9/11 Debate Wiki

[TheLoneBedouin]

In Dictator Cheney's fairwell thread, metamars proposed a "debate wiki".

Originally Posted by metamars

Would you spell out what going through "the huge pile of information" consisted of? What particular issues did you research, and did you really go through all relevant threads?

I've been intending to add a post to a new thread of mine (doubtless similar suggestions have been made) that debunker arguments & information be properly organized into some sort of wiki, which makes a point of specifically answering truther counter-arguments. Ultimately, there needs to be some sorts of dispute-wiki, where differently oriented teams (debunker/truther/'mixed mode' :-) ) can control group-specific posts. I made a suggestion along these lines at physorg, because I couldn't help but notice that physicists on different sides of the string theory debate, as well as physicist on different sides of the big bang debate, were talking past each other.

IOW, there wasn't enough real debates going on.

It's definitely my impression that the non-dominant school of thought was more earnest in trying to get the dominant school of thought to engage their opponents. This is almost obvious in the case of string theory - there's been not one but two anti-string theory books written (Not Even Wrong and The Trouble with Physics), with the definite intention by both authors to get a more serious debate going, and ultimately to make physics less dogmatic.

Well, guess what? Both authors have been disappointed. I know of no book being written to answer these two. And, very tellingly, there's a lot of dismissive nastiness by some string theorists. Lee Smolin, author of The Trouble with Physics, even talks about a "string theory mafia".

These tendencies towards stupid tribalism, evident even in very smart people like string theorists, cannot be eradicated by snapping ones fingers or saying "Shame on you!". 5 million years of human evolution forbid such an easy solution. The point of a dispute wiki is as an aide to objectivity, but even designing a tool to mitigate group think won't completely solve the problem. (And it won't make any difference at all, unless competing schools of thought eagerly embrace such a tool.) There isn't a complete solution to the problem. (Except, perhaps, waiting another 5 million years. )

Sounds like a good idea. How about Wikispaces?

Originally Posted by Wikispaces

Public wikis are free; private and ad-free wikis options range from $5 to $20 per month. See all of the options.

I'll volunteer for the "truther" side. Any debunkers interested?

[SDC]

There is no debate. Why bother?

I'm sorry, I can't resist saying this. (I had sworn off posting to the 9/11 conspiracy area. Oh dear, off the wagon...)

[e^n]

Originally Posted by TheLoneBedouin

I'll volunteer for the "truther" side. Any debunkers interested?

Sure, and I can easily host any wiki or similar needed. Unfortunately we need an independent jury, and a series of rules. Any proposals?

[A W Smith]

what ever happened to
"the time for debate is over"

[Mince]

Originally Posted by A W Smith

what ever happened to
"the time for debate is over"

Nice one. I'm pretty sure, if I believed the U.S. Government had killed 3,000 of its own citizens and was now trying to kill and/or enslave me, I wouldn't be wasting time on a message board...7 years later. I guess the threat isn't that immediate for the truthers.

[mrbaracuda]

Originally Posted by Mince

Nice one. I'm pretty sure, if I believed the U.S. Government had killed 3,000 of its own citizens and was now trying to kill and/or enslave me, I wouldn't be wasting time on a message board...7 years later. I guess the threat isn't that immediate for the truthers.

Welcome to mah blog!

[Mince]

Originally Posted by mrbaracuda

Welcome to mah blog!

Nice.

[defaultdotxbe]

Originally Posted by e^n

Sure, and I can easily host any wiki or similar needed. Unfortunately we need an independent jury, and a series of rules. Any proposals?

i could easily host or mirror a site as well

may i suggest mediawiki as software?

i never understood the truther desire to use low quality free hosts for everything, youd think the truth would be worth 10 dollars a year

[Bobert]

but that would mean 10 dollars LESS of Twinkies and weed!

[GodisEnergy]

if it wasnt for 911 truth we would probally be in martial law by now ))

[dtugg]

Originally Posted by GodisEnergy

if it wasnt for 911 truth we would probally be in martial law by now ))

LOL. 9/11 "truth" has done nothing in the last seven except for make some noise on the Internet. They have done nothing that matters in the real world.

[Travis]

Originally Posted by GodisEnergy

if it wasnt for 911 truth we would probally be in martial law by now ))

Keep telling yourself that.....maybe one day it will be true. I know my Defenders From Dark Realms Club is all that keeps us from being overrun and enslaved by Orcs. Similarly my brothers Extraterrestrial Vigilance League is all that keeps us from being wiped out by aliens.

[jaydeehess]

Dictator Cheney is gone??? awww he was gonna discuss the CTBUH .........

Originally Posted by GodisEnergy

if it wasnt for 911 truth we would probally be in martial law by now ))

Now that there is funny, I tell ya what.

