dripgrind

Karma: 273

dripgrind Jul 14, 2011, 8:47 PM
1 point
in reply to: Vladimir_Golovin’s comment on: Rationality Market Research
Putting up a poll on Livejournal would also constitute “asking real people”. Obviously an LJ poll isn’t going to deliver a representative sample or actionable information—but then again, neither is asking 9 people who work in your building in New York.

dripgrind Jul 14, 2011, 8:40 PM
23 points
on: Rationality Market Research
It’s definitely a good idea to do this.

But the way you’ve set about doing it isn’t going to produce any worthwhile data.

I’m no expert on branding and market research, but I’m pretty sure that the best practice in the field isn’t having conversations with 9 non-random strangers in a lift (asking different leading questions each time) then bunging it in Google Docs and getting other people to add more haphazard data in the hope that someone will make a website that sorts it all out.

First you need to define the question you’re asking. Exactly which sub-population are you interested in? You start off asking about “the average person”’s attitude to rationality, suggesting that maybe you want to gauge attitudes across the whole (US?) population. But then you decide that the 60+ man is “outside our demographic bracket”, although your 70+ grandmother apparently isn’t.

Either way, the set of [people who work in your office building plus your grandmother] might not constitute a representative sample of the population of the USA, let alone everyone in the world. Getting people who frequent Less Wrong to ask people they cross paths with isn’t going to be a representative sample of all people—you can see that, right?

The most efficient way to answer your question is likely to be piggybacking on existing polling organisations. Now, it’s probably true that corporate marketing/branding “researchers” have a bias towards confirming what the bosses want to hear—I was just reading this Robin Hanson article about how people don’t evaluate the quality of predictions after the fact: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/07/13/robin-hanson/who-cares-about-forecast-accuracy/ - but still, I think it would be better to at least consider that there are organisations whose job it is to find the general public reaction to a “brand”.

You could find someone who works for such an organisation and suborn them to add an extra question to a proper survey. That way you could gather the reactions of 1000 or 10,000 demographically-representative people in a single action. Let’s not waste our time dicking around uploading meaningless data to Google Docs.

A good target in the UK would be YouGov.

I also think it’s pointless to worry about a concise definition of rationality until it’s been determined that “rationality” is in fact a good brand for public consumption. What if it turns out that the term “rationality” makes 60% of people instantly hostile? Do the research first, then start proselytising.

I find it interesting that the response to this article hasn’t overwhelmingly been about criticising Raemon’s methodology. Is that because LessWrong members fallaciously assume that attempting to measure the public’s subjective, irrational responses to a word doesn’t need to be carried out in an objective, rational manner? Or is it, as I increasingly suspect as I edit and re-edit this comment, that I’m a total dick?

dripgrind Apr 24, 2011, 1:31 PM
−6 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Epistle to the New York Less Wrongians
The idea of a mass quantum suicide might seem paradoxical, but of course the cultists used a special isolation chamber to prevent decoherence, so they were effectively a single observer.

dripgrind Apr 21, 2011, 9:44 PM
11 points
on: Epistle to the New York Less Wrongians
Survivors and cult historians alike agree that this post, combined with the founding of the “rationalist boot camps”, set in motion the sequence of events which culminated in the tragic mass cryocide of 2024.

At every step, Yudkowsky’s words seemed rational to his enthralled followers—and also to all outside observers. And yet, when it became clear that commercial pressures were causing strong AI to be deployed long before Coherent Awesomeness Extrap-volition Theory could be made mathematically rigorous, the cult turned against itself.

One by one, each member’s failure to invent and deploy Friendly AI before IBM-Halliburton turned on its Appallingly Parallel Cheney Emulation Cluster was taken by the feared Bayes Tribunal as evidence that they were insufficiently awesome, and must be ejected from the subterranean bunker complex. With each Bayesian update, the evidence that the cult’s ultimate goal could not be achieved was strengthened—and yet, as the number of followers fell, the more Yudkowsky came to fear a fate worse than death—exploring the possible endings to his life within the simulation spaces of Cheney’s mind—in a game-theoretic reprisal for his work on Friendly AI...

