I think the U-Haul theory was still a valuable contribution, even though it was debunked thoroughly. It honestly tried to make sense of the facts known at the time. Adam’s contributions to the case were considerable, even though he always insisted on Tom’s contributions being more important.
It’s a real horses / zebra kind of thing, though.
The situation: a hiker goes missing in an area where hikers are known to go missing (and, sadly, die).
The problem: eyewitnesses report the hiker’s truck being in one direction, then not present at all, then in another direction.
Solution 1: eyewitnesses were mistaken about whether they saw the car / what direction it was facing
Solution 2: someone stole the car, took it away for a bit, and then returned it to the trailhead
Occam’s razor requires only one additional assumption for solution 1 (eyewitnesses sometimes/often make mistakes, which is well-known, especially about something as banal about an ordinary car), whereas solution 2 requires us to postulate an entire person (or persons?) who had a motivation to take and then return the car (what? any motivation—e.g. maybe Bill was involved in the drug trade—adds more assumptions).
Let me posit Solution 3: the ranger deliberately recorded his information wrong because he didn’t want to be in trouble for not sounding the alarm about a missing hiker.
or Solution 4: the park management/police colluded together to falsify the witness reports to provide doubt to Bill dying hiking to try and reduce the number of deaths attributable to JTNP
Both Solution 3 and Solution 4 seem far less fanciful than Solution 2. Sure, Solution 5 (“Aliens!”) would be more fantastical than the u-haul one, but just because the Solution 2 doesn’t rely on us changing our understanding of our place in the world doesn’t mean it’s valuable to think about.
If Bill’s body had been discovered buried in the back yard of some drug lord, then sure, Solution 2 all of a sudden looks good. But the situation presented (missing hiker in a place where hikers have been known to get lost and die) does not require that level of attention.
I don’t deny Adam contributed more to the case than almost anyone out there, but the u-haul theory doesn’t become valuable just because it was he who postulated it.
OK, I was gonna stay out of this, but I have to call b.s. (respectfully) on your take.
Solution 1 was indeed always the most likely but I have just as much an issue with the bias towards the unexpected solution as the bias towards the mundane one when the latter does not fit the facts as known.
Your comment is a perfect example of this. Your Solution 3 sounds comfortably mundane except that it’s impossible. The ranger reported his information in real time, not after the fact. Solution 4 is likewise virtually impossible because of the timeline and the number of different agencies involved. So while they sound more plausible on the surface, they have no validity. They just sound less kooky. It contributes even less to understanding the case than the U-Haul. It’s noise.
This is the problem with arranging our thinking solely on the basis of favoring a conventional answer.
At that time we had a situation where Ewasko had not been found anywhere he’d be expected to be found, we had a ping that geographically made no sense (and that was timed suspiciously, though it turned out to be complete coincidence), and we had eyewitnesses (park employees, one of whom was tasked to find the car) who missed his car three times, and the one who said his car was turned around was absolutely adamant on this point. There was also a lot of ancillary evidence for a self-disappearance that again later turned out to be coincidental. But it was there. It wasn’t aliens, and it wasn’t really that much of an evidential reach if you knew as much about the case as I did.
So everyone else, like you, had just handwaved this all away. I had, and still have, a problem with that. So I made the honest attempt to reconcile the eyewitness fact set and put it out there—knowing full well I was going to look like an ass in so doing, even though I said right up front that this was a far-fetched idea, and it comprised about 2% of an exhaustive blog on the case which, may I add, correctly stated in another section where he was most likely to be found.
And yes, it did contribute to the case because it forced people to think of a better scenario which no one had yet done. And someone did—they posited that because of the layout of the parking area, Mimi Gorman had indeed seen (or thought she had seen) the car parked in reverse because of the angle she was viewing it coming back from Keys’ View. Better explanation that didn’t dodge the problem, which I immediately accepted. It would not have happened but for the U-Haul.
I get my back up about this a little because there’s an understandable—but in my opinion intellectually lazy—bias against a non-mundane solution because of the amount of conspiracy theory b.s. on the internet. Look, I get it. Extraordinary claims required extraordinary proof. But this was not a claim. It was simply an idea for discussion and through it, a better idea came out of it which by the way I immediately accepted as more plausible.
Now I could have said “I don’t want to look like a dummy because internet critics will jump all over it despite the years I’ve put into this case seize on this one little thing because it’s an easy smackdown” which was indeed a predictable outcome. And in retrospect I wish I had not put it out there. But at the time, not doing so felt like an act of cowardice. So I put it in the blog, heavily codiciled, and the internet did what it did. I also by the way allowed myself to look like an idiot by pretending I thought foul play was plausible—which I never did—because it’s what the family thought and I didn’t want to add to their pain suggesting Ewasko took off in case I was wrong. And of course, I was.
I think I’ve atoned for my past sins with the videos I’ve put up, which admit to my theoretical mistakes, but as it said, those mistakes built to a full understanding of the case. That’s how scientific inquiry works, and science is full of far-fetched ideas that were ridiculed but later turned out to be right. This was not, of course, one of them. But if they fit the facts I don’t think we should mock those ideas out of existence.
