About the Jaynes reference, I’ll have to find it again.
You’re probably thinking of Chapter 5 of Logic of Science. If I’m reading him correctly, Jaynes is arguing that while reports of ESP are evidence for ESP, they’re even stronger evidence that the reports are somehow mistaken.
But the thing about ESP is, we already have strong theoretical reasons for thinking that it doesn’t exist. Whereas the prior probability of a secret implosion of WTC7 is very low, and structural engineering is difficult enough that we can’t expect naive physical intuition to be able to tell what really happened from a nine-second YouTube clip.
Before dismissing a study as unscientific, you should be able to point to specific sections of the report and explain why you think they’re mistaken.
If I’m reading him correctly, Jaynes is arguing that while reports of ESP are evidence for ESP, they’re even stronger evidence that the reports are somehow mistaken.
I don’t have my copy of PT:LOS right here, but this doesn’t sound right to me. I would think that your prior probability for the reports being mistaken is greater than your prior for ESP. The reports provide strong evidence for a mistake, and even stronger evidence for ESP, but not strong enough to make ESP look more probable than a mistake.
I’m not a structural engineer but IMHO the collapse of WTC7 as portrayed in the video cannot be explained by the failure of one column.
I’m not a structural engineer either but I can guess why intuition built from the demolition of objects on a scale of several feet cannot apply to a skyscraper.
First, the entire column of the skyscraper should have a lot of inertia—why would it tip horizontally in one direction or another without a significant continued force to do so?
You’re probably underestimating the cohesion of the floors, one to another. Maybe they’re not like layers of cake balanced on toothpicks. Just a few internal structures connecting the floors (like concrete staircases?) make a vertical crumbling fall seem much more reasonable.
*An impact that is strong enough to break a hole in an exterior wall doesn’t just affect that wall, presumably the whole building would be agitated, shaking and wobbling at various sonic and subsonic frequencies. (Thunder during a storm is enough to cause my house to resonate and rattle the mirrors on my wall.)
I’m not saying that I would have predicted that the building would fall vertically rather than tip over. I’m just saying that I would expect that the fall of an enormous building with lots of external and internal structure to be more complex than my intuition could accommodate.
If I was worried about there being a conspiracy, and it was because the fall of this building was nagging at me, what I would do—because I know from experience this is what I do when I worry—is I would go to youtube and google “building collapse” and see if buildings typically fall in ways that I expect, and if there’s a lot of variation, etc. I would see if after watching a few buildings collapse at that scale, if my brain could extract enough information to really feel comfortable one way or another about the likelihood of identifying a ‘false’ collapse..
(Seeing what structural engineers have to say about it is not the first thing I would do, because I expect demolition models are like climate models—you have enough free parameters and undetermined assumptions to get out anything you can imagine.)
You’re probably thinking of Chapter 5 of Logic of Science. If I’m reading him correctly, Jaynes is arguing that while reports of ESP are evidence for ESP, they’re even stronger evidence that the reports are somehow mistaken.
But the thing about ESP is, we already have strong theoretical reasons for thinking that it doesn’t exist. Whereas the prior probability of a secret implosion of WTC7 is very low, and structural engineering is difficult enough that we can’t expect naive physical intuition to be able to tell what really happened from a nine-second YouTube clip.
Before dismissing a study as unscientific, you should be able to point to specific sections of the report and explain why you think they’re mistaken.
I don’t have my copy of PT:LOS right here, but this doesn’t sound right to me. I would think that your prior probability for the reports being mistaken is greater than your prior for ESP. The reports provide strong evidence for a mistake, and even stronger evidence for ESP, but not strong enough to make ESP look more probable than a mistake.
I’m not a structural engineer either but I can guess why intuition built from the demolition of objects on a scale of several feet cannot apply to a skyscraper.
First, the entire column of the skyscraper should have a lot of inertia—why would it tip horizontally in one direction or another without a significant continued force to do so?
You’re probably underestimating the cohesion of the floors, one to another. Maybe they’re not like layers of cake balanced on toothpicks. Just a few internal structures connecting the floors (like concrete staircases?) make a vertical crumbling fall seem much more reasonable.
*An impact that is strong enough to break a hole in an exterior wall doesn’t just affect that wall, presumably the whole building would be agitated, shaking and wobbling at various sonic and subsonic frequencies. (Thunder during a storm is enough to cause my house to resonate and rattle the mirrors on my wall.)
I’m not saying that I would have predicted that the building would fall vertically rather than tip over. I’m just saying that I would expect that the fall of an enormous building with lots of external and internal structure to be more complex than my intuition could accommodate.
If I was worried about there being a conspiracy, and it was because the fall of this building was nagging at me, what I would do—because I know from experience this is what I do when I worry—is I would go to youtube and google “building collapse” and see if buildings typically fall in ways that I expect, and if there’s a lot of variation, etc. I would see if after watching a few buildings collapse at that scale, if my brain could extract enough information to really feel comfortable one way or another about the likelihood of identifying a ‘false’ collapse..
(Seeing what structural engineers have to say about it is not the first thing I would do, because I expect demolition models are like climate models—you have enough free parameters and undetermined assumptions to get out anything you can imagine.)