downvoting evidence as opposed to normal comments you better be very sure about what you are doing.
Ok. If you are arguing about a general problem, then my remarks clearly stand even if a single other comment was poorly voted on. But, I’ve already explained why even in that individual case the voting was reasonable.
You have a valid point. I saw this testimony a while ago and must not have remembered it as well as I thought. If the witnesses testimony is accurate it presents problems with the standard account of events. The notion however that someone in that situation would be keeping very good track of timelines and the like isn’t at all obvious(yes less traumatic than being in one of the two towers but that’s not saying that much). Also, structural damage to WTC 7 is not by itself fatal to the standard account nor for that matter is it terribly strong evidence for conspiracy. So this doesn’t change the situation a lot.
I don’t share your conviction that comments that claim to have evidence should somehow be privileged over comments that are more analytical. Moreover, even if I don’t have a perfect method for deciding when to downvote or upvote, that’s not an argument against any specific downvote or upvote. The general rule of thumb that comments with extremely weak evidentiary issues should be downvoted is not an unreasonable standard. Moreover, given how little this matters, the notion that I must “better be very sure” simply doesn’t hold. People can easily click through to read a comment if they want to. You seem to be taking the karma system much more seriously than necessary.