Faith and the Church of JREF 9/11 Debunking

If Mohammed won't go to the mountain of evidence, the mountain of evidence must go to Mohammed.

... Or not. Mohammed could just remain ignorant and irrelevant, as the inevitable natural cost of refusing to examine evidence that isn't spoon-fed to him.

Yeah, I think I know which one's going to happen.

It's too bad, though. By missing the point of what skepticism and critical thinking are all about, people like HI make their world very small.

Here's how. Let's start with the idea that the world is a very large place. There are many things happening, many things that have happened, vast numbers of people and places and things and events, most of which each of us will never see first-hand.

Thanks to the technologies of our time, old and new, we nonetheless have the opportunity to know many more things than we can possibly observe or learn about first-hand. We can read journalists' reports of political issues in countries across the world. We can read historians' accounts of things that happened hundreds of years ago. We can view video of things happening in outer space. We can view photographs of objects too far away to be seen without an enormous telescope. We can use equations discovered by others to understand the behavior of particles too small for anyone to have ever seen. We can use the services of experts like doctors and engineers who can solve problems for us that we could not solve with our own personal knowledge and skills.

But there's a problem: what if those indirect sources are unreliable? What if the historian is just making things up, or altering the narrative for political purposes? What if the news photograph is faked? What if the doctor is incompetent?

Critical thinking and skepticism are the answer.

Since the way critical thinking and skepticism function is by filtering out bad information, it's perhaps an easy mistake to make to conclude that that's what they're for. But if all we wanted to do was filter out bad information, we could easily accomplish that by disregarding all information except the miniscule amount we are able to verify first-hand. We could, in short, all be like some Truthers, and refuse to believe that any airplane passengers died at the Pentagon unless we ourselves see the DNA test results. (Oops, not good enough, they could have been faked, so we'll have to see the charred bodies. Oops, not good enough, they could be different bodies, so we have to have watched them actually die before our eyes. But we weren't there to watch that, so it will have to remain a mystery to us, like just about everything else in the world as we reject everything outside our very very tiny range of personal observation.)

What critical thinking and skepticism are for is giving us a reasonably reliable basis to place our trust, conditionally and wisely, in indirect sources of information. This allows us to maximize our understanding of a very large world with a very deep history, at minimum risk of being harmed by errors and lies.

How we actually do that, step by step, is a large subject about which whole books and courses have been written. Generally speaking, we look for information consistent with well-verified scientific principles (unlike the impossible maneuvers hypothesized by PFT or the silent demolitions suggested by Jones), information that fits into a coherent narrative that makes logical sense (unlike the vague or self-contradictory narratives that truthers reluctantly offer), information that is verified by multiple independent sources (unlike the wild accounts of GZ countdowns or Pentagon fly-overs offered on truther sites), information that other critical thinkers are willing to stake money, reputations, and other valuable things on (unlike the truthers who are unwilling to act on what they claim to believe), information from sources that have been reliable in the recent past (unlike truthers who have demonstrably lied repeatedly and who refuse to correct proven errors), and yes, thrown into the mix, information consistent with what we can verify ourselves (unlike nearly every truther allegation of interest that I've been able to check on).

For example, there are people on this site who claim to be engineers, and who claim to calculate certain results from certain models of structural collapses. I cannot verify that they are engineers, and I cannot verify that all of their calculations are correct because some of what they do is beyond my working knowledge. However, I can and do repeat some of their calculations, and verify that they are correct. This makes me more willing to trust those people's results that I cannot verify for myself.

If on the other hand it turned out they tried to fool me about the simpler stuff, I would catch it and reveal their deception to others who perhaps could not detect it for themselves. If they tried to fool me on more complex stuff I can't verify myself, it's very likely that someone else who knows more than I do about the subject would catch it and reveal the deception to me. In order for my trust in this process to be misplaced, it would have to be the case that everyone more knowledgeable than me about that subject is lying. Without evidence, there is no reason to entertain such a paranoid notion.

Without verification my trust would be foolish, but without trust my verification would be useless, because I can only verify a tiny fraction of what I'm told. The interaction of trust and verification that comprises critical thinking is cumulative, because once I trust someone else's ability and willingness to convey accurate information, I can also take advantage of their ability to verify the accuracy, and eventually the trustworthiness, of third parties whose expertise I cannot verify myself, and so forth. Worlds of information are thereby opened up to me.

