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Roll Call: What do you think happened on 9/11, and why?

pgimeno said:
Bump for PhotoMatt, Fonebone, MicahJava, Tippit, tanabear and whoever else wants to participate.

Please remember this bit from the OP:
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They won't post here as they are afraid to put into words their beliefs, at least here.( I hope that wasn't discussion)
 
1. I woke up in a rental house at the beach.

2. The kids were little and not yet up, so I made a mad dash to the donut shop.

3. I bought way more donuts than I should have. Just about the perfect amount.

4. I heard the radio in the donut shop talking about tower 1 and it sounded like crazy talk.

5. I got back to the rental and gave the kids donuts.

6. I went next door and gathered their cousins, all about the same age as my kids and invited them over for donuts. I told the adults to wait until we were gone to turn on the news.

7. I played games and ate donuts with the best kids in the world while trying not to think about what I had heard.

8. I left the beach the next day so that I could go into work on Thursday and Friday. That was a waste of time.
 
Several well-educated, non-cave dwelling, non-goat herding, mostly Arab militant Islamists planned and carried out an attack on the United States, probably in retaliation for American meddling in Middle Eastern affairs.
 
As my contribution on this thread was requested in another thread, here goes.

Let E be the set of relevant empirical observations. Then by the principle of multiple explanations what I think happened is a probability distribution over the set H, where H is the set of hypotheses consistent with E, weighed by complexity and my own gratuitously chosen prior probabilities. In particular the probability mass is concentrated about equally among the "standard" hypothesis and the hypothesis of a minimal MIHOP (ie MIHOP by getting some jihadi's to crash planes into buildings), but of course including every hypothesis consistent with E, such as a small probability that there is no such thing as 9/11 because I'm dreaming right now and I'll wake up again soon in the "real" world.
 
caveman1917 said:
As my contribution on this thread was requested in another thread, here goes.

Let E be the set of relevant empirical observations. Then by the principle of multiple explanations what I think happened is a probability distribution over the set H, where H is the set of hypotheses consistent with E, weighed by complexity and my own gratuitously chosen prior probabilities. In particular the probability mass is concentrated about equally among the "standard" hypothesis and the hypothesis of a minimal MIHOP (ie MIHOP by getting some jihadi's to crash planes into buildings), but of course including every hypothesis consistent with E, such as a small probability that there is no such thing as 9/11 because I'm dreaming right now and I'll wake up again soon in the "real" world.
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My head hurts from reading this. Now in simple terms what do you think happened on 9/11?
 
theprestige said:
Mainstream explanation, with a small chance that someone or some faction in the US government was in on the plan and actively contributed to its success.
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Specifically, that the hijackers were ultimately not recruited and sent on their missions by Al Qaeda / OBL / KSM, but by other agencies.
 
bknight said:
My head hurts from reading this. Now in simple terms what do you think happened on 9/11?
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theprestige said:
Mainstream explanation, with a small chance that someone or some faction in the US government was in on the plan and actively contributed to its success.
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Oystein said:
Specifically, that the hijackers were ultimately not recruited and sent on their missions by Al Qaeda / OBL / KSM, but by other agencies.
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Rather something like 50% mainstream, 45% MIHOP, 5% everything else.
 
bknight said:
Rather an ambiguous answer, and since you haven't given a straightforward answer again, I'll not ask for the answer again.
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Heh. I was actually thinking this was pretty straightforward and clear-cut statement of his position. I was wondering why he didn't just give us his percentage breakdown to begin with, instead of that elaborately obfuscatory seminar in statistical jargon.
 
theprestige said:
Heh. I was actually thinking this was pretty straightforward and clear-cut statement of his position. I was wondering why he didn't just give us his percentage breakdown to begin with, instead of that elaborately obfuscatory seminar in statistical jargon.
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I disagree as he is still hiding behind percentages and vague descriptions of what happened. For example WTF is 45% MIHOP he need to describe what his explanation to make it happen on purpose means to him.
 
theprestige said:
Heh. I was actually thinking this was pretty straightforward and clear-cut statement of his position. I was wondering why he didn't just give us his percentage breakdown to begin with, instead of that elaborately obfuscatory seminar in statistical jargon.
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Because my position isn't actually that clear-cut down to the exact percentage points, it may as well be, for example, 45% mainstream, 45% MIHOP, 10% other. Hence why I gave the more general description of the probability mass being about equally concentrated in mainstream and MIHOP, with a small probability covering everything else.
 
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bknight said:
I disagree as he is still hiding behind percentages and vague descriptions of what happened. For example WTF is 45% MIHOP he need to describe what his explanation to make it happen on purpose means to him.
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But he HAS described that, and two of us have tried to explain that description to you!