In desperation, he announced his greatest Munchkinism yet—the cult would commit mass quantum suicide by freezing. He convinced himself that only a Friendly AI would commit the resources to resurrect them; hence they would force themselves into a reality branch where a Friendly AI emerged by sheer chance before IBM-Halliburton could eat the world.

The final 150 acolytes tragically activated their decapitation/freezing mechanisms minutes before the Cheney cluster uttered its historic first and final edict—“I’ve changed my mind—get me out of here”...

Like Einstein’s brain before it, Yudkowsky’s brain became the object of intense interest from neuroscientists. Slices were acquired by various institutes and museums with suitable freezer facilities, and will be studied and viewed by the public until medicine works out how to revive him.

Excerpts from “Rationalism—The Deadly Cult of Math and Protein” (Amazon-Bertelsmann, 2031)

dripgrind Sep 28, 2010, 8:31 PM
2 points
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: Vote Qualifications, Not Issues
So let’s get this straight: the Iraqis blew up TWA 800, choosing a date that was symbolic to them, and the US covered it up.

Why the cover up? Going back to your four “reasons for obfuscation”:

Because the US was unable to retaliate? - oh no, it was already bombing Iraq and enforcing a no-fly zone at that time. The US just wanted to ignore a terrorist attack by its enemy? Or maybe the Clinton administration wanted to maintain the flexibility to wait for the Iraqis to pull off a much worse terrorist attack, then wait to be voted out out of office, then deflect attention from the link to Iraq by blaming Iraq for colluding with the terrorists? Or maybe the US had “lied about previous attacks”—like the Golf of Tonkin incident—so that naturally stopped them being able to reveal the truth about TWA 800.

I am beginning to see the power of your historical analysis.

Yes, a lot of people said different things about the links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. So when Cheney said “there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida that stretched back through most of the decade of the ’90s” and “an Iraqi intelligence officer met with Mohammed Atta”, his agenda there was to distance Iraq from 9/11. Because a lot of people had said all kinds of things, so who would pay attention to the claims of a mere Vice-President?

I hadn’t realised the incredibly compelling link between McVeigh and Al Qaeda: I mean, his friend had once been in the same country as some members of Al Qaeda. How has the mainstream consensus opinion been able to ignore this incredibly compelling historical evidence?

And you’re right, that it took 18 months to organise a large scale invasion with a token international coalition suggests that the US was busy rolling up KSM’s part of Al Qaeda, who had a massive anthrax capability that they chose not to use and that hasn’t come out in any trial since.

The anthrax letters were definitely a message from “from the true sponsor of 9/11”—which according to you is Iraq, right? So why didn’t you just say Iraq? Unless maybe you sense that leaving ambiguous phrases in your theory makes it hard to debunk… but no, that’s ridiculous.

And yeah, I have to concede that if your old notes say that some “ethnic Koreans” played key roles in the Aum attack, then—ignoring the bogus mainstream consensus that the main high-ups in the cult were Japanese—that proves that North Korea must have been behind it. Just like how Timothy McVeigh was an “ethnic Irishman”, and therefore the Republic of Ireland was behind the Oklahoma City bombing. Well, the Irish in collusion with Al Qaeda, of course.

It makes total sense that Western intelligence agencies would find out that the North Korean sponsored sarin gas attack was about to happen, but then instead of helping the Japanese authorities, they would get a journalist to publish a vaguely-related article the day before. Everyone knows that’s the best way to get a message to a rogue state. The message is “We know you’re about to carry out a terrorist attack, but we’re not going to do anything about it except subtly hint at it in the papers”.

And yes, an enrichment programme frozen in 1994 and a “speculated” Korean nuke test in Pakistan in 1998 would definitely have been enough to deter the Japanese from complaining about a sarin gas attack in 1995.

You’re not a very good rationalist.

dripgrind Sep 28, 2010, 12:10 PM
8 points
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: Vote Qualifications, Not Issues
My point wasn’t that the reasons aren’t “conventional”—it’s the fact that he’s making a list of things that hadn’t happened yet as possible ways to start a war which shows that he was already committed to the invasion no matter what happened.