I think the U-Haul theory was still a valuable contribution, even though it was debunked thoroughly. It honestly tried to make sense of the facts known at the time. Adam’s contributions to the case were considerable, even though he always insisted on Tom’s contributions being more important.
It’s a real horses / zebra kind of thing, though.
The situation: a hiker goes missing in an area where hikers are known to go missing (and, sadly, die).
The problem: eyewitnesses report the hiker’s truck being in one direction, then not present at all, then in another direction.
Solution 1: eyewitnesses were mistaken about whether they saw the car / what direction it was facing
Solution 2: someone stole the car, took it away for a bit, and then returned it to the trailhead
Occam’s razor requires only one additional assumption for solution 1 (eyewitnesses sometimes/often make mistakes, which is well-known, especially about something as banal about an ordinary car), whereas solution 2 requires us to postulate an entire person (or persons?) who had a motivation to take and then return the car (what? any motivation—e.g. maybe Bill was involved in the drug trade—adds more assumptions).
Let me posit Solution 3: the ranger deliberately recorded his information wrong because he didn’t want to be in trouble for not sounding the alarm about a missing hiker.
or Solution 4: the park management/police colluded together to falsify the witness reports to provide doubt to Bill dying hiking to try and reduce the number of deaths attributable to JTNP
Both Solution 3 and Solution 4 seem far less fanciful than Solution 2. Sure, Solution 5 (“Aliens!”) would be more fantastical than the u-haul one, but just because the Solution 2 doesn’t rely on us changing our understanding of our place in the world doesn’t mean it’s valuable to think about.
If Bill’s body had been discovered buried in the back yard of some drug lord, then sure, Solution 2 all of a sudden looks good. But the situation presented (missing hiker in a place where hikers have been known to get lost and die) does not require that level of attention.
I don’t deny Adam contributed more to the case than almost anyone out there, but the u-haul theory doesn’t become valuable just because it was he who postulated it.
OK, I was gonna stay out of this, but I have to call b.s. (respectfully) on your take.
Solution 1 was indeed always the most likely but I have just as much an issue with the bias towards the unexpected solution as the bias towards the mundane one when the latter does not fit the facts as known.
Your comment is a perfect example of this. Your Solution 3 sounds comfortably mundane except that it’s impossible. The ranger reported his information in real time, not after the fact. Solution 4 is likewise virtually impossible because of the timeline and the number of different agencies involved. So while they sound more plausible on the surface, they have no validity. They just sound less kooky. It contributes even less to understanding the case than the U-Haul. It’s noise.
This is the problem with arranging our thinking solely on the basis of favoring a conventional answer.
At that time we had a situation where Ewasko had not been found anywhere he’d be expected to be found, we had a ping that geographically made no sense (and that was timed suspiciously, though it turned out to be complete coincidence), and we had eyewitnesses (park employees, one of whom was tasked to find the car) who missed his car three times, and the one who said his car was turned around was absolutely adamant on this point. There was also a lot of ancillary evidence for a self-disappearance that again later turned out to be coincidental. But it was there. It wasn’t aliens, and it wasn’t really that much of an evidential reach if you knew as much about the case as I did.
So everyone else, like you, had just handwaved this all away. I had, and still have, a problem with that. So I made the honest attempt to reconcile the eyewitness fact set and put it out there—knowing full well I was going to look like an ass in so doing, even though I said right up front that this was a far-fetched idea, and it comprised about 2% of an exhaustive blog on the case which, may I add, correctly stated in another section where he was most likely to be found.
And yes, it did contribute to the case because it forced people to think of a better scenario which no one had yet done. And someone did—they posited that because of the layout of the parking area, Mimi Gorman had indeed seen (or thought she had seen) the car parked in reverse because of the angle she was viewing it coming back from Keys’ View. Better explanation that didn’t dodge the problem, which I immediately accepted. It would not have happened but for the U-Haul.
I get my back up about this a little because there’s an understandable—but in my opinion intellectually lazy—bias against a non-mundane solution because of the amount of conspiracy theory b.s. on the internet. Look, I get it. Extraordinary claims required extraordinary proof. But this was not a claim. It was simply an idea for discussion and through it, a better idea came out of it which by the way I immediately accepted as more plausible.
Now I could have said “I don’t want to look like a dummy because internet critics will jump all over it despite the years I’ve put into this case seize on this one little thing because it’s an easy smackdown” which was indeed a predictable outcome. And in retrospect I wish I had not put it out there. But at the time, not doing so felt like an act of cowardice. So I put it in the blog, heavily codiciled, and the internet did what it did. I also by the way allowed myself to look like an idiot by pretending I thought foul play was plausible—which I never did—because it’s what the family thought and I didn’t want to add to their pain suggesting Ewasko took off in case I was wrong. And of course, I was.
I think I’ve atoned for my past sins with the videos I’ve put up, which admit to my theoretical mistakes, but as it said, those mistakes built to a full understanding of the case. That’s how scientific inquiry works, and science is full of far-fetched ideas that were ridiculed but later turned out to be right. This was not, of course, one of them. But if they fit the facts I don’t think we should mock those ideas out of existence.
Thank you for your time.
Thanks, you’re right.