I'll repeat it for you:

Caveman thinks it is likely (close to a 50:50 likelihood) that the people ultimately behind the 4 teams of hijackers were not Osama bin Laden and/or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (and whoever unwittingly may have supported them financially), but an (unnamed) other secret agency of an (unnamed) state (presumable the USA, or an ally of her secret services) manipulated the hijackers (on some level - either manipulated the 19, or manipulated OBL/KSK, or...)

Now it is true that this is lacking detail - I hint on areas that could well do with more detail.

But it is, for the purpose of this thread (opening post: "I would like everybody ... to state as consisely as possible your working hypothesis of what happened on 9/11, who did it, how they did it, and why they did it."), a good start. Ok, the "who did it" part I'd be interested in.
 
Oystein said:
But he HAS described that, and two of us have tried to explain that description to you!

I'll repeat it for you:

Caveman thinks it is likely (close to a 50:50 likelihood) that the people ultimately behind the 4 teams of hijackers were not Osama bin Laden and/or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (and whoever unwittingly may have supported them financially), but an (unnamed) other secret agency of an (unnamed) state (presumable the USA, or an ally of her secret services) manipulated the hijackers (on some level - either manipulated the 19, or manipulated OBL/KSK, or...)

Now it is true that this is lacking detail - I hint on areas that could well do with more detail.

But it is, for the purpose of this thread (opening post: "I would like everybody ... to state as consisely as possible your working hypothesis of what happened on 9/11, who did it, how they did it, and why they did it."), a good start. Ok, the "who did it" part I'd be interested in.
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Exactly my point, he hides behind ambiguity using all your UNs. So this as you point out further in the post does not give concisely what (s)he thinks/believes.

For example I could say there is a 50-50% chance of rain today. In other words I don't have a firm opinion of whether it will rain or not.
 
bknight said:
Exactly my point, he hides behind ambiguity using all your UNs. So this as you point out further in the post does not give concisely what (s)he thinks/believes.

For example I could say there is a 50-50% chance of rain today. In other words I don't have a firm opinion of whether it will rain or not.
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I could just as well state that your claim of "50-50% chance of rain" is hiding behind ambiguity because you didn't specify exactly where in the sky the cloud would form or on what exact second of the day the first drop would hit the ground. In the same way that you use the hypothesis "it will rain today" as a shorthand for every hypothesis under which "it rains today" is true (ie it will rain at 1 minute past midnight or it will rain at 2 minutes past midnight or it will rain at 3 minutes past midnight and so on and so forth) the hypothesis MIHOP is a shorthand for every hypothesis under which MIHOP is true.
 
caveman1917 said:
I could just as well state that your claim of "50-50% chance of rain" is hiding behind ambiguity because you didn't specify exactly where in the sky the cloud would form or on what exact second of the day the first drop would hit the ground. In the same way that you use the hypothesis "it will rain today" as a shorthand for every hypothesis under which "it rains today" is true (ie it will rain at 1 minute past midnight or it will rain at 2 minutes past midnight or it will rain at 3 minutes past midnight and so on and so forth) the hypothesis MIHOP is a shorthand for every hypothesis under which MIHOP is true.
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The subject of the thread is what you think, not every hypothesis that exists.
 
caveman1917 said:
Because my position isn't actually that clear-cut down to the exact percentage points, it may as well be, for example, 45% mainstream, 45% MIHOP, 10% other. Hence why I gave the more general description of the probability mass being about equally concentrated in mainstream and MIHOP, with a small probability covering everything else.
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In other words, you have no idea what happened, and you're just trying to conceal that behind a smokescreen of obscure and irrelevant mathematics.
 
The Common Potato said:
After the event, it's possible to say with 100% accuracy whether it rained or not.
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Can you tell me whether it rained on the Southern-most tip of the Italian peninsula on 1 January 50,000 BC? Likewise if, say, just before midnight you see rain clouds forming then you can already say before the event with reasonably good accuracy that it will rain. Probabilities reflect a lack of knowledge, not whether an event has or hasn't happened yet. The fact that an event hasn't happened yet would be one common source of lack of knowledge though.
 
caveman1917 said:
Can you tell me whether it rained on the Southern-most tip of the Italian peninsula on 1 January 50,000 BC? Likewise if, say, just before midnight you see rain clouds forming then you can already say before the event with reasonably good accuracy that it will rain. Probabilities reflect a lack of knowledge, not whether an event has or hasn't happened yet. The fact that an event hasn't happened yet would be one common source of lack of knowledge though.
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He indicated after the event. Of course one has to be in a position to be able to observe to be able to say that the event happened with 100% accuracy. Quit trying to obfuscate the discussion with what might have occurred.

The question is clear enough, what do you think happened on 9/11 as the thread topic suggests. Clear concise thoughts without statistical probabilities that you continue to use. What happened?
 
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