[A W Smith]

Originally Posted by GodisEnergy

if it wasnt for 911 truth we would probally be in martial law by now ))

oh but wait!


9/11 truthers say we Are under martial law!!

[metamars]

Originally Posted by TheLoneBedouin

In Dictator Cheney's fairwell thread, metamars proposed a "debate wiki".

Sounds like a good idea. How about Wikispaces?

My impression of wiki's is that there isn't yet the sort of granularity of control that would allow different groups of individuals to dispute a topic. Am I wrong about this? (BTW, I'm learning Microsoft Sharepoint which includes wikis, so maybe I will have more input later. As Sharepoint is programmable, and I am certified in VB.NET, maybe I will take a crack at adding such functionality, myself.).

My original suggestion at physorg was here:
http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=19531&hl=

Some background here:
http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=19985


An advanced implementation could have:
* some sort of way for participants to make red-flag votes, for when they believe that a key point is being ducked by the opposition
* some way of rating argument points on a scale ranging from "solid fact" to "likely fact"
* some way of rating argument points' degree of criticality to a subsequent point which depends on it
* granularity of sides (or teams) down to the sub-topic level (e.g., most 911 truthers don't want to be even associated with a topic such as "no planes hit the WTC towers")
* allow for neutral "fact check" sides (or teams); in the case of 911, I assume it would be much easier to get volunteers amongst engineering faculty by sending an appeal to join a fact checking team, as opposed to a truther or debunker team.
*

Frankly, so much time has elapsed since 911 that I don't know that even if the wiki-like platform was available or soon developed, whether participation would do it any justice. However, there could still be considerable value in going down this road, because disputes of one sort or another will always be with us, and 911 truthers and debunkers could essentially serve as beta testers for a technology that could help solve future disputes.

Since the JREF is supposed to promote critical thinking skills, it should presumably be full of people who would be happy to help develop a tool which would make disagreeing groups resolve intellectual disputes more rationally. Furthermore, enhancing rational dispute settling processes could have applications to governance in this internet age, and maybe even help settle international disputes.


I could see such a project benefiting from talking to artificial intelligence experts.

[beachnut]

9/11 truth failed to present a single rational argument in 7 years. The failed fusion Physicist Jones and his thermite nonsense started with a broken law of momentum statement in his first insane letter about 9/11. No debating a nice guy like Jones, he says it is so, so we have MIB positioning bags of termite into the WTC before 9/11 with radio controlled fuses! Gee, if the police and firemen had radios that worked as well as Dr Jones Radio Controlled Thermite BOMBS; that be something! How do you debate insane people? Can't! I teach at the "learning center", you can't debate those who lack the skills to understand.

A debate? How can you debate the fantasy of 9/11 truth? 9/11 truthers are false information experts, you can't sway them with physics or logic, they use hearsay, lies and false information to form a debate proof fantasy mentality. Fetzer sums it up best, he goes with what ever he says is true is! Fetzer believes in beam weapons! Debate that! The bs artist at work weaving their sound good threads of 9/11 CT are amusing, but not debatable. How do you debate beliefs based on fantasy ideas. How do you teach those who think they are thinking for themselves to realize they are regurgitating lies and false information. Debate them?

Truthers know they are right, truthers don't know hearsay is not evidence.

The truthers also have a short list of evidence for the debate. Let me review that shore list.
9/11 truth evidence list:
1. (the empty set)

That was fast, I would repeat it, but… ( http://911myths.com./ truthers can use this to find the truth, and debate themselves; self help - http://debunking911.com/ )

[metamars]

Originally Posted by beachnut

9/11 truth failed to present a single rational argument in 7 years.

You're lying. E.g., I myself have pointed out that the Bazant Zhou paper is illogical - it proves nothing because it can prove nothing. Furthermore, BZ ignored a body of research on axial impacts, where there's quite good agreement between theory and experiment (e.g., the paper by Ari-Gur, et. al.) Such papers, which are based on legitimate physics principles regarding the propagation of both elastic and inelastic waves, do not involve magical 'boundaries' to the propagation of said waves (which carry away energy), even if the 'boundaries' are conveniently lifted once the crushing front descends beyond these point. These papers also reflect the fact that elastic waves have speed of about 5100 m/s, and inelastic waves about 500 m/s - both far greater than the 8 m/s or so speed of impact in the BZ scenario.


I normally ignore your drivel, but in this case, it's good that you spammed this thread with a little more of your lying, propagandistic spew. One thing a serious dispute wiki would have to have is a rule to stick to the topic, subtopics, and points at hand. No over-arching "points", of which your lie about 911 truth having "failed to present a single rational argument in 7 years" is an excellent example. A dispute wiki will be for serious participants, who are going to make a conscious effort to be dispassionate, objective, and relevant at whatever level of granularity is involved, even if human nature compels all of us to fail at carrying out those objectives perfectly. Of course, ad hominems would also be banned.

