Are most "scientific" results wrong?

Of course most scientific results are wrong, for the simple reason that most scientific research is funded - whether directly or indirectly - by organizations with a vested commercial interest in obtaining specific results. The days of independent, objective research - usually carried out by maverick researchers with a private income and a passion for science - pretty much ended when Edison invented the concept of research and development as a single entity (this was the only thing Edison ever invented, by the way).

So now we have researchers being paid to find evidence in support of man-made global warming, researchers being paid to find positive results in drug and vaccine trials, and so on. Inevitably - through data selection bias, observational bias, group reinforcement bias and a dozen other psychological mechanisms - the results of any such research are going to be skewed. And that's leaving aside deliberate fraud, which is widespread in R&D.

It's not just money, Fred. With the "publish or perish" environment in academia, scientists are encouraged to cut corners to come out with something new and noteworthy. What is needed is some sort of organization that tries to reproduce reported results.

Bob

A lot remains to be discovered in science I feel sure. I'm guessing that our road of discovery is only in its infancy if humans should go on from here another 10 thousand years. However, I'm more concerned with the problem of underdetermination--the observation that the same results can be used to support different often wildly competing theories. While I'm just as interested in verifying the results obtained by reasearch in other labs, I am always attentive to the strengths of the ontological commitments being made by scientists producing those results. Recently, for instance, I was presented with the video of the Architects and Engineers who claim that building 7 came down by demmolition. Both sides of the issue see the exact same video but come to very different conclusions! What prior commitments are at work that would bring equally credentialed people to opposite conclusions?

I certainly agree with you that the preponderance and consilience of the evidence suffices in many case to resolve conflicts. But the theory of underdetermination is clear. It says that no amount of data is sufficient to determine (to fix ) a theory. This comes as a result of at least two things: (1) the same copious data can be used to explain opposite theories and (2) disconfirming evidence can always be waiting just around the corner. Your posit that a hypothesis may be verified within a certain range begs certain questions---what criterion is there to establish some agreement for either “verification” or “certain range”?

Building 7 is an interesting case in point. Both sides seem to possess respectable enough scientists who think they have good evidence for, or the absence of, chemical analysis of explosives. “Preponderance” is apparently not doing its job here. A&E is still, I believe, gathering members and appealing to congress for an independent investigation.

I’m with you, Fred, and believe there is enough evidence to support no demolitions. But why do certain experts persist in not thinking so if “evidence usually narrows the options”?

Are you Tommy from the old board?

Bob

Hi blarney. I agree with you---their claim doesn't make a lot of sense. Just as a challenge however, I'd like to see if you could spell out in logical terms exactly why exactly it "doesn't make a lot of sense".

And THEY say the evidence for controlled demolition is in the video showing the nature of the free fall of building 7. Since I am going to have to debate this issue soon, I'd really appreciate some help and support somewhat better than your "there is no evidence". The devil is in the details exhibited and contained in the video of the collapse for instance, and surely it is not well contained in your denial, however emotionally satisfying, that there is no evidence at all. I'm not going to get very far by proclaiming to the hostile crowd present at the debate that there is no evidence.

Tommy - here's an article from The Skeptical Inquirer about the WTC conspiracy claims. Might give you some of the info you're looking for.

www.csicop.org/si/show/the_9_11_truth_movement_the_top_conspiracy_theory_a_decade_later/

@tommy


Well, the claim is ridiculous for many reasons. First of all, what would be the point of going to the enormous trouble and risk of wiring a building with high explosives if you are going to fly a plane into it anyway (in the case of the two main towers)?

Is it seriously being suggested that crashing a passenger plane into the building wasn't going to cause enough damage or kill enough people?

And in the case of WTC7, how would you know in advance that this building was going to be extensively damaged and set on fire when the plane crashed into the north WTC?

The idea that three WTC towers were SECRETLY wired with explosives is also patently absurd. This is a claim that could only be made by someone who knew nothing about explosives. It would have taken a team of demolition experts weeks, even months, to rig one of the towers with explosives, and there would be miles and miles of wires throughout the building. But no one - not the thousands of workers and visitors, not the electricians and maintenance men, not the security men - noticed that this was going on? Puhleeze! This is just too absurd to even take seriously.

And again, why bother to go to all this trouble if the intention is to fly a plane into the building?

Or, conversely, why kill yourself flying a plane into the building if you can demolish it by pressing a button?

(And in the case of WTC7, why wait 7 hours before demolishing the building? Wouldn't it make more sense to do it immediately after the planes hit? Were the people who demolished the building waiting for the fire to reach a level of intensity which could plausibly account for the building's collapse?)

And by the way, the alleged explosives could not have been detonated by radio, as this would have involved a high risk of premature detonation (ie, with all the radio-operated gadgets in a large building there would be a good chance that one of them operated on the same frequency as the detonators).

And by the way, rigging a building with explosives is a complex and intricate business, involving carefully timed explosions in a particular sequence. And such a set up would have been ruined by the plane crashing into the building and the resultant fire.

And also by the way, why didn't the impact cause any of the prepositioned explosives (or the initiator charges) to go off?

Demolition theorists point to what appears to be explosions taking place as the buildings collapse. But if you look closely (or look at close-up images), you will see that the jet of air/smoke/dust that is expelled begins slowly and accelerates as the collapse progresses. This is the OPPOSITE of what would happen if these were explosive charges or squibs. Explosives would discharge rapidly and then recede. This is conclusive proof that these blasts of air are NOT explosives going off.

Demolition theorists also make a big deal of the fact that the buildings fell "in their own footprint".
In fact this is one of the strongest arguments AGAINST their theory.