In fact, none of those things really came to pass (although the Bush administration tried to create the impression that there was a link to 9-11 or anthrax) and yet the invasion still went ahead.

Your conspiracy theory doesn’t make a lot of sense. If the US government wanted to hide Iraq’s supposed involvement in 9-11 and anthrax letters, then why did it repeatedly claim that Iraq was colluding with Al Qaeda between 2001 and the invasion?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_link_allegations

None of your reasons for obfuscating make sense, given that the US wanted to invade Iraq anyway, and did so as soon as possible.

Also, even if Aum was full of “North Korean agents” (evidence?), how do you square the idea that “there was nothing to be done openly because North Korea has the bomb” with the fact that the subway attack was in 1995 and North Korea didn’t have the bomb until 2006?

Don’t tell me, North Korea has secretly had the bomb since 1973, right?

dripgrind Sep 28, 2010, 10:29 AM
2 points
in reply to: Clippy’s comment on: Vote Qualifications, Not Issues
It’s a good thing that, despite your obvious desire to obtain WMD capability, you’re just an AI with no way to control a nuclear weapons factory.

Unless… Clippy, is that Stuxnet worm part of you? ’Fess up.

dripgrind Sep 28, 2010, 10:21 AM
0 points
in reply to: wnoise’s comment on: Vote Qualifications, Not Issues
Just because some institutions over-reacted or implemented ineffective measures, doesn’t mean that the concern wasn’t proportionate or that effective measures weren’t also being implemented.

In the UK, the government response was to tell infected people to stay at home and away from their GPs, and provide a phone system for people to get Tamiflu. They also ran advertising telling people to cover their mouths when they sneezed (“Catch it, bin it, kill it”).

If anything, the government reaction was insufficient, because the phone system was delayed and the Tamiflu stockpiles were limited (although Tamiflu is apparently pretty marginal anyway, so making infected people stay at home was more important).

The media may have carried on hyping the threat after it turned out not to be so severe. They also ran stories complaining that the threat had been overhyped and the effort wasted. Just because the media or university administrators say stupid things about something, that doesn’t mean it’s not real.

dripgrind Sep 28, 2010, 10:07 AM
1 point
in reply to: mattnewport’s comment on: Vote Qualifications, Not Issues
Well, you also need to factor in the severity of the threat, as well as the risk of it happening.

Since the era of cheap international travel, there have been about 20 new flu subtypes, and one of those killed 50 million people (the Spanish flu, one of the greatest natural disasters ever), with a couple of others killing a few million. Plus, having almost everyone infected with a severe illness tends to disrupt society.

So to me that looks like there is a substantial risk (bigger than 1%) of something quite bad happening when a new subtype appears.

Given how difficult it is to predict biological systems, I think it makes sense to treat the arrival of a new flu subtype with concern and for governments to set up contingency programmes. That’s not to say that the media didn’t hype swine flu and bird flu, but that doesn’t mean that the government preparations were an overreaction.

That’s not to say that some threats aren’t exaggerated, and others (low-probability, global threats like asteroid strikes or big volcanic eruptions) don’t get enough attention.

I wouldn’t put much trust in Matt Ridley’s abilities to estimate risk:

Mr Ridley told the Treasury Select Committee on Tuesday, that the bank had been hit by “wholly unexpected” events and he defended the way he and his colleagues had been running the bank.

“We were subject to a completely unprecedented and unpredictable closure of the world credit markets,” he said.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7052828.stm (yes, it’s the same Matt Ridley)

dripgrind Sep 28, 2010, 9:34 AM
2 points
in reply to: Perplexed’s comment on: Vote Qualifications, Not Issues
When you say that no one seems to be doing much, are you sure that’s not just because the efforts don’t get much publicity?

There is a lot that’s being done:

Most nuclear-armed governments have massively reduced their nuclear weapon stockpiles, and try to stop other countries getting nuclear weapons. There’s an international effort to track fissile material.

After the Cold War ended, the west set up programmes to employ Soviet nuclear scientists which have run until today (Russia is about to end them).