If it happened to be true that the 911 truth movement had "failed to present a single rational argument in 7 years", then this would become glaringly obvious in a 911 dispute wiki that had the necessary levels of participation, as one could (in principle) look through the various subtopics and points of the dispute wiki, and see that the 911 truth movement had failed to produce a "single rational argument", throughout.

It just occurred to my that your sorry post suggests the following:
* arguing, partisan teams (such as truthers, debunkers) should be offered the chance to be self-regulating; If you were on a debunker team, your team would have 24 hours to remove your spam-like post, before being susceptible to red-flagging by truther teams and neutral teams (such as a fact check team; though it's also occurred to me that there could also be multiple governance teams, whose sole job would be to make red-flagging judgements based on whether basic rules of objectivity and relevance were being followed. One doesn't need a Ph.D. in anything to see through your crap.)

Once red-flags are issued, if the problem is not corrected within 24 hours, then the red-flags could not be rescinded. If a team allowed you to become a member, and then refused to diligently correct your spam and/or eject you from the team, the entire team would get punished, as it's red-flagged ratings climbed into the stratosphere.

Of course, those red-flagged ratings would be relative to different participating groups. Even assuming honest intentions by all, it is still to be expected that red-flagged ratings doled out by neutral parties are likely to be more objective than those doled out by partisan teams.

[SDC]

Metamars, or TLB, go ahead and set up your own wiki, or site, or whatever you want. Anyone who wants to go there can do so.

This reminds me of the "new investigation" threads. The only reasonable response from non-truthers is, "go ahead and organize or lobby for it. But without me/ us."

Go ahead. Carpe diem. But don't ask me to help; I believe that the debate, if there ever really were grounds on which to debate, is long over and won by the non-truthers. (I'm trying out that term, see if it works.)

'Bye.

[metamars]

Originally Posted by SDC

Metamars, or TLB, go ahead and set up your own wiki, or site, or whatever you want. Anyone who wants to go there can do so.

This reminds me of the "new investigation" threads. The only reasonable response from non-truthers is, "go ahead and organize or lobby for it. But without me/ us."

Go ahead. Carpe diem. But don't ask me to help; I believe that the debate, if there ever really were grounds on which to debate, is long over and won by the non-truthers. (I'm trying out that term, see if it works.)

'Bye.

Looks like you completely missed this:

Quote:

Frankly, so much time has elapsed since 911 that I don't know that even if the wiki-like platform was available or soon developed, whether participation would do it any justice. However, there could still be considerable value in going down this road, because disputes of one sort or another will always be with us, and 911 truthers and debunkers could essentially serve as beta testers for a technology that could help solve future disputes.

Since the JREF is supposed to promote critical thinking skills, it should presumably be full of people who would be happy to help develop a tool which would make disagreeing groups resolve intellectual disputes more rationally. Furthermore, enhancing rational dispute settling processes could have applications to governance in this internet age, and maybe even help settle international disputes.

Anybody who is interested in promoting critical thinking, and believes that a JREF subforum like the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories subforum is a good example of this, well, all I will say is "pleasant dreams". But even such a dreamlike attitude towards what I call a 'high strangeness' event like 911 should not apply to fundamental physics areas like particle theory and cosmology.

[beachnut]

Originally Posted by metamars

You're lying. E.g., I myself have pointed out that the Bazant Zhou paper is illogical -

No, you did not. You showed to me you have no idea what the purpose of their paper was, and then proved you have zero evidence to support your other ideas on 9/11; what ever fantasy you had. Your engineering bs is not amusing, if only you understood Bazant/Zhou paper rebuttal would mean nothing and will not refute impact, fire, collapse of the WTC. I am not sure how was your CT able to fuse the explosive thermite ridden building with radio controls, what frequency did you use in your fantasy? How did you keep accidental detonation from occurring before 9/11?

Your support of fantasy is repugnant to me, I see the lives lost on 9/11 and have no respect for those who spread lies, false information and fantasy based on shallow or no research and zero evidence. Debate away, but just do it to yourself. I have listened to the structural engineer who built the WTC and he thinks your ideas are mush. From the Number ONE source who built and designed the WTC structure, he thinks your ideas on 9/11 are junk. Debate ends; this is not about faith, this is a reality event, you do not understand it. You have been pre shoot down by the guy who built the WTC. Like loosing the football game but you are still on the field talking of how you won. Where is the debate in this failure to make a rational thesis?