It also works the other way: when I attempt to verify something I can verify for myself and find that it's erroneous or deliberately deceptive, like Balsamo's "11G" descent path calculation, I know not to trust that source. Furthermore I know not to trust other sources who trust Balsamo as a source, and so forth. Whole networks of error and attempted deception are rendered harmless to me.

People like HI can go ahead and think I'm a fool for trusting, for example, in the ability of the world's press to notice, investigate, and report shortcomings in the official "story" that are anywhere near as clearly evidenced or as obvious as truthers claim they are. But in fact, systems based on multiple independent agents vying for individual advantage tend to be very robust and reliable, and far more difficult to subvert than an organized hierarchy. That's why it's much harder to stop a rumor from spreading than it is to intercept a UPS package delivery. Given my willingness to trust the entire world's press to collectively exhibit a modicum of competence at its fundamental business, the plausibility of trusting theorists whose narratives require that the entire world's press lacks that competence is correspondingly reduced.

If my purpose for using critical thinking and skepticism were to avoid ever being deceived on any matter at any cost even if mystically all-powerful organizations with implausible resources were out there focusing absurd efforts on deceiving me personally about relatively unimportant matters, then perhaps I might join HI and his ilk in regarding any trust in any information source whatsoever as unjustified faith. I might advocate endless investigations of 9/11 and then refuse to draw any reasonable conclusions from any of them. I might doubt there's dust on the moon if I can't go there and see it for myself. I might doubt that the FBI has any evidence of Osama Bin Laden's culpability for 9/11, or that a plane crashed into the Pentagon. I might doubt that Bin Laden, or for that matter George W. Bush, actually exist in the first place, or that my wife spends all those hours every day at work rather than in a secret cave full of ninjas plotting my demise.

But that's not my purpose. The reason I use critical thinking and skepticism is to place my trust as reliably as possible, so that I can know as much about the world as possible.

Well-justified trust is not a failure of skepticism. It's its intended result.

Well-justified trust is not a failure of critical thinking. It's the avenue for its rewards.

Calling that "faith" merely shows that HI doesn't get the point. The result of that is that his world is much smaller and contains vastly less truth than mine.

Respectfully,
Myriad
 
Homeland Insurgency said:
Well just a question. Have you pointed to where NIST showed any of their fire tests reached the temperature needed to compromise steel in the way they claim caused the collapse of any of the WTC buildings on 9/11? Or do you just have faith that they did?
Click to expand...
Answer my question and I will gladly respond to the question you responded with. A simple yes or no, and if possible the titles of your references. I can suggest a few for you to look into as well if you've explored no such publications. In the mean time, you can also tell me which tests you are referring to, the simulations, or the physical tests?
 
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Travis said:
Ever hear of Eric Rudolph?
Click to expand...

Ever hear of Richard Jewell?

Travis said:
You know this because you have seen the cumulative intelligence of all these 160 countries on every subject and can therefore verify that none of them have provided evidence implicating Bin Laden? Or, perhaps, you are just assuming this? That would be very ironic considering the threads theme.
Click to expand...

No what I'm claiming is everything you claim to be the truth is an assumption unless you can show otherwise.
 
Grizzly Bear said:
Answer my question and I will gladly respond to the question you responded with. A simple yes or no, and if possible the titles of your references. I can suggest a few for you to look into as well if you've explored no such publications. In the mean time, you can also tell me which tests you are referring to, the simulations, or the physical tests?
Click to expand...

I don't claim to know the truth you do. Produce it.
 
Homeland Insurgency said:
I don't claim to know the truth you do. Produce it.
Click to expand...

What a ridiculous statement.

You do claim to know the "truth"- in your fantasy narrative, none of the evidence is allowed, all these countries are blind, and attacking an entire forum of people in an attempt to start a flame war is an appropriate substitute for a well-thought rebuttal.

It's just far more comfortable for you to play ignorant so you can float in some ambiguous middle ground where there "is no evidence" and you "know nothing" except that you will then turn around and pretend to know just enough to demand a "new investigation".

Do you really think anyone buys that? It's been tried before- by many before you.
 
Myriad said:
If Mohammed won't go to the mountain of evidence, the mountain of evidence must go to Mohammed.