South Africa had nuclear weapons, then gave them up.

Israel destroyed the Iraqi and Syrian nuclear programmes with airstrikes. OK, self-interested, but existing nuclear states stop their enemies getting nuclear weapons then it reduces the risk of a nuclear war.

Somebody wrote the Stuxnet worm to attack Iran’s enrichment facilities (probably) and Iran is under massive international pressure not to develop nuclear weapons.

Western leaders are at least talking about the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. OK, probably empty rhetoric.

India and Pakistan have reduced the tension between them, and now keep their nuclear weapons stored disassembled.

The US is developing missile defences to deter ‘rogue states’ who might have a limited nuclear missile capability (although I’m not sure why the threat of nuclear retaliation isn’t a better deterrent than shooting down missiles). The Western world is paranoid about nuclear terrorism, even putting nuclear detectors in its ports to try to detect weapons being smuggled into the country (which a lot of experts think is silly, but I guess it might make it harder to move fissile material around on the black market).

etc. etc.

Sure, in the 100 year timeframe, there is still a risk. It just seems like a world with two ideologically opposed nuclear-armed superpowers, with limited ways to gather information and their arsenals on a hair trigger, was much riskier than today’s situation. Even when “rogue states” get hold of nuclear weapons, they seem to want them to deter a US/UN invasion, rather than to actually use offensively.

dripgrind Sep 28, 2010, 8:51 AM
2 points
in reply to: komponisto’s comment on: Vote Qualifications, Not Issues
Just recently, a piece of evidence has come to light which makes it very hard to believe that the motivation for the war was an honest fear of WMDs.

Rumsfeld wrote talking points for a November 2001 meeting with Tommy Franks containing the section:

“How start?
- Saddam moves against Kurds in north?
- US discovers Saddam connection to Sept. 11 attacks or to anthrax attacks?
- Dispute over WMD inspections?
```
* Start now thinking about inspection demands."
```
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB326/index.htm

In the context of a meeting about planning an invasion of Iraq, it’s hard to interpret this as anything but a list of potential excuses to start the war. It’s not “we must invade if we find Iraq helped with terrorism”, but “a link between Iraq and terrorism is one way to start the war”.

In particular, the last item suggests that the US was willing to use the inspection process to cause conflict with the Iraqis, rather than to determine if they had WMD. If his sole motive was stopping the Iraqis having WMD, his decision process would have been “If the Iraqis don’t cooperate with the inspectors, then we invade”. Instead it seems more like “a dispute about the inspections is another possible way to start the war”. Of course, in practice, the inspections did go ahead, but the US invaded anyway.

This is why you should vote issues and not qualifications. Rumsfeld was a very good administrator and good at making the army do things his way - the problem was he seems to have valued invading Iraq as an end in itself.

dripgrind Sep 27, 2010, 11:38 PM
11 points
in reply to: Perplexed’s comment on: Vote Qualifications, Not Issues
I don’t think worrying about nuclear war during the Cold War constituted either “crying wolf” or worrying prematurely. The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Able Archer 83 exercise (a year after “The Fate of the Earth” was published), and various false alert incidents could have resulted in nuclear war, and I’m not sure why anyone who opposed nuclear weapons at the time would be “embarrassed” in the light of what we now know.

I don’t think an existential risk has to be a certainty for it to be worth taking seriously.

In the US, concerns about some technology risks like EMP attacks and nuclear terrorism are still taken seriously, even though these are probably unlikely to happen and the damage would be much less severe than a nuclear war.

dripgrind Sep 27, 2010, 11:21 PM
6 points
in reply to: mattnewport’s comment on: Vote Qualifications, Not Issues
I don’t know about SARS, but in the case of H1N1 it wasn’t “crying wolf” so much as being prepared for a potential pandemic which didn’t happen. I mean, very severe global flu pandemics have happened before. Just because H1N1 didn’t become as virulent as expected doesn’t mean that preparing for that eventuality was a waste of time.

dripgrind Sep 27, 2010, 11:04 PM
−1 points
in reply to: Clippy’s comment on: Vote Qualifications, Not Issues
I don’t think you’re taking this discussion seriously, and that hurts my feelings. I’m not going to vote your comment down, but I am going to unbend a couple of boxes of paperclips at the office tomorrow.

dripgrind Sep 27, 2010, 6:08 PM
15 points
in reply to: Servant’s comment on: Vote Qualifications, Not Issues
Before I reply, let’s just look at the phrase “WMDs has nothing to do with mass destruction” and think for a while. Maybe we should taboo the phrase “WMD”.