I am an engineer and I understand Bazant Zhou paper for what it was days after 9/11. My mom and the USAF are proud I understand it and what it means. I further understand 9/11 truth and you have nothing to offer to understand 9/11. 7 years and you do not understand 9/11 and have no evidence; what will you debate with? talk?

http://911myths.com./ http://debunking911.com/ Some resources for you do debate yourself.

Debate yourself first, then you will start to realize you are evidence free and have faulty research and junk science, like bigfoot, moon landing deniers, and flat-earth groups. Better off debating yourselves, you may win. It is like debating why 1 plus 1 is not equal to 2; you have lost when the first plane killed people in NYC. Your work looks like apologies for the terrorists.

[e^n]

metamars, your suggestions are good and indeed I have thought about trying to make such a system. Unfortunately you require 3 teams of people, proponents, opponents and judges.

ASP.NET is unfortunately no good to me (everything I run is Linux) but I think a wiki would provide us a good base. I'll work on it, we need to have some sort of live discussion too so an IRC channel or similar would be a good investment.

http://911db.org/ is the site I have which I have yet to do anything useful with, so I will see if I can get MediaWiki on there shortly.

[metamars]

Originally Posted by e^n

metamars, your suggestions are good and indeed I have thought about trying to make such a system. Unfortunately you require 3 teams of people, proponents, opponents and judges.

ASP.NET is unfortunately no good to me (everything I run is Linux) but I think a wiki would provide us a good base. I'll work on it, we need to have some sort of live discussion too so an IRC channel or similar would be a good investment.

http://911db.org/ is the site I have which I have yet to do anything useful with, so I will see if I can get MediaWiki on there shortly.

Thanks. It probably would have been easy to get teams of proponents and opponents a few years ago (not sure about judges). While I think that a wiki tailored to disputes would be far superior to (what I understand of) normal wikis, it may well be better to have a normal wiki than no wiki at all. However, if you have programming skills useful for a linux wiki, and you can implement some features I suggested, say within a month or two, I'd still prefer it if you held off with the wiki until such time as the enhanced version is ready.

OTOH, what you (or somebody else) might do in the meantime is create a reference wiki. Basically, an wikified-index into other online papers, journal articles, and forum posts that might feed into the enhanced wiki.


For now, please consider subsuming this under Gregory Urich's the911forum.freeforums.org, where members of that forum can comprise 1 man 'teams'

Also, this is important enough to society, in general, that evangelizing it to, say, university computer science departments might get some hot-shot kids interested in this as participants in an open-source project.

Finally, the notion of a delphi process is not a new one. A survey of what's already been done could begin with googling:

+delphi +"decision making" +wiki

which yields 23,200 pages. Googling

+delphi +"decision making" +wiki +"open source"

yields 12,700 hits.

My guess is that somebody has already implemented a wiki with some of my requested features.

[Dave Rogers]

The problem with assigning a neutral moderator is that such a position may not exist. The status quo ante, after all, is that the majority are convinced that 9/11 was carried out by al-Qaeda operatives, planned by KSM and overseen by UBL. A position commonly held by many members of the truth movement is that the events of 9/11 are not sufficiently well understood and that a new investigation is necessary to investigate these events in more detail. This is strongly opposed by the debunking community, who believe that no such investigation is necessary because the events of 9/11 are thoroughly understood. In this context, given that those who have not formed at least a tentative conclusion on 9/11 are, almost by definition, inclined towards the truth movement's side of the debate, what possible position could qualify as "neutral"?

Dave

[SDC]

Metamars, I read your statement, and I believe understood it. As I said, your plan is just more of the "new investigation!" gambit, a P.T. Barnum exercise hoping to draw in the suckers. As such it is pointless. There was nothing "strange" about 9/11; it was unusual (thank heavens).

Again, go ahead and have your party, and maybe a few here will feel like joining it. Peachy. The only way you can appear to establish a neutral ground, however, is by setting up an overwhelming bias in your own favor.

[A W Smith]

http://911blogger.com/node/4773

[metamars]

Originally Posted by Dave Rogers

The problem with assigning a neutral moderator is that such a position may not exist. The status quo ante, after all, is that the majority are convinced that 9/11 was carried out by al-Qaeda operatives, planned by KSM and overseen by UBL. A position commonly held by many members of the truth movement is that the events of 9/11 are not sufficiently well understood and that a new investigation is necessary to investigate these events in more detail. This is strongly opposed by the debunking community, who believe that no such investigation is necessary because the events of 9/11 are thoroughly understood. In this context, given that those who have not formed at least a tentative conclusion on 9/11 are, almost by definition, inclined towards the truth movement's side of the debate, what possible position could qualify as "neutral"?

