How do Truthers explain the cooperation/coordination needed within the US govt...

[Allen773]

Prove your innocence, folks. It’s just as important as proving your guilt.

 

[caveman1917]

No, in fact, I'm not. You're committing the fallacy of argument from incredulity, by claiming that it's impossible to sink a ship without killing some of the people on board. I'm pointing out that it is in fact relatively straightforward to do so, therefore you cannot conclude that sinking a ship implies killing people. I don't need to conclude that Northwoods specifically excludes deaths; you're the one making the affirmative claim (that Northwoods is evidence that the US government is prepared to kill its own citizens in false flag attacks), so all I need to do is point out that your evidence doesn't support the claim.

I didn't say that it's impossible to sink a ship without killing some of the people on board, I said that sinking a ship is likely to kill some of the people on board.

The refugees needn't be in on the plan, and the people being wounded in fake assassination attempts needn't not be in on it. And, of course,

This is what you said:

And, of course, it's perfectly straightforward to sink a boat without killing anyone on board; you simply have the rescue vessel take everyone off, sink the boat, then say, "We picked this boatload of people out of the sea after the Cubans sank their boat."

The refugees involved would be perfectly aware that they were picked up before the boat sank and not afterwards, hence they would need to be in on it lest they contradict the desired story.

 

[caveman1917]

Prove your innocence, folks. It’s just as important as proving your guilt.

Oh right, using judicial social practice as a substitute for logical reasoning, another box on the pseudo-skeptic list.

 

[Allen773]

Oh right, using judicial social practice as a substitute for logical reasoning, another box on the pseudo-skeptic list.

This is boring. Maybe you should brush up on your own logical reasoning skills before discussing serious stuff.

 

[Oystein]

...neither I nor anyone else in this thread claimed there was covert US government involvement in the 9/11 attacks. ...

And yet you have said explicitly that such a covert government (US? Other?) involvement is as likely as the "Al Qaeda alone" scenario, right?

What do you base these essentially equal probability percentages on? Evidence? Imagination?

You see, there are multiple wide, long, large trails of evidence implicating Al Qaeda.
There is some evidence of Al Qaeda receiving money from Saudi sources, coordinated via embassy and consulates.
What evidence is there that it all links back to some (or the US?) government MAKING 9/11 happen - as in actively conjuring up, planning and executing the framing of AQ? Zero evidence, right?



So what EVIDENCE is your 50:50 assessment of AQ:MIHOP based on?

 

[Allen773]

And yet you have said explicitly that such a covert government (US? Other?) involvement is as likely as the "Al Qaeda alone" scenario, right?

What do you base these essentially equal probability percentages on? Evidence? Imagination?

You see, there are multiple wide, long, large trails of evidence implicating Al Qaeda.
There is some evidence of Al Qaeda receiving money from Saudi sources, coordinated via embassy and consulates.
What evidence is there that it all links back to some (or the US?) government MAKING 9/11 happen - as in actively conjuring up, planning and executing the framing of AQ? Zero evidence, right?



So what EVIDENCE is your 50:50 assessment of AQ:MIHOP based on?

Something something Northwoods something something Gladio

 

[caveman1917]

This is boring. Maybe you should brush up on your own logical reasoning skills before discussing serious stuff.

My goodness what a charade.

 

[Oystein]

...just because there would be no known precedent doesn't mean there is no precedent.

But it means there is no EVIDENCE of precedent, and basing probability estimates on precedent that is NOT IN EVIDENCE is equivalent to making up ****. It is all in your head - alone. It is Conspiracy Theorists who think that way - only them. It's called "projection": They think it's what they would do if they were in power. Which is why it is important to make sure Conspiracy Theories and Theorists never gain the upper hand politically.

There is a 50:50 probability they would mass murder all debunkers and non-CTists.

 

[Allen773]

My goodness what a charade.

Describing yourself again?

 

[caveman1917]

And yet you have said explicitly that such a covert government (US? Other?) involvement is as likely as the "Al Qaeda alone" scenario, right?

What do you base these essentially equal probability percentages on? Evidence? Imagination?

The principle of maximum entropy.

