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

[caveman1917]

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.

Hi Caveman,

how would you go about proving this negative?


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?

I'll just refer you to the third point I made in earlier post on this subject:

3. Even if it were impossible to prove a claim, that's still no reason to consider the claim true. "It's impossible to prove this claim therefor I'm believing it" - seriously, think that one through for a second.

I believe that the technical term for what you're doing is "whining." If you can't back up your claim then don't make it, it's that simple, and no amount of whining gets you out of the burden of proof for your claims.

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.

Wait, you mean that, like, the maximum entropy distribution depends on the choice of sample space? No, it can't be true! *Gasp* We should tell the world!

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!

Fascinating how you immediately jump to pretending to be some sort of knowledgeable teacher on a subject you never even heard of until just earlier today.

Here's your homework as well:

Derive the law of non-contradiction in the way indicated in this paper, show us the "boring details."

We shall continue this discussion after your successful completion of it.

 

[caveman1917]

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. "

Giving an example of an hypothesis with a specific property is not the same as claiming the hypothesis to be true. As for your persistent claims of disingenuity, I think you might want to look up the - much referenced in this thread - concept of "projection".

 

[BStrong]

Not at all, it's possible to shoot people in the head in exactly the right way so that it doesn't actually kill them but merely wounds them. I would comment that your inability to understand how things can be done without killing people says more about your own imagination than the proclivities of any government. Like I said, your argument can be used regarding any statement short of literally using the term "kill".

It's "possible" that a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich, but there's no evidence to support that premise.

Thanks for proving, yet again, that CTists base their worldview on fiction, not fact.

Individuals that have survived headshots fall into three categories:

1. Incidents where the person intended to commit suicide by shooting themselves in the head and botched it, or didn't use enough gun.

2. Incidents where a criminal actor shoots their victim in the head under the two circumstances above.

3. Incidents involving military or law enforcement gunfights where an individual is wearing a projectile resistant helmet, or under the same two circumstances noted above.

In the Marvel Comic Universe, headshots deliberately intended not to kill may be on the table, but that's the only universe that notion has any applicability.

 

[Oystein]

I'll just refer you to the third point I made in earlier post on this subject:



I believe that the technical term for what you're doing is "whining." If you can't back up your claim then don't make it, it's that simple, and no amount of whining gets you out of the burden of proof for your claims.



Wait, you mean that, like, the maximum entropy distribution depends on the choice of sample space? No, it can't be true! *Gasp* We should tell the world!



Fascinating how you immediately jump to pretending to be some sort of knowledgeable teacher on a subject you never even heard of until just earlier today.

Here's your homework as well:


We shall continue this discussion after your successful completion of it.

Thanks for not answering a single question I asked.

 

[Oystein]

In general, the dilemma "A or NOT A" almost never has equal likelihoods for both options. The Principle of maximum entropy does not speak to that at all.

It is trivially simple to come up with any number of examples of this.

"Either dragons lived in the medieval age, or they didn't" - there is not a 50:50 chance that they did

"Either I am the most intelligent person on ISF, or I am not" - there is not a 50:50 a priori chance that I am

"Either Iran is working on a nuclear bomb, or they aren't" - there is not a 50:50 a priori chance that they are..

"Either some country is working on newly acquiring a nuclear bomb, or none are" - there is not a 50:50 a priori chance that no country out there is working on a nuclear bomb.

"Either caveman beats up little children regularly, or he doesn't" - well prove to me you don't. Until such time I shall claim there's a 50:50 chance you do.

 

[bknight]

Statistics is "clear concise thought" on uncertain events. If your thoughts do not take the form of probability distributions over the set of possible hypotheses then you're doing thinking wrong.

So you are telling the readers that 9/11 didn't happen as current consensus tells. You still did not state what you think happened on 9/11 in a concise sentence or paragraph barring your statistical barrages.

 

[Leftus]

Giving an example of an hypothesis with a specific property is not the same as claiming the hypothesis to be true. As for your persistent claims of disingenuity, I think you might want to look up the - much referenced in this thread - concept of "projection".

So I provide exactly the evidence you claim doesn't exist and rather than accept it, you move the goalposts and deflect? And this is your evidence that you aren't being intentionally disingenuous?

 

[Axxman300]

And that is your opinion, which is strongly contradicted by the historical knowledge available to us. Indeed, I have by now already pointed out two examples of covert operations that only came to light decades after the fact - the CryptoAG operation which had dozens of people involved and Operation Gladio which had hundreds of people involved. So the notion that any covert operation would almost immediately be leaked has no basis in fact. Basically your argument boils down to claiming that covert operations are generally impossible because "muh leaks" therefor the notion that covert involvement in this particular instance is "absurd, laughable, and offensive." If covert operations are impossible then one wonders why the CIA even still exists.