Dave

A neutral party adopts the attitude that no scenario is to be favored, or accepted a priori. Therefore, a neutral party should have no position - or rather, since 911 is a well known event, act as though they had no position.

As far as the limitations of neutral teams, my ideas about this are mostly half-baked, but I have thought of moderation mostly in terms of filters, with implications for the associated views which reflect those filters. These views can associate lower ratings with visible posts, and hence the truth-rating of a point being argued by those posts; but I suppose hiding the most offending or irrelevant posts could be allowed (normally by collapsing, not outright removal). If you lose faith in a moderating team A, you simply remove their associated filters, and go with moderating team B.

Though the red-flagging of a post would reflect the entire post, I can think of no reason why a neutral team couldn't just collapse the offending parts of a sub-standard post.

There should be no technical limit to how many neutral teams one can choose from*, though there's the very practical limit of how many capable volunteers one can scrounge up. Ideally, choices of neutral parties by proponent and opponent teams will converge, but that should not be thought of as a requirement - or even likely.

I'd also like to see implementation of ratings of neutral teams by non-neutral teams and lurkers.

There's an obvious problem which I'm basically ignoring - if neutral teams hide or delete posts by non-neutral team members, but the non-neutral members consider the point worth arguing, viewers who choose these exact neutral team filters will end up looking at a wiki argument with a lot of holes. Or, if neutral teams rate an argument as counter-factual or doubtful, but a lengthy argument ensues between non-neutral teams in that vein, anyway, than lurkers may question the perspicacity of the neutral teams, when really one or both non-neutral teams are wasting time. If lurker, proponent teams, and opponent teams all select the same neutral teams, and respect their judgements, these problems mostly goe away. Otherwise....

I would also caution against starting disputable points at too high a level of generalization. E.g., you might have top level categories:

MIHOP
LIHOP
mega-OOPS

but you wouldn't allow argument of these, directly. Instead, you could have a tree, as follows:


MIHOP
___<reference facts>
___WTC1
______<reference facts>
______CD
_________<reference facts>
_________thermite
____________<reference facts>
____________thread 1
____________thread 2
...
_________thermate
____________<reference facts>
____________thread 1
____________thread 2
...
_________DEW
____________<reference facts>
____________thread 1
____________thread 2
...
_________nukes
____________<reference facts>
____________thread 1
____________thread 2
...
_________"conventional"
____________<reference facts>
____________thread 1
____________thread 2


the rule of thumb would be that threads can be created (and thus argued) when there is a specific enough hypothesis that can be profitably argued. I realize that this is a judgment call - I may simply be restating the problem of at what point do you allow argumentation? Also, what if <reference facts> are in dispute?

BTW, in Sharepoint, you can have a hierarchy of sites. Each site can have it's own Documents folder. This is analogous to my repeated <reference facts> sections.

Another obvious problem: category duplication. E.g., most anything that appears in a MIHOP/WTC 1/ CD/thermite thread will be just as much at home at MIHOP/WTC 2/ CD/thermite . I guess the way to handle this is to make 1 dominant, and put a link at the other one. Different threads would be allowed only where absolutely necessary. However, this raises the interesting question of who would be entrusted to set up the logical tree structure, in the first place, and make links of the sort I mention above, in the second place?

* in a Day 1 implementation, presumably 1 fact checking team at a time, and 1 wiki-etiquette team at a time; Later on, look at combining the filtering effects of multiple, neutral teams which have the same basic tasks (fact checking, etiquette, etc.)

[e^n]

Originally Posted by metamars

As far as the limitations of neutral teams, my ideas about this are mostly half-baked, but I have thought of moderation mostly in terms of filters, with implications for the associated views which reflect those filters. These views can associate lower ratings with visible posts, and hence the truth-rating of a point being argued by those posts; but I suppose hiding the most offending or irrelevant posts could be allowed (normally by collapsing, not outright removal). If you lose faith in a moderating team A, you simply remove their associated filters, and go with moderating team B.

I don't really agree with this system, or a particular system of red flagging posts. Here is my take on things:

I think a site with four sections would be appropriate, the sections would be as follows:

• Proponents of 911 conspiracies
• Opponents of 911 conspiracies
• Neutral factual pages
• Debate

There would also be four groups of members split into two sides, proponents and reviewed proponents, opponents and reviewed opponents.

Proponents of conspiracies would be given free access to edit the first group, opponents the second. This allows unfettered discussion, and as long as moderation is quite strict, members registering as the opposite side and defacing pages could quickly be dealt with. (I believe in moderator approval for all registrations).