You see, there are multiple wide, long, large trails of evidence implicating Al Qaeda.
There is some evidence of Al Qaeda receiving money from Saudi sources, coordinated via embassy and consulates.
What evidence is there that it all links back to some (or the US?) government MAKING 9/11 happen - as in actively conjuring up, planning and executing the framing of AQ? Zero evidence, right?

And what evidence is there that some government did not make 9/11 happen? Zero evidence, right? We're going in circles here.

 

[Allen773]

What evidence is there that I did not make 9/11 happen? Or Oystein, or Dave Rogers, or Axxman, or indeed, you, caveman1917?

Lots of uncertainty here, after all....

 

[Oystein]

...
1. Of course you can prove a negative, we do this all the time.
...

How?

 

[Allen773]

How?

Well Oystein, I can prove that you weren’t involved in making 9/11 happen. I can also prove that you were. The two are equally probable.

 

[Oystein]

The principle of maximum entropy.

Hmmm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_maximum_entropy

Can you show your work and why you arrived at the rather precise estimate of 50%:45%?
Which numbers were your input, which mathematical operations did you perform based on what model assumptions, and did this approach result in the probabilities you provided? Yes - or rather NO? (Hint: I bolded the correct answer)

If the answer is "No" (and it is!!), you just made up ****. Unless the "principle of maximum entropy" states that in all unproven dychotomies, no matter the distribution of evidence, the result is always "50:50". Which it isn't.

In other word: You just made up ****.

And what evidence is there that some government did not make 9/11 happen? Zero evidence, right? We're going in circles here.

Classical reversal of Burden of Evidence. You are desperate to find at least one person here who falls for this old, worn (and sillily invalid) Truther ploy, right?

 

[caveman1917]

Describing yourself again?

You're embarrassing yourself. But since you seem to be impervious to reason, perhaps employing a fallacy (in particular an appeal to authority) may work. Let's start with your hilarious claim that you "can't prove a negative" as explained here.

A principle of folk logic is that one can’t prove a negative.
Dr. Nelson L. Price, a Georgia minister, writes on his website that ‘one of the laws of logic is that you can’t prove a negative.’ Julian Noble, a physicist at the University of Virginia, agrees, writing in his ‘Electric Blanket of Doom’ talk that ‘we can’t prove a negative proposition.’ University of California at Berkeley Professor of Epidemiology Patricia Buffler asserts that ‘The reality is that we can never prove the negative, we can never prove the lack of effect, we can never prove that something is safe.’ A quick search on Google or Lexis-Nexis will give a mountain of similar examples.

But there is one big, fat problem with all this. Among professional logicians, guess how many think that you can’t prove a negative? That’s right: zero. Yes, Virginia, you can prove a negative, and it’s easy, too. For one thing, a real, actual law of logic is a negative, namely the law of non-contradiction. This law states that that a proposition cannot be both true and not true. Nothing is both true and false. Furthermore, you can prove this law. It can be formally derived from the empty set using provably valid rules of inference. (I’ll spare you the boring details). One of the laws of logic is a provable negative. Wait… this means we’ve just proven that it is not the case that one of the laws of logic is that you can’t prove a negative. So we’ve proven yet another negative! In fact, ‘you can’t prove a negative’ is a negative  so if you could prove it true, it wouldn’t be true! Uh-oh.

Here's your homework: Derive the law of non-contradiction in the way indicated in this paper, show us the "boring details." After that we'll move on to your other pseudo-logical nonsense.

 

[caveman1917]

Hmmm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_maximum_entropy

Can you show your work and why you arrived at the rather precise estimate of 50%:45%?
Which numbers were your input, which mathematical operations did you perform based on what model assumptions, and did this approach result in the probabilities you provided? Yes - or rather NO? (Hint: I bolded the correct answer)

If the answer is "No" (and it is!!)

Bold of you to declare what the answer is to a technical question in a formalism which you hadn't even heard of until 5 minutes ago. Too bad that it's the wrong answer, the maximum entropy distribution over a universe with 2 outcomes under no constraints is, in fact, 50/50.