The OP of this thread was a response to this one:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=341275

This was the OP for that thread:

How they spoofed the “live” shots of flight 175:

1. Rehearse the handful of perspectives of flight 175 that will be broadcast live.
2. The fireball will erupt from the south face of the South Tower.
3. The rehearsed perspectives were from the north face of the North Tower (opposite the fireball).
4. By design these rehearsed “live” perspectives will fail to capture the crash of the alleged plane.
5. Create a CGI animation of a jet with a transparent background to match each of the rehearsed shots.
6. On the big day: from the same rehearsed perspectives, capture video footage of the fireball that erupted from the south face of the South Tower.
7. Live television is never live; there is always a broadcast delay to prevent unwanted content from airing. Utilizing the broadcast delay of how ever many seconds were necessary,
8. overlay the CGI animations onto the live videos of the fireball.
9. Flatten the video layers of the CGI planes and the live fireball.
10. Release the merged video layers as “live.”

How they spoofed the “amateur” videos (not live):

1. Deploy dozens of photographers to pose as amateurs.
2. Rehearse each of their perspectives and create a CGI animation of a jet with a transparent background to match.
3. The first fireball erupts from the north face of the North Tower.
4. 18 minutes until the next fireball.
5. All the live network broadcasts are capturing videos of the hole in the north face of the North Tower.
6. Dozens of “amateur” cameras are capturing videos of the south face of the South Tower.
7. The second fireball erupts, this time from the south face of the South Tower.
8. The Networks broadcast live videos showing what looks like a plane crashing into the towers; the world is horrified.
9. Each of the “amateur” photographers edits their respective video, removing what really cut the hole in the South Tower and adding a plane.
10. The propaganda organs release these videos periodically over the following days, weeks, months and years.

And a continuation of this thread:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=12735730&postcount=59

This is the hill you've chosen to die upon.

Worse, you don't defend your side of the argument in a way that display's insight into the intelligence world and the CIA. You drag out a 67 year-old operation in Iran which involved over a hundred people based on the link you provided. Then you, like every CTist since 2001, wave Operation Northwind around as if it proves your case even though the operation was just a proposal by the Joint Chiefs, not the CIA, and was one of a dozen proposals shot down by JFK and RFK for being too risky.

If you knew 911 better you could defend your case by pointing out that in the case of the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing Al Qaeda was never named publicly by the FBI, DoJ, or NYC. But today all of the actors are linked to Al Qaeda in some way. If I was the guy arguing LIHOP I'd be asking why Ramzi Yousef's Al Qaeda training not emphasized in his trial in 1995? Why was there no aggressive investigation of his cell, which included his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I would also be asking what was in the documents former Clinton National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger stole from the National Archives which were DIRECTLY RELATED TO DECISIONS MADE BY HIM AND PRESIDENT CLINTON on actions related to Al Qaeda.

You want to argue LIHOP or MIHOP this is the way to go. You'll either go to work or stay at the kiddie table.

 

[pgimeno]

Even if there was no known precedent then your conclusion still wouldn't follow because, again, just because there would be no known precedent doesn't mean there is no precedent.

Right, but without the basis for asserting that there's a precedent, all you have left is your personal bias. A pure rational person would at this point acknowledge this bias and drop it, but I guess that a pure rational person is about as fantastic as a government that doesn't lie, so I can't really blame you for not doing it.

 

[Robin]

First of all, yes you can prove a negative. For example we can prove that there is no highest prime number and that there is no smallest real number.

But this:

Furthermore, you can prove [the law of non-contradiction]. It can be formally derived from the empty set using provably valid rules of inference. (I’ll spare you the boring details).

is complete nonsense.

You can't prove the law of non-contradiction (more properly the non-contradiction tautology) because any proof would depend upon non-contradiction being sound.

So a proof of the law of non-contradiction would be assuming its conclusion.

 

[pgimeno]

2. Your claim that the statement "there was no covert involvement" can not be disproven contradicts your claim that its negation ("there was covert involvement") can theoretically be proven. After all, any proof that there was covert involvement would necessarily also constitute disproof that there was no covert involvement.

Little lesson of logic:

If P(x) is a proposition on x (here, x is an individual from the group of people that could potentially be performing covert operations in 9/11, and P(x) is "x is involved in covert operations"), then the assertion "there were covert operations in 9/11" can be formally expressed as:

"exists x so that P(x) is true"

or in formal symbols:

∃xP(x)

Its negation is:

"for all x, P(x) is false".

or in formal symbols:

∀x¬P(x)

This means that you need to check whether each and every member of the set meets the criteria. This is regarded as impossible in many practical situations. There are some situations in which you can. For example, to disprove your claim that O.N. included the killing of own people, I went through each and every point in the plans, and refuted it for each of them. I could just as well have asked you for an example of one claim that did, but my experience in forums shows that this method doesn't go very far. There were just 9 of them and the text was of a relatively manageable size, so I could do that. But for something as fuzzy as the set of candidates for covert involvement in 9/11, there's no way to even determine who's part of the set, let alone go one by one showing that they weren't involved.