The second set of groups, the reviewed groups would be for people who have made even-handed edits, rational arguments etc, and have served a probationary period as moderators of their section. These groups would have the responsibility to collate each claim, and on the part of the proponents, the larger conspiracy in general into neutral pages primarily focused on fact. These pages can link to individual sides' discussions, but they should be clearly marked as such. The debates section's purpose should be quite evident.

The rest of your post I mostly agree with, especially the section on a tree structure. I can't make any guarantees about coding time for any alterations to software, but I will do what I can as needed.

I have set up a copy of MediaWiki on http://wiki.911db.org , feel free to register and add your thoughts. It's new software to me but I will go through the configuration in the next day or so.

[metamars]

Originally Posted by SDC

Metamars, I read your statement, and I believe understood it. As I said, your plan is just more of the "new investigation!" gambit, a P.T. Barnum exercise hoping to draw in the suckers. As such it is pointless. There was nothing "strange" about 9/11; it was unusual (thank heavens).

Again, go ahead and have your party, and maybe a few here will feel like joining it. Peachy. The only way you can appear to establish a neutral ground, however, is by setting up an overwhelming bias in your own favor.

If you really did understand it, than to continue to speculate about my "gambit" shows that you don't believe me. Quite frankly, I was interested in physics long, long, before 9/11, and ultimately, the quest for an ultimate theory is of more interest to me than any resolution of MIHOP/LIHOP/megaOOPS could ever be.

Whatever you think happened on 911, we're still talking about mass murder. It is basically about humans behaving badly - not much better than animals, frankly.

An ultimate theory represents an attempt to understand how the universe is sewn together. To me, that means it represents not only an inquiry into what the world "out there" is really like, but what the world "in here" is really like. To me, it is therefore a spiritual quest, not just an intellectual one. That quest is also suffering from the effects of tribalism, though not in a bloody way.

If you don't see that as a tragedy, also, well fine. Maybe you should hang out at Lubos Motl's blog, and cheerlead as he refers to other physicists as "crackpots". It's kind of obvious that you could convince yourself that you'd be doing something worthwhile. With any luck, you could fool other people, as well as yourself.

[SDC]

Originally Posted by metamars

If you really did understand it, than to continue to speculate about my "gambit" shows that you don't believe me. Quite frankly, I was interested in physics long, long, before 9/11, and ultimately, the quest for an ultimate theory is of more interest to me than any resolution of MIHOP/LIHOP/megaOOPS could ever be.

Whatever you think happened on 911, we're still talking about mass murder. It is basically about humans behaving badly - not much better than animals, frankly.

An ultimate theory represents an attempt to understand how the universe is sewn together. To me, that means it represents not only an inquiry into what the world "out there" is really like, but what the world "in here" is really like. To me, it is therefore a spiritual quest, not just an intellectual one. That quest is also suffering from the effects of tribalism, though not in a bloody way.

If you don't see that as a tragedy, also, well fine. Maybe you should hang out at Lubos Motl's blog, and cheerlead as he refers to other physicists as "crackpots". It's kind of obvious that you could convince yourself that you'd be doing something worthwhile. With any luck, you could fool other people, as well as yourself.

A fairly comic set of accusations. First, the true statement: I don't believe you. You are right. I won't elaborate, no point.

Second, I'm not interested in quests. I'm interested in facts, and realities.

Third, why do you think I don't regard 9/11 as a tragedy? I do. I know people who were killed and injured. I've lived around NY most of my adult life and, believe me, visiting the city after the attacks was painful. (I was living in Michigan in 1999-2004). And I also think that the way it looks is the way it was; a jihadist attack using airplanes to destroy buildings and kill people. End of story.

I have no idea who Lubos Motl is. All I have seen in your posts is claims that you are somehow representing science. I regard that as a false claim.

As for "fooling people," I think your posts are far from being as cogent as anything old P.T. ever had to say. They don't fool anyone.

Again, go set up your wiki, or whatever site, and have a good time.

[metamars]

Originally Posted by SDC

A fairly comic set of accusations. First, the true statement: I don't believe you. You are right. I won't elaborate, no point.

Second, I'm not interested in quests. I'm interested in facts, and realities.

So you say.

Quote:

Third, why do you think I don't regard 9/11 as a tragedy?

No, you misunderstood. The tragedy I referred to is the holding back of scientific progress in pursuing an ultimate theory. An ultimate physics theory that unifies quantum theory and relativity. Notice the word "also":

Quote:

If you don't see that as a tragedy, also,

Quote:

I do. I know people who were killed and injured. I've lived around NY most of my adult life and, believe me, visiting the city after the attacks was painful. (I was living in Michigan in 1999-2004). And I also think that the way it looks is the way it was; a jihadist attack using airplanes to destroy buildings and kill people. End of story.