... Or not. Mohammed could just remain ignorant and irrelevant, as the inevitable natural cost of refusing to examine evidence that isn't spoon-fed to him.

Yeah, I think I know which one's going to happen.

It's too bad, though. By missing the point of what skepticism and critical thinking are all about, people like HI make their world very small.

Here's how. Let's start with the idea that the world is a very large place. There are many things happening, many things that have happened, vast numbers of people and places and things and events, most of which each of us will never see first-hand.

Thanks to the technologies of our time, old and new, we nonetheless have the opportunity to know many more things than we can possibly observe or learn about first-hand. We can read journalists' reports of political issues in countries across the world. We can read historians' accounts of things that happened hundreds of years ago. We can view video of things happening in outer space. We can view photographs of objects too far away to be seen without an enormous telescope. We can use equations discovered by others to understand the behavior of particles too small for anyone to have ever seen. We can use the services of experts like doctors and engineers who can solve problems for us that we could not solve with our own personal knowledge and skills.

But there's a problem: what if those indirect sources are unreliable? What if the historian is just making things up, or altering the narrative for political purposes? What if the news photograph is faked? What if the doctor is incompetent?

Critical thinking and skepticism are the answer.

Since the way critical thinking and skepticism function is by filtering out bad information, it's perhaps an easy mistake to make to conclude that that's what they're for. But if all we wanted to do was filter out bad information, we could easily accomplish that by disregarding all information except the miniscule amount we are able to verify first-hand. We could, in short, all be like some Truthers, and refuse to believe that any airplane passengers died at the Pentagon unless we ourselves see the DNA test results. (Oops, not good enough, they could have been faked, so we'll have to see the charred bodies. Oops, not good enough, they could be different bodies, so we have to have watched them actually die before our eyes. But we weren't there to watch that, so it will have to remain a mystery to us, like just about everything else in the world as we reject everything outside our very very tiny range of personal observation.)

What critical thinking and skepticism are for is giving us a reasonably reliable basis to place our trust, conditionally and wisely, in indirect sources of information. This allows us to maximize our understanding of a very large world with a very deep history, at minimum risk of being harmed by errors and lies.

How we actually do that, step by step, is a large subject about which whole books and courses have been written. Generally speaking, we look for information consistent with well-verified scientific principles (unlike the impossible maneuvers hypothesized by PFT or the silent demolitions suggested by Jones), information that fits into a coherent narrative that makes logical sense (unlike the vague or self-contradictory narratives that truthers reluctantly offer), information that is verified by multiple independent sources (unlike the wild accounts of GZ countdowns or Pentagon fly-overs offered on truther sites), information that other critical thinkers are willing to stake money, reputations, and other valuable things on (unlike the truthers who are unwilling to act on what they claim to believe), information from sources that have been reliable in the recent past (unlike truthers who have demonstrably lied repeatedly and who refuse to correct proven errors), and yes, thrown into the mix, information consistent with what we can verify ourselves (unlike nearly every truther allegation of interest that I've been able to check on).

For example, there are people on this site who claim to be engineers, and who claim to calculate certain results from certain models of structural collapses. I cannot verify that they are engineers, and I cannot verify that all of their calculations are correct because some of what they do is beyond my working knowledge. However, I can and do repeat some of their calculations, and verify that they are correct. This makes me more willing to trust those people's results that I cannot verify for myself.

If on the other hand it turned out they tried to fool me about the simpler stuff, I would catch it and reveal their deception to others who perhaps could not detect it for themselves. If they tried to fool me on more complex stuff I can't verify myself, it's very likely that someone else who knows more than I do about the subject would catch it and reveal the deception to me. In order for my trust in this process to be misplaced, it would have to be the case that everyone more knowledgeable than me about that subject is lying. Without evidence, there is no reason to entertain such a paranoid notion.

Without verification my trust would be foolish, but without trust my verification would be useless, because I can only verify a tiny fraction of what I'm told. The interaction of trust and verification that comprises critical thinking is cumulative, because once I trust someone else's ability and willingness to convey accurate information, I can also take advantage of their ability to verify the accuracy, and eventually the trustworthiness, of third parties whose expertise I cannot verify myself, and so forth. Worlds of information are thereby opened up to me.