So I'd say that Allen's claim of not being able to prove a negative, was correct when applied to this case.

 

[caveman1917]

First of all, yes you can prove a negative. For example we can prove that there is no highest prime number and that there is no smallest real number.

But this:

is complete nonsense.

You can't prove the law of non-contradiction (more properly the non-contradiction tautology) because any proof would depend upon non-contradiction being sound.

So a proof of the law of non-contradiction would be assuming its conclusion.

See theorem 3.24 of Russel's Principia Mathematica. It can also be proven from several other axiomatic systems.

 

[caveman1917]

Little lesson of logic

I don't require these "little lessons of logic." Allen claimed that both

P can be proven

and

~P can not be disproven

are true. This is an obvious contradiction, any proof for P is necessarily a disproof of ~P.

 

[Robin]

See theorem 3.24 of Russel's Principia Mathematica. It can also be proven from several other axiomatic systems.

Again, any proof of anything requires the law of contradiction - modus ponens depends on it.

So what rules of inference are going to be used to prove the "law" of non-contradiction.?

 

[Robin]

And having a quick look at PM, which I haven't even glanced at for years, I see that the proof is to show that the contradiction axiom follows from the excluded middle axiom and (I think) De Morgans theorem (or some version of it).

But right from the start, none of his steps would work if "p implies q" does not rule out that "p implies not q".

 

[caveman1917]

Again, any proof of anything requires the law of contradiction - modus ponens depends on it.

Modus ponens doesn't depend on it. Systems of logic exist in which the law of non-contradiction is false yet modus ponens still is true.

So what rules of inference are going to be used to prove the "law" of non-contradiction.?

Russel & Whitehead derive it from standard propositional calculus. Like I said, it's theorem 3.24 in the Principia Mathematica, pick up a copy and just follow the derivation there.

 

[caveman1917]

And having a quick look at PM, which I haven't even glanced at for years, I see that the proof is to show that the contradiction axiom follows from the excluded middle axiom and (I think) De Morgans theorem (or some version of it).

The excluded middle isn't taken as an axiom either, it's another theorem somewhere in part 2 (2.something). But yes, it follows from the excluded middle and De Morgan's laws.

But right from the start, none of his steps would work if "p implies q" does not rule out that "p implies not q".

Why?

P->Q
P
therefor Q

is valid inference irrespective of whether the law of non-contradiction holds or not.

 

[Oystein]

...
This means that you need to check whether each and every member of the set meets the criteria. This is regarded as impossible in many practical situations. There are some situations in which you can. ...

...was of a relatively manageable size, so I could do that. But for something as fuzzy as the set of candidates for covert involvement in 9/11, there's no way to even determine who's part of the set, let alone go one by one showing that they weren't involved.

So I'd say that Allen's claim of not being able to prove a negative, was correct when applied to this case.

It is interesting and educational that caveman pretends to not have read your post, just as he pretended, but actually avoided, to answer my questions the other day that went in the same direction:

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?

which caveman quoted, but failed to answer:

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.

Hi Caveman,

how would you go about proving this negative?


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?

I'll just refer you to the third point I made in earlier post on this subject:

3. Even if it were impossible to prove a claim, that's still no reason to consider the claim true. "It's impossible to prove this claim therefor I'm believing it" - seriously, think that one through for a second.

I believe that the technical term for what you're doing is "whining." If you can't back up your claim then don't make it, it's that simple, and no amount of whining gets you out of the burden of proof for your claims.
...

Very instructive to see caveman twice dodge questions going after the practical possibility of proving negatives. Almost as if he knew any honest answer would blow his boat out of the water

 

[caveman1917]

It is interesting and educational that caveman pretends to not have read your post, just as he pretended, but actually avoided, to answer my questions the other day that went in the same direction:


which caveman quoted, but failed to answer:



Very instructive to see caveman twice dodge questions going after the practical possibility of proving negatives. Almost as if he knew any honest answer would blow his boat out of the water

You were provided with an answer. Believing a claim because you couldn't possibly prove it is the dumbest ******* thing I've ever heard. Are you lot having a contest of making the stupidest argument possible or what?

 

[Oystein]

You were provided with an answer. Believing a claim because you couldn't possibly prove it is the dumbest ******* thing I've ever heard. Are you lot having a contest of making the stupidest argument possible or what?

It has been pointed out to you already that your answer did NOT address the question. It was more like Q: "Where is Waldo?" A: "He has a dog."
So thanks for dodging yet again.

Also, it has been pointed out to you that making up fuzzy **** "50% chance someone, I won't go into detail, MIHOP" and then demanding evidence for the negation is disingenuous.

Show us evidence that none of your extended family MIHOP - until such time it would be irrational of you to believe 9/11 was NOT made to happen by your family. Right? In fact, it has a 50% likelihood - right?