Wow, a 2 sentence summation. Just think how much time and energy Peter Dale Scott wasted, when he just could have talked to you, instead of writing books on the subject! However, as you failed to understand my simple analogy of people talking past each other in string theory, vs. 911, I have my doubts that your 2 sentence summation is adequate, on that basis alone.

Quote:

I have no idea who Lubos Motl is. All I have seen in your posts is claims that you are somehow representing science. I regard that as a false claim.

As for "fooling people," I think your posts are far from being as cogent as anything old P.T. ever had to say. They don't fool anyone.

Again, go set up your wiki, or whatever site, and have a good time.

Thanks. You too - have a good time. When you get tired of your fantasy about my "gambit", I'm sure you'll have no trouble replacing it with another. Have fun with that one, also.

Don't worry if you don't know who Lubos Motl is. Your 2 sentence summaries would probably fail to entertain him, even if you joined him in calling other physicists "crackpots". You're probably better off reciting your "facts" here at JREF.

[metamars]

Originally Posted by e^n

I think a site with four sections would be appropriate, the sections would be as follows:

• Proponents of 911 conspiracies
• Opponents of 911 conspiracies
• Neutral factual pages
• Debate

Well, let's look at this in terms of high level goals. What I noticed in the particle physics world is people talking past each other. Both Woit and Smolin, who wrote entire books, expressed disappointment at their points not being addressed. Said Woit:

Quote:

I’d be happy to participate in the sort of debate you describe, but I don’t think you’re going to find many string theorists willing to go along with the idea. Lee Smolin and I both put a lot of effort into carefully putting into words our arguments about string theory, and I think both of us have been discouraged by how little serious response this led to

Now, there's no tool that, by itself, can force people to debate who don't want to debate. But if there is real interest in a debate, then you certainly don't want to encourage any sort of talking past each other process - which you can observe also in the case of Motl's (seemingly very significant) criticism of Lisi on Motl's blog, which didn't look like it got the sort of response that it deserved, either.

If we think of a debate as a boxing match, then I've basically described a hierarchical boxing ring. IMO, it's design should either force a debate to be constrained by points that either proponents or opponents felt were worth debating about, or else make it obvious that one side or another was ducking*.

In your schema, there's a forum just for debating. But, it's not clear that it would even be structured along the lines of either proponent or opponent wiki, much less both of them. If that's the case, it may be like those boxing matches one sees where the boxers mostly punch air.

Another problem is that, while using terms like "proponent' and "opponent" for convenience sake, there will be many CT's, and since government narratives don't all agree, "debunkers" will not be unified in their theories all the time, either. Should there be a separate wiki for each CT group that comes along?

One of the annoying things about politics in the US is the common assumption that people fall into some sort of left-right dichotomy. This is often deliberately inculcated by right wing radio talk show hosts. (Ah, look, I'm doing it myself!). Frankly, these notions could only fly in a society which is already dumbed down. Be that as it may, the reality is that there are many categorizations of political thought, and these categories can overlap, as well as not satisfy any sort of simplistic, left-right breakdown. If a dispute wiki is produced for debating, say, an ideal tax plan for the US after Obama becomes president, should there only be 2 schools of thought allowed, with their respective wikis?


* Or simply doesn't have a good answer. There are many questions are good, and one simply doesn't know how to answer them, or can't answer them, definitively. The person asking such a question often assumes that a non-answer or non-definitive answer means that one's own assumptions as to the correct answer are valid. But, it ain't necessarily so.

[A W Smith]

attention seeking fact deficit disorder. Take what you have to an international court or whatever and make your case. You have nothing new to debate,

[beachnut]

Originally Posted by metamars

Peter Dale Scott ...

...

Don't worry if you don't know who Lubos Motl is. Your 2 sentence summaries would probably fail to entertain him, even if you joined him in calling other physicists "crackpots". You're probably better off reciting your "facts" here at JREF.

Scott; what an expert! Great scott!

Motl would look at your posts and laugh at your lack of evidence. He thinks you lack knowledge with your failed attempt at 9/11 terrorist apologies and theories. You should study the people you name in posts, he sees your anti-intellectual approach as pure fantasy. Ask him.

Neat stuff

[SDC]

Two sentences?? I count 6 in the passage quoted. Well, go thou and figure, as the prophets said.

"Peter Dale Scott," forsooth. How about Chomsky? Who was the poster who was sure, sure, he would be able to convert Chomsky to the Truth, some time ago?

Yep, go set up your wiki. If you build it, they will...

[metamars]

Originally Posted by metamars

If a dispute wiki is produced for debating, say, an ideal tax plan for the US after Obama becomes president, should there only be 2 schools of thought allowed, with their respective wikis?