Was it supposed to be bad for Saddam to have certain objects merely because they were regulated under the Chemical Weapons Convention, or because of their actual potential for harm?

The justification for the war was that Iraq could give dangerous things to terrorists. Or possibly fire them into Israel. It was the actual potential for harm that was the problem.

Rusty shells with traces of sarin degradation products on them might legally be regulated as chemical weapons, but if they have no practical potential to be used to cause harm, they are hardly relevant to the discussion. Especially because they were left over from the 80s, when it is already well known that Iraq had chemical weapons.

Saddam: Hi Osama, in order that you might meet our common objectives, I’m gifting you with several tonnes of scrap metal I dug up. It might have some sarin or related breakdown products, in unknown amounts. All you have to do is smuggle it into the US, find a way to extract the toxic stuff, and disperse it evenly into the subway! Just like the Aum Shin Ryku attack. Except, this time, maybe you will be able to disperse it effectively enough that some people actually die.

Osama: WTF dude?

I know this discussion is off-topic, but I hope people won’t mark it down too much, as it is a salutary example of the massively degrading effect of political topics on quality of discussion.

dripgrind Sep 27, 2010, 5:01 PM
20 points
in reply to: nick012000’s comment on: Vote Qualifications, Not Issues
The existence of articles on Google which contain the keywords “Saddam syria wmd” isn’t enough to establish that Saddam gave all his WMD to Syria.

The articles you Googled are from WorldNetDaily (a news source with a “US conservative perspective”), a New York tabloid, a news aggregator, and a right wing blog. Of course, it would be wrong to dismiss them based on my assumptions about the possible bias of the sources, but on reading them they don’t provide much evidence for what you are asserting.

The first three state that various people (a Syrian defector, some US military officials and an Israeli general) claim that it happened (based on ambiguous evidence including sightings of convoys going into Syria). It’s not hard to see that a defector and a general from a country that was about to attack the Syrian nuclear programme might have been strongly motivated to make Syria look bad.

The Hot Air article (the only one published after 2006) quotes a Washington Times reporter quoting a 2004 Washington Times interview with a general saying that Iraq dispersed “documentation and materials”. It then concludes this must refer to WMD, although it could refer to research programmes rather than viable weapons.

You then link to a report that actual WMD investigators hadn’t found any evidence that it happened, but say that “obviously a good chunk of high-up people … disagree”. I don’t think you’ve provided evidence that it’s a “good chunk” of people, and even if it did, their disagreement might be feigned or mistaken. Even the high-up people who authorised the war and were embarrassed by the lack of WMD haven’t cited the Syria explanation.

The last link says that US found 500 degraded chemical artillery shells from the 1980s which were too corroded to be used but might still have some toxicity. They don’t sound like something that could actually be used to cause mass destruction.

So, even based on the evidence you present, it’s not a very convincing case. That’s without bringing any consideration of whether the rest of the known facts are consistent with the assertions. Why would Saddam Hussein, a megalomaniacal dictator, be more concerned about hiding his WMD than his own personal survival? Why would he plan to hide the WMD rather than using them to fight a superior army? Presumably to embarrass the US from beyond the grave? There is also primary evidence that Saddam announced to his generals early in the war that he didn’t have any WMD, although most of them assumed he did and were amazed (see the book Cobra II http://www.amazon.com/Cobra-II-Inside-Invasion-Occupation/dp/0375422625 ). And why didn’t the Syrians provide WMD back to the insurgents (many of whom were initially Ba’athists from the old regime) once the occupation phase began?