It also works the other way: when I attempt to verify something I can verify for myself and find that it's erroneous or deliberately deceptive, like Balsamo's "11G" descent path calculation, I know not to trust that source. Furthermore I know not to trust other sources who trust Balsamo as a source, and so forth. Whole networks of error and attempted deception are rendered harmless to me.

People like HI can go ahead and think I'm a fool for trusting, for example, in the ability of the world's press to notice, investigate, and report shortcomings in the official "story" that are anywhere near as clearly evidenced or as obvious as truthers claim they are. But in fact, systems based on multiple independent agents vying for individual advantage tend to be very robust and reliable, and far more difficult to subvert than an organized hierarchy. That's why it's much harder to stop a rumor from spreading than it is to intercept a UPS package delivery. Given my willingness to trust the entire world's press to collectively exhibit a modicum of competence at its fundamental business, the plausibility of trusting theorists whose narratives require that the entire world's press lacks that competence is correspondingly reduced.

If my purpose for using critical thinking and skepticism were to avoid ever being deceived on any matter at any cost even if mystically all-powerful organizations with implausible resources were out there focusing absurd efforts on deceiving me personally about relatively unimportant matters, then perhaps I might join HI and his ilk in regarding any trust in any information source whatsoever as unjustified faith. I might advocate endless investigations of 9/11 and then refuse to draw any reasonable conclusions from any of them. I might doubt there's dust on the moon if I can't go there and see it for myself. I might doubt that the FBI has any evidence of Osama Bin Laden's culpability for 9/11, or that a plane crashed into the Pentagon. I might doubt that Bin Laden, or for that matter George W. Bush, actually exist in the first place, or that my wife spends all those hours every day at work rather than in a secret cave full of ninjas plotting my demise.

But that's not my purpose. The reason I use critical thinking and skepticism is to place my trust as reliably as possible, so that I can know as much about the world as possible.

Well-justified trust is not a failure of skepticism. It's its intended result.

Well-justified trust is not a failure of critical thinking. It's the avenue for its rewards.

Calling that "faith" merely shows that HI doesn't get the point. The result of that is that his world is much smaller and contains vastly less truth than mine.

Respectfully,
Myriad
Click to expand...

I have a list in my OP. Go point by point and source your evidence. I already know you have faith. Show me your evidence.
 
Homeland Insurgency said:
I don't claim to know the truth you do. Produce it.
Click to expand...
What is your "truth" then given you have not acknowledged reading any such material to verify the integrity of the NIST report research subjects? I've read several books pertaining to construction, steel, and structures in order to come to the opinion I have. NIST served as secondary research material to me. If the NIST is fallacious but corroborated by the many available publications made directly by teams of engineers, and similar, does that imply too much "faith" in the material they publish?

What is your opinion?
 
Totovader said:
What a ridiculous statement.

You do claim to know the "truth"- in your fantasy narrative, none of the evidence is allowed, all these countries are blind, and attacking an entire forum of people in an attempt to start a flame war is an appropriate substitute for a well-thought rebuttal.

It's just far more comfortable for you to play ignorant so you can float in some ambiguous middle ground where there "is no evidence" and you "know nothing" except that you will then turn around and pretend to know just enough to demand a "new investigation".

Do you really think anyone buys that? It's been tried before- by many before you.
Click to expand...

I sincerely don't know what happened on 9/11 based on any official investigation done to date or anything claimed to have been debunked here at JREF. I want to know how you know.
 
Grizzly Bear said:
What is your "truth" then given you have not acknowledged reading any such material to verify the integrity of the NIST report research subjects? I've read several books pertaining to construction, steel, and structures in order to come to the opinion I have. NIST served as secondary research material to me. If the NIST is fallacious but corroborated by the many available publications made directly by teams of engineers, and similar, does that imply too much "faith" in the material they publish?

What is your opinion?
Click to expand...

My opinion is that it is disputed by experts in the same fields as experts who endorse it. You would have a hard time finding someone who endorses the government version who isn't connected to the government.
 
Homeland Insurgency said:
I have a list in my OP. Go point by point and source your evidence. I already know you have faith. Show me your evidence.
Click to expand...


The list in your OP is a list of false assertions.

You want me to provide evidence for your false assertions? Sorry, I decline.

Respectfully,
Myriad
 
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