Fair enough. But compare this to somebody saying that although they’re no biologist, evolution cannot in their opinion explain how all the different species came to be, and therefore studies saying otherwise are unscientific. To many people, me included, your claim doesn’t sound much more convincing.
please keep in mind that I’m not the only one, there are lots of structural engineers that don’t buy the official story. Unlike your example with evolution I’m providing a very falsifiable alternative theory, not just denying one theory without providing another scientific theory.
Also I would like to refer you to the E.T. Jaynes again he has this great example of the study with the psychic where he reasons similarly as I’m doing now, I don’t remember which chapter it was. I even wanted to write a top-level post about it because it has some very far-reaching conclusions in regard to rationality.
there are lots of structural engineers that don’t buy the official story.
If there are actual experts of the field who agree with you, then that would at least be the sort of admissible evidence I’ve been asking for the last several comments. If you had provided links to such originally, instead of trying to pass the video as evidence by itself, then I would have considered your original comment good enough as to not merit downvoting.
The Jaynes reference isn’t going to be of much use unless you can narrow down its location in the book a bit more, I’m afraid.
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.)
Kaj, are you serious? When you watch the WTC7 collapse and it’s roof staying basically horizontal during the whole process can you imagine this to happen unless all columns are destroyed at exactly the same time?
Like I said before: Damage to just one column causing such a collapse does sound a bit counter-intuitive, but then it would be hardly the first thing in physics that would be a bit counter-intuitive. If a structural engineer told me that it is possible, I’d believe him, just as I believe scientists when they tell me about the bizarreness that is quantum mechanics. Certainly the prior probability for “physics is sometimes counterintuitive” is far higher than the prior for “there was a conspiracy to cause 9/11″. Also, MatthewB’s explanation sounds quite plausible to me.
But yes, providing these sources earlier would have been good.
what about the structural engineers who say that the collapse had to be due to a controlled demolition? You seem to totally discount that. So what really seems to be going on in your mind and in those of others is that the probability “structural engineers who are on my side are right” is far greater than the probability “structural engineers who are on the other side are right”. Certainly each of us can find authorities to support our view, I was trying to argue from the basic evidence.
what about the structural engineers who say that the collapse had to be due to a controlled demolition? You seem to totally discount that.
For this whole time, I’ve been commenting on whether or not your original comment deserved being downvoted or not, not whether I believe in 9/11 theories in general. I didn’t mention the engineers that support your view, because I was responding to a comment where you implied that seeing the video should by itself convince anyone that something is up and that any report claiming otherwise is unscientific. By itself, meaning “even without the knowledge that there are engineers saying otherwise”. Yes, structural engineers saying that the collapse had to be due to a controlled demolition is pretty strong evidence, far stronger than any intuitive interpretation about a single video—which is why you should have brought them up in the beginning.
(So what is my stance on 9/11 theories in general? Undecided. The issue doesn’t really interest me enough that I’d spend time and energy researching it in the detail required to form a proper opinion. Sorry. :) )
So what is my stance on 9/11 theories in general? Undecided. The issue doesn’t really interest me enough that I’d spend time and energy researching it in the detail required to form a proper opinion.
If all you have is weak evidence, you can only end up “uncertain” if your prior says “uncertain”, that is you expect the building to have been detonated or not about equally, before taking into account the way it collapsed. Which doesn’t sound right. It seems that while evidence is weak, you should remain pretty confident that the building wasn’t detonated.
I have several (well, two) relatively intelligent, mostly rational friends who have studied 9/11 theories in detail and come to the conclusion that there might actually be a conspiracy, so I’m setting my confidence intervals somewhat wide in this matter.
It’s either strong evidence, or privileging the hypothesis. Uncertainty is half-way from disbelief to conviction, it’s not a trivial milestone. If you allow for a likelihood ratio of 10 to go either way from “uncertain”, you are already changing level of belief between 1% and 99%. This is the opposite side of this situation: if you’ve just dropped or introduced a strong piece of evidence (like recalling that you haven’t asked the details of what exactly is being claimed by the presumably reliable source), you can’t be uncertain both before and after that.
I think we might have slightly different definitions for “undecided”. I might consider a subjective belief of .95 for something not having happened as “undecided”, if the associated weight of evidence isn’t large.
Still, upon consideration, you’re right. I’ve revised my estimate from “undecided” to “don’t think there was a (malicious) conspiracy”.
For this whole time, I’ve been commenting on whether or not your original comment deserved being downvoted or not, not whether I believe in 9/11 theories in general.
Well, your comment that started all this exchange was:
The fourth is making a bold claim that contradicts scientific research, without really backing up that claim in any way.
You operate under the assumption that there is a scientific explanation(I assume by that you mean that it is a correct explanation) of the collapse based on structural damage. Further down you write:
So what is my stance on 9/11 theories in general? Undecided. The issue doesn’t really interest me enough that I’d spend time and energy researching it in the detail required to form a proper opinion.
I see a contradiction. You cannot claim to be undecided and at the same time write “The official story is supported by science.”
You operate under the assumption that there is a scientific explanation
Sigh.