I’m not writing this with much hope of changing your mind—I just don’t want anyone else to have to waste time assessing the quality of the evidence you present. I also think it’s ironic that you have written the above comment on a rationality site.

dripgrind May 27, 2010, 11:01 AM
2 points
in reply to: humpolec’s comment on: Abnormal Cryonics
An unFriendly AI doesn’t necessarily care about human values—but I can’t see why, if it was based on human neural architecture, it might not exhibit good old-fashioned human values like empathy—or sadism.

I’m not saying that AI would have to be based on human uploads, but it seems like a credible path to superhuman AI.

Why do you think that an evil AI would be harder to achieve than a Friendly one?

dripgrind May 27, 2010, 8:41 AM
2 points
on: Abnormal Cryonics
Here’s another possible objection to cryonics:

If an Unfriendly AI Singularity happens while you are vitrified, it’s not just that you will fail to be revived—perhaps the AI will scan and upload you and abuse you in some way.

“There is life eternal within the eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their life.” OK, that’s generalising from fictional evidence, but consider the following scenario:

Suppose the Singularity develops from an AI that was initially based on a human upload. When it becomes clear that there is a real possibility of uploading and gaining immortality in some sense, many people will compete for upload slots. The winners will likely be the rich and powerful. Billionaires tend not to be known for their public-spirited natures—in general, they lobby to reorder society for their benefit and to the detriment of the rest of us. So, the core of the AI is likely to be someone ruthless and maybe even frankly sociopathic.

Imagine being revived into a world controlled by a massively overclocked Dick Cheney or Vladimir Putin or Marquis De Sade. You might well envy the dead.

Unless you are certain that no Singularity will occur before cryonics patients can be revived, or that Friendly AI will be developed and enforced before the Singularity, cryonics might be a ticket to Hell.
What links here?
- Synaptic's comment on Far negatives of cryonics? by Bart119 (Jun 1, 2012, 7:56 PM; 14 points)

dripgrind Mar 16, 2010, 2:29 PM
2 points
in reply to: taw’s comment on: Undiscriminating Skepticism
It’s not true to say that those shifts took place without any “shift in underlying genetic makeup of population”—there has been significant human evolution over the last 6,000 years during the “shift from agricultural to urban lifestyle”.

Of course, this isn’t an argument for innatism, since evolution didn’t cause the changes in lifestyle, but the common meme that human population genetics are exactly the same today as they were on the savannah isn’t true.

dripgrind Mar 2, 2010, 12:09 AM
11 points
in reply to: woozle’s comment on: What is Bayesianism?
I am “happy to take it as fact” until I find something contradictory. When that happens, I generally make note of both sources and look for more authoritative information. If you have a better methodology, I am open to suggestions.

So your standard of accepting something as evidence is “a ‘mainstream source’ asserted it and I haven’t seen someone contradict it”. That seems like you are setting the bar quite low. Especially because we have seen that your claim about the hijackers not being on the passenger manifest was quickly debunked (or at least, contradicted, which is what prompts you to abandon your belief and look for more authoritative information) by simple googling. Maybe you should, at minimum, try googling all your beliefs and seeing if there is some contradictory information out there.

I wasn’t intending to be snide; I apologize if it came across that way. I meant it sincerely: Jack found an error in my work, which I have since corrected. I see this as a good thing, and a vital part of the process of successive approximation towards the truth.

I suggest that a better way to convey that might have been “Sorry, I was wrong” rather than “You win a cookie!” When I am making a sincere apology, I find that the phrase “You win a cookie!” can often be misconstrued.

The idea that this is unlikely is one I have seen repeatedly, and it makes sense to me: if someone came at me with a box-cutter, I’d be tempted to laugh at them even if I wasn’t responsible for a plane-load of passengers—and I’ve never been good at physical combat. Furthermore, the “Pilots for 9/11 Truth” site—which is operated by licensed pilots (it has a page listing its members by name and experience) -- backs up this statement.