Let me explain. There are two ways to wire a building for demolition. They can be summarized as the easy way and the hard way. The easy way is simply to place explosives at the base of a building, on one side. In other words, blow up two or more of its main supports and allow the weight of the building to do the rest of the work. This method is used to demolish buildings - especially things like chimney stacks - that have no other buildings around them.

The hard way involves wiring the building so that when it collapses, it collapses into its own "footprint" - ie straight down. This method is used when there are other buildings in the vicinity, or where there are people around who might be injured by flying debris. The hard way takes far longer to set up, and involves considerably more wiring.

So the question is: why on earth would the people who carried out the attacks go to so much additional trouble and risk to wire a building to fall in its own footprint if their aim was to cause as much death and destruction as possible? Were they trying to minimize the damage? Why didn't they just wire the building the easy way - ie, to fall over sideways and scatter debris in all directions? They've flown a plane into it, and they're demolishing it - but they're demolishing it using a method designed to keep the damage to a minimum?

And why would anyone want to demolish WTC7 anyway? One demolition theorist told me that the CIA (who had offices in the building) wanted it demolished "to destroy the evidence." "The evidence of what?" I asked him. "The evidence of their involvement in the attacks!" he said.
So there you have it. They demolished the building in order to destroy the evidence that they demolished the building.

The whole thing is ridiculous. I can give you at least ten other reasons why WTC7 - and the two main towers - were not, and COULD NOT, have been demolished by controlled explosions. It didn't happen. And there is no evidence at all that it did.

But don't expect the believers to be impressed by facts and logic. They have a huge emotional investment in their theory, and they are hostile to facts - and to the people presenting these acts - that contradict or refute their claims. For many of these people, belief in the controlled explosion theory has become their religion.

Thanks Tommy, but stamina has nothing to do with it. I love the board. To me it's fun. It kees my mind fresh to talk to people with different ideas. And it will be a lot more fun if you stick around.

Bob

If the two main towers collapsed as a result of fire, it doesn't exactly support the claim they usually make that no high rise building has ever collapsed as a result of fire, does it?

And where is the evidence that WTC7 was demolished?
There is none whatsoever.

Most controlled explosion theorists (believers) claim that all three buildings were brought down with explosives.
They also typically claim:

"The fire in WTC7 wasn't big enough to cause the building to collapse".
They usually back up this assertion by showing photos of the *front* of the building before it collapsed. In these photos it looks as if there is only a small fire. These photos are deceptive and misleading. If you look at photos of the rear of the building it is clear that the whole interior of the building was an inferno. In addition, 25% of the building had been demolished by debris from the north tower explosion. The building was in danger of collapsing even if it hadn't been on fire. In fact firefighters expected it to fall.

And in this 7-hour inferno, the explosives supposedly planted all over the building didn't burn (most explosives don't explode when they are exposed to heat, but they do burn), the wires didn't burn, the detonator caps didn't melt or explode... Did the people who wired the building use indestructible explosives, detonators, wires etc? The reality is there is NO WAY a demolition set-up would not be destroyed by a raging fire. This is just not possible.


"No high rise building has ever collapsed from fire alone."
This is a silly statement - and in fact it isn't true. The Kader toy factory in Thailand collapsed from fire, as did 11 floors of the Windsor Building in Madrid. Very few high rise buildings go on fire because modern buildings usually have sprinkler systems and other elaborate safeguards against fire. There have only been a handful of significant fires in high rise buildings worldwide. In the case of building 7, firefighters had great difficulty accessing the building. The water supply was also disconnected. Which meant that the fire raged for several hours without intervention. It is meaningless to compare the unique circumstances of this fire with other fires in high rise buildings.


Kader toy factory

"Explosions were heard in the building"
This is also a silly argument. There are always explosions in fires. In large buildings there are going to be hundreds of objects - gas cylinders, boilers, oxygen tanks, containers of industrial cleaning materials etc. - that will explode in a fire. It would be more remarkable if there were no explosions.

But the main argument against the demolition theory is that it doesn't make any sense, and there isn't a shred of evidence to support it.

Lex parsimoniae.

Faith, and a devotion to a flawed ideology.

Bob

Conspiracy theories are all way too complex. They are Rube Goldberg systems that are unnecessarily expensive and complicated used to achieve a result that could easily have been done by any number of very simple and cheap methods. Plus, the conspiracy believers are somehow always able to find obvious clues of the conspiracies that would have been very easy to hide. The conspiracies just don't make sense, at least as described by their true beleivers.

From my experience, ideologies have a "sticking power." My father was a lifelong communist party member. I grew up reading the Daily Worker every day. Any arguments contradicting the view that history was on our side were brushed away as coming from capitalist apologists. It wasn't until the Soviet Union sent troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968 that I started to seriously have doubts. Here was an event that didn't fit in. Of course there were plenty of other events, such as the bloody suppression of Hungary in 1956 and the revelations about Stalin's murderous rampages that came out that same year. But those were filtered out. For some reason, this one stuck. It took about 3 years before I was able to dump the whole ideology.

I read a story once about a devoted communist in East Germany who lived near a prison. He would frequently hear screams from the prison but he payed no attention. Then one night, he HEARD the screams. It suddenly dawned upon him that there were human beings in there that were being tortured. He fled to the West soon afterward.

So Tommy, there seems to be a "tipping point" when contrary facts make a sudden impression. Keep talking and keep trying.

Bob

Thanks Bob. I hope you are right about that tipping point. But I wish you would take a look at the site I enclose here. These experts---PhD's from Harvard, Yale etc.----don't appear to be anywhere near a tipping point and, Fred,they surely don't appear to be low on any social scale that is apparent to me.

www.ae911truth.org/news-section/41-articles/798-who-are-these-2000-architects-and-engineers.html