I got the assumption that there is a scientific explanation from you saying that there is a study which explains (or at least claims to explain) the collapse. From the context, one could deduce that it was written by people with a science background—presumably, if it was completely unscientific and obviously written by people with no background in engineering, you wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it at all. Therefore it was presumably a scientific study.
When I say “scientific study”, I don’t mean that it would have to be correct. Obviously there is, and has always been, lots of scientific research that is outright wrong. Being scientific doesn’t mean you’re always correct, it means you employ the tools of science and therefore hopefully minimize your chances of being wrong. But if a layman says there is a study and the context implies that the study was made by people trained in the field, then that study has a higher prior probability of being correct than that same layman when he says the same study is wrong (because the layman cannot employ the scientific tools of the field that the experts are trained in). Especially if the layman in question supports his own case only by a video of an implosion and nothing else.
I see a contradiction. You cannot claim to be undecided and at the same time write “The official story is supported by science.”
The official story seems to be supported by a scientific study, but I do not have the expertise to determine whether the science in that study is actually correct.
What are you sorry about?
The fact that you seem to have spent some effort digging up material in an effort to convince me of the conspiracy point of view, but I probably won’t give most of it the attention it might deserve.
I think this makes it fairly obvious that I don’t believe it to be correct. Of course you can say “well it was presumably a study by experts so it has a high probability of being correct.” But wouldn’t that be begging the question again, since the official story is precisely what is under dispute?
presumably, if it was completely unscientific and obviously written by people with no background in engineering, you wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it at all. Therefore it was presumably a scientific study.
Well, maybe you should question your assumptions here.
You then wrote:
The fourth is making a bold claim that contradicts scientific research,
And this is where I took objection.
The fact that you seem to have spent some effort digging up material in an effort to convince me of the conspiracy point of view, but I probably won’t give most of it the attention it might deserve.
From a previous comment of yours:
that would at least be the sort of admissible evidence I’ve been asking for the last several comments.
Ok here I was assuming that you really wanted to take a closer look at the evidence.
And well, I didn’t just do it for you, but also for others reading this thread, and from the amount of downvotes there seem to be a few.
Even if you are not a structural engineer and in spite of physics often being counterintuitive, from the way this building collapses, can you tell me which columns where blown up in what order? Now consider the video of the WTC7 collapse.
Fair enough. But compare this to somebody saying that although they’re no biologist, evolution cannot in their opinion explain how all the different species came to be, and therefore studies saying otherwise are unscientific. To many people, me included, your claim doesn’t sound much more convincing.
Vladimir, Kaj,
please keep in mind that I’m not the only one, there are lots of structural engineers that don’t buy the official story. Unlike your example with evolution I’m providing a very falsifiable alternative theory, not just denying one theory without providing another scientific theory.
Also I would like to refer you to the E.T. Jaynes again he has this great example of the study with the psychic where he reasons similarly as I’m doing now, I don’t remember which chapter it was. I even wanted to write a top-level post about it because it has some very far-reaching conclusions in regard to rationality.
If there are actual experts of the field who agree with you, then that would at least be the sort of admissible evidence I’ve been asking for the last several comments. If you had provided links to such originally, instead of trying to pass the video as evidence by itself, then I would have considered your original comment good enough as to not merit downvoting.
The Jaynes reference isn’t going to be of much use unless you can narrow down its location in the book a bit more, I’m afraid.
Kaj, are you serious? When you watch the WTC7 collapse and it’s roof staying basically horizontal during the whole process can you imagine this to happen unless all columns are destroyed at exactly the same time? At least from my physical understanding of this world there is something very wrong with the official explanation.
But, I’ve taken some time to google up some videos for you:
Richard Gage Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth Alex Jones NIST Report Welding Engineer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2IVgrnb80I
Eyes Wide Shut: Gross Negligence with NIST Denial of Molten Metal on 9/11: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs_ogSbQFbM
MIT engineer Jeff King: WTC was demolished on Airplane Day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiRIdlb88tg
9/11 Blueprint for Truth presented by Architect Richard Gage, AIA(this is a 2 hours presentation): http://video.google.com.br/videoplay?docid=-8182697765360042032#
Nine Scientists Find Active Nano-thermite in 9/11 WTC Dust—April 6, 2009: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT5IOD17gN8
About the Jaynes reference, I’ll have to find it again.
I see that the downvote squad has been active, oh well. ;)
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.)
Like I said before: Damage to just one column causing such a collapse does sound a bit counter-intuitive, but then it would be hardly the first thing in physics that would be a bit counter-intuitive. If a structural engineer told me that it is possible, I’d believe him, just as I believe scientists when they tell me about the bizarreness that is quantum mechanics. Certainly the prior probability for “physics is sometimes counterintuitive” is far higher than the prior for “there was a conspiracy to cause 9/11″. Also, MatthewB’s explanation sounds quite plausible to me.
But yes, providing these sources earlier would have been good.