Maybe I should have been a little more explicit. Your scheme suggests to me that, the more schools of thought there regarding a given debate topic, there needs to be that many more school-specific wikis. If people, for whatever reason, come to view these school-specific wikis as their primary internet stomping grounds, you could have the debate wiki be a poorly utilized after-thought, even as the school-specific wikis received a lot of action, and even though they shared most of the same URL. Furthermore, the more schools of thought there are - I imagine in economics, you could have a dozen - the less likely anybody is to try and take in that many different wikis.

Maybe one way to guard against that is to insist that school specific wikis cannot start new threads, topics, and sub-topics unless they are first started in the debate wiki. Plus, people would have to be reminded that at least a distilled contribution, drawn from the school-specific wiki, has to end up in the common debate wiki. I.e., this needs to be partly a training issue, presumably enforced by nagging moderators.

In business meetings, attended by people with very different jobs, to keep the meeting reasonably short one often hears "let's take this offline". A school-specific wiki makes more sense to me if similarly conceived - as a sandbox for hashing out details not of interest to the larger group.

If you do adopt a rule as I suggest, viz., "Maybe one way to guard against that is to insist that school specific wikis cannot start new threads, topics, and sub-topics unless they are first started in the debate wiki.", wouldn't it make that much more sense to just implement the school-specific wikis to support a split screen view, where topics/subtopics/thread are replicated 1-1 from the top screen to the bottom, and nobody (save an admin, if deemed absolutely necessary) can directly create a subtopic/thread in the school-specific wiki? (Their creation would be automatic, mirroring their creation in the debate wiki. As a default, they would be locked, with a warning message not to unlock them, unless there was a good reason to develop them in the school-specific wiki.)

To be clear: Although I'm suggesting topic/subtopic/initial-post-in-a-thread should be automatically mirrored, none of the subsequent posts in a thread should be. If necessary, people can just copy and paste.

N.B.: If you google sharepoint and "open source", you can see that there's been a few implementations. Most of such source code is overkill for a dispute wiki, but I'll bet the site / sub-site hierarchy code could be very useful if you wanted to make a portal web site, encompassing heterogeneous topics and large fields that cry out for subdivisions. E.g., maybe the JREF forum/subforum structure could be implemented as site/subsite/dispute-wiki.

[metamars]

Originally Posted by metamars

BTW, I'm learning Microsoft Sharepoint which includes wikis, so maybe I will have more input later. As Sharepoint is programmable, and I am certified in VB.NET, maybe I will take a crack at adding such functionality, myself.

From what I've seen of Sharepoint wikis, they're pretty simple, except for the permission configurations. In fact, Microsoft approached a company making an enterprise level wiki ('confluence') to partner with them in making a connector for their two products.

Looks like neither of these two products natively support forum-like threads, nor the ability to make contributions from different groups (corresponding to schools of thought, in my scheme) segregatable, nor allow for overlaying logical structures at all, much less ones which allow participants to vote on their perception of the fidelity to these logical structures.

I've still got little idea of how programmable each should be, though I note that atlassian, which makes confluence, will release source code to customers, so in principle the sky's the limit.

[DC]

Originally Posted by jaydeehess

Dictator Cheney is gone??? awww he was gonna discuss the CTBUH .........




Now that there is funny, I tell ya what.

we can still do that. but not here, but there
http://the911forum.freeforums.org

[applecorped]

Originally Posted by Dictator Cheney

we can still do that. but not here, but there
http://the911forum.freeforums.org

I thought you were leaving. So much for the good news!

[metamars]

Originally Posted by e^n

I have set up a copy of MediaWiki on http://wiki.911db.org , feel free to register and add your thoughts. It's new software to me but I will go through the configuration in the next day or so.

Check Out this extension to the open source office suite called OpenOffice . It plugs into Writer, the analog to Microsoft Word.

Quote:

The Sun Wiki Publisher extension makes creating new wiki pages on MediaWiki servers an easy task. The extension allows users to create wiki pages without having to know the syntax of the MediaWiki markup language.

http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/f...sher_Extension

[metamars]

Sharepoint has threaded 'Discussion Boards' which can be created inside of a Sharepoint site or sub-site. They seem very primitive, compared to a spiffy forum implementation such as JREF has. The Sharepoint wikis are also contained within sites or sub sites.

However, in spite of the lack of features, it looks like it's promising to build on a Sharepoint paradigm because, besides the fact that it's programmable, it already supports groups with a rich selection of permissions. Not yet sure how readily groups can span different communication objects such as forums and wikis.

There's alternatives to Sharepoint, which work with openoffice. (Sharepoint is said to represent an attempt to "lock in" users to Microsoft products). See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O3spaces
http://www.alfresco.com/

Don't know how programmable these guys are.