Classical reversal of Burden of Evidence. You are desperate to find at least one person here who falls for this old, worn (and sillily invalid) Truther ploy, right?

Blah blah blah. The simple fact of the matter is that there is neither evidence for covert involvement nor against covert involvement, giving us 50/50 as the maximum entropy distribution.

 

[Oystein]

Well Oystein, I can prove that you weren’t involved in making 9/11 happen. I can also prove that you were. The two are equally probable.

You mean you can NOT prove I weren't involved and you can NOT prove I was, right?

Now a claim that I was (or wasn't) involved is quite specific - far more specific than what Caveman claims: That some (unspecified) agency within some (unspecified government) was involved actively at some (unspecified) level by doing something (unspecified) that can be characterized as MIHOP.

It is difficult enough to probe I was not involved, especially today: There is such scant evidence of what I did and didn't do prior to 9/11: There probably exists some evidence that I was in NYC at the end of the 1990s (photos should be somewhere, I probably still have my old passport with the entry stamp from La Guardia), so there is initial evidence that I could have been on a spying mission back then. Some US services probably still have some records stored somewhere about my trip. But otherwise? My email accounts and computers of the time no longer exist, the data is probably irretrievably deleted. Evidence of my employment is severly limited, as more than 20 years have passed, and anyway me receiving wages and what not could have been a front, right? So there is plenty of room for me to have helped organize 9/11 - and evidence to be evasive.

By the principle of maximum entropy, I just learned, this means there is an almost 50% chance I did 9/11.

And also a 50% that you did 9/11

And also a 50% that Caveman did 9/11!!!

But wait, wait ... the Wiki article on Principle of maximum entropy states that, if no testable information exists, Entropy maximization

... respects the universal "constraint" that the sum of the probabilities is one. Under this constraint, the maximum entropy discrete probability distribution is the uniform distribution,
p_i = 1/n for all i i element of {1, ..., n}

There were what - 6 billion or so people alive in 2001? Then each had a probability of having masterminded 9/11 of 1/6,000,000,000.

Unless there was evidence that Osama Bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammend were behind it...




But I digress:
Proving that I, specifically, did NOT do it is difficult enough - more difficult than proving I did it IF I did it.

But proving that no one out of hundreds of thousands of individuals anywhere in a position to be involved with covert government operations was involved is the kind of global negative that USUALLY cannot be proven, and demanding evidence to prove that kind of a negative is disingenuous.

 

[Oystein]

Hi Caveman,

how would you go about proving this negative?

Among professional logicians, guess how many think that you can’t prove a negative? That’s right: zero.

Or in general: How do you go about proving a global negative claim such as "No government agency was involved in Making 9/11 Happen on Purpose"?

Is it practically possible to prove such a negative?

 

[Oystein]

Bold of you to declare what the answer is to a technical question in a formalism which you hadn't even heard of until 5 minutes ago. Too bad that it's the wrong answer, the maximum entropy distribution over a universe with 2 outcomes under no constraints is, in fact, 50/50.

Explain your reasons to believe there are only 2 possible outcomes.
Explain your reasons to believe there are no constraints. Do you assume the weight of evidence is equal on both sides of the (alleged) 2 possible outcomes?

I think both assumptions are very obviously wrong.

Blah blah blah. The simple fact of the matter is that there is neither evidence for covert involvement nor against covert involvement, giving us 50/50 as the maximum entropy distribution.

You misapply the principle.

There is of course also the possibility that aliens did 9/11, that it didn't happen and is just a weird dream we all share, and that four planes genuinely got off course accidentally that day. So that's five possible outcomes, and all have the same 20% probability, according to your method.

Of course that is totally silly. Please explain WHY that is silly!

 

[Leftus]

And I gave an example of one such theory claiming that 9/11 was an "inside job" and showed that it required no such large scale cooperation/coordination, thereby refuting the claim in the OP.

Beg your pardon, but have you seen any goalposts around these parts? I swore they were right here a post ago.


So do you now admit that your example conversation was disingenuous since you now acknowledge the existence of " anyone else in this thread making the claim that there was covert US involvement in 9/11. "