Kaj,
what about the structural engineers who say that the collapse had to be due to a controlled demolition? You seem to totally discount that. So what really seems to be going on in your mind and in those of others is that the probability “structural engineers who are on my side are right” is far greater than the probability “structural engineers who are on the other side are right”. Certainly each of us can find authorities to support our view, I was trying to argue from the basic evidence.
The key is that we are just operating under different basic assumptions: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1kj/the_911_metatruther_conspiracy_theory/1d3k
For this whole time, I’ve been commenting on whether or not your original comment deserved being downvoted or not, not whether I believe in 9/11 theories in general. I didn’t mention the engineers that support your view, because I was responding to a comment where you implied that seeing the video should by itself convince anyone that something is up and that any report claiming otherwise is unscientific. By itself, meaning “even without the knowledge that there are engineers saying otherwise”. Yes, structural engineers saying that the collapse had to be due to a controlled demolition is pretty strong evidence, far stronger than any intuitive interpretation about a single video—which is why you should have brought them up in the beginning.
(So what is my stance on 9/11 theories in general? Undecided. The issue doesn’t really interest me enough that I’d spend time and energy researching it in the detail required to form a proper opinion. Sorry. :) )
If all you have is weak evidence, you can only end up “uncertain” if your prior says “uncertain”, that is you expect the building to have been detonated or not about equally, before taking into account the way it collapsed. Which doesn’t sound right. It seems that while evidence is weak, you should remain pretty confident that the building wasn’t detonated.
I have several (well, two) relatively intelligent, mostly rational friends who have studied 9/11 theories in detail and come to the conclusion that there might actually be a conspiracy, so I’m setting my confidence intervals somewhat wide in this matter.
blinks
Of the “explosive in building” sort, or the “deliberately ignored intelligence” sort?
Anyone here willing to give a prior for the deliberately ignored intelligence sort of conspiracy?
I think “explosive in the building” sort, though I haven’t asked for the exact details.
It’s either strong evidence, or privileging the hypothesis. Uncertainty is half-way from disbelief to conviction, it’s not a trivial milestone. If you allow for a likelihood ratio of 10 to go either way from “uncertain”, you are already changing level of belief between 1% and 99%. This is the opposite side of this situation: if you’ve just dropped or introduced a strong piece of evidence (like recalling that you haven’t asked the details of what exactly is being claimed by the presumably reliable source), you can’t be uncertain both before and after that.
I think we might have slightly different definitions for “undecided”. I might consider a subjective belief of .95 for something not having happened as “undecided”, if the associated weight of evidence isn’t large.
Still, upon consideration, you’re right. I’ve revised my estimate from “undecided” to “don’t think there was a (malicious) conspiracy”.
Right. So if you expect further investigation to change your belief (you can’t know which way), you say it’s undecided.
That’s a pretty good way of describing it, yes.
Well, your comment that started all this exchange was:
You operate under the assumption that there is a scientific explanation(I assume by that you mean that it is a correct explanation) of the collapse based on structural damage. Further down you write:
I see a contradiction. You cannot claim to be undecided and at the same time write “The official story is supported by science.”
What are you sorry about?
Sigh.
I got the assumption that there is a scientific explanation from you saying that there is a study which explains (or at least claims to explain) the collapse. From the context, one could deduce that it was written by people with a science background—presumably, if it was completely unscientific and obviously written by people with no background in engineering, you wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it at all. Therefore it was presumably a scientific study.
When I say “scientific study”, I don’t mean that it would have to be correct. Obviously there is, and has always been, lots of scientific research that is outright wrong. Being scientific doesn’t mean you’re always correct, it means you employ the tools of science and therefore hopefully minimize your chances of being wrong. But if a layman says there is a study and the context implies that the study was made by people trained in the field, then that study has a higher prior probability of being correct than that same layman when he says the same study is wrong (because the layman cannot employ the scientific tools of the field that the experts are trained in). Especially if the layman in question supports his own case only by a video of an implosion and nothing else.
The official story seems to be supported by a scientific study, but I do not have the expertise to determine whether the science in that study is actually correct.
The fact that you seem to have spent some effort digging up material in an effort to convince me of the conspiracy point of view, but I probably won’t give most of it the attention it might deserve.
Sigh. I’ll start by quoting myself again:
I think this makes it fairly obvious that I don’t believe it to be correct. Of course you can say “well it was presumably a study by experts so it has a high probability of being correct.” But wouldn’t that be begging the question again, since the official story is precisely what is under dispute?
Well, maybe you should question your assumptions here.
You then wrote:
And this is where I took objection.
From a previous comment of yours:
Ok here I was assuming that you really wanted to take a closer look at the evidence.
And well, I didn’t just do it for you, but also for others reading this thread, and from the amount of downvotes there seem to be a few.
I have a feeling this discussion isn’t going anywhere. Probably easier to let it be.
I think we have finally come to an agreement. LOL
:)
Just to make it clearer what I’m thinking of, here is a video of a real controlled demolition(scroll forward to the 1 min mark): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRaNwPGcQcM
Even if you are not a structural engineer and in spite of physics often being counterintuitive, from the way this building collapses, can you tell me which columns where blown up in what order? Now consider the video of the WTC7 collapse.