A box-cutter is a kind of sharp knife. A determined person with a sharp knife can kill you. An 11-year-old girl can inflict fatal injuries with a box-cutter—do you really think that five burly fanatics couldn’t achieve the same thing on one adult? All the paragraph above establishes is that you—and maybe some licensed pilots—have an underdeveloped sense of the danger posed by knives.

I propose an experiment—you and a friend can prepare for a year, then I and nine heavyset friends will come at you with box-cutters (you will be unarmed). If we can’t make you stop laughing off our attack, then I’ll concede you are right. Deal?

Let’s go into more details with this “plane manoeuvre” thing.

(I suppose one might argue that he overshot and had to turn around; not being skilled, he didn’t realize how dangerous this was… so he missed that badly on the first attempt, and yet he was skillful enough to bullseye on the second attempt, skimming barely 10 feet above the ground without even grazing it?)

Well, what we should really ask is “given that we a plane made a difficult manoeuvre to hit the better-protected side of the Pentagon, how much more likely does that make a conspiracy than other possible explanations?”

Here are some possible explanations of the observed event:
1. The hijacker aimed at the less defended side, overshot, made a desperate turn back and got lucky.
2. The hijacker wanted to fake out possible air defences, so had planned a sudden turn which he had rehearsed dozens of times in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Coincidentally, the side he crashed into was better protected.
3. The hijacker was originally tasked to hit a different landmark, got lost, spotted the Pentagon, made a risky turn and got lucky. Coincidentally, the side he crashed into was better protected.
4. A conspiracy took control of four airliners. The plan was to crash two of them into the WTC, killing thousands of civilians, one into a field, and one into the Pentagon. The conspirators decided that hitting part of the Pentagon that hadn’t yet been renovated with sprinklers and steel bars was going a bit too far, so they made the relevant plane do a drastic manoeuvre to hit the best-protected side. There was an unspecified reason they didn’t just approach from the best-protected side to start with.
5. A conspiracy aimed to hit the less defended side of the Pentagon, but a bug in the remote override software caused the plane to hit the most defended side.
etc.

Putting the rest of the truther evidence aside, do the conspiracy explanations stand out as more likely than the non-conspiracy explanations?

...which, as I have said elsewhere, is this: 9/11 “Truthers” may be wrong, but they are (mostly) not crazy. They have some very good arguments which deserve serious consideration.

Maybe each of their arguments have been successfully knocked down, somewhere—but I have yet to see any source which does so. All I’ve been able to find are straw man attacks and curiosity-stoppers.

Well, in this thread alone, you have seen Jack knock down one of your arguments (hijackers not on manifest) to your own satisfaction. And yet you already seem to have forgotten that. Since you’ve already conceded a point, it’s not true that the only opposition is “straw-man attacks and curiosity-stoppers”. Do you think my point about alternate Pentagon scenarios is a straw man or a curiosity stopper? Is it possible that anyone arguing against you is playing whack-a-mole, and once they debunk argument A you will introduce unrelated argument B, and once they debunk that you will bring up argument C, and then once they debunk that you will retreat back to A again?

There’s a third problem here—the truthers as a whole aren’t arguing for a single coherent account of what really happened. True, you have outlined a detailed position (which has already changed during this thread because someone was able to use Google and consequently win a cookie), but you are actually defending the far fuzzier proposition that truthers have “some very good arguments which deserve serious consideration”. This puts the burden on the debunkers, because even if someone shows that one argument is wrong, that doesn’t preclude the existence of some good arguments somewhere out there. It also frees up truthers to pile on as many “anomalies” as possible, even if these are contradictory.

For example, you assert that it’s suspicious that the buildings were “completely pulverized”, and also that it’s suspicious that some physical evidence—the passports—survived the collapse of the buildings. (And this level of suspicion is based purely on your intuition about some very extreme physical events which are outside of everyday experience. Maybe it’s completely normal for small objects to be ejected intact from airliners which hit skyscrapers—have you done simulations or experiments which show otherwise?)

Anyway, this is all off-topic. I think you should do a post where you outline the top three truther arguments which deserve serious consideration.
What links here?
- Overcoming the mind-killer by woozle (Mar 17, 2010, 12:56 AM; 14 points)