The Sinking of MS Estonia: Case Re-Opened

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Vixen said:
So what? If you and I are both at the same event and you describe it as 'being like a train rushing at you' and I describe it like a high speed wind, does it mean it never happened?

Someone with literary skills is often better at describing abstract concepts to a lay person by using likeness to more familiar every day events.

It doesn't mean the testimony is worthless.
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Of course the testimony isn't useless.

Something certainly happened.

If we were both at the same event and we described it as you said, than we can conclude some things.
1. Something, some event happened.
2. I descridbed it as a train rushing at me.
3 you described it as a high speed wind.
4 At least one of us must be mistaken, because both can't be true at the same time.
5 Depending on what was found in an other line of research, it might well be found that we were both mistaken. It was neither a train, nor a high speed wind, but something else (whatever that was, is not important in this particular example).

Like does not equal is.

Edit:
And the ninjas in the shape of JayUtah say it so much better than me.
 
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Vixen said:
I am sure it is very difficult for you to imagine the JAIC or PM Carl Bildt lied.



It was obviously the survivors who are a bunch of liars.
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I have no dog in your fight over whether anyone lied but I am taken aback by your brazen habit of shoving words into other people's mouths. Nothing whatever in my post you responded to gave any indication I thought the survivors lied, nor that I thought the report impeccable nor that I think Bildt incapable of lying. Nothing.
 
JayUtah said:
Are you seriously claiming that going to a museum is equivalent to experiencing the events those exhibits depict?

Being able to identify the cause behind the perception of one's sense depends heavily on having experienced those sensations before while being sure one knows the cause. If you've never heard a steel cable part, for example, you might mistake it for a gunshot -- which is frequently mistaken because actual gunshots sound very different from how they're depicted in the media.

Here's perfectly valid to challenge the testimony of eyewitnesses who purport to identify the cause of their sensations.
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You should be ashamed of yourself, contributing to the PTSD of survivors like this. Probably causing it outright. I only hope that disaster survivors don't find your posts, you heartless cretin, you.
 
Vixen said:
Oh please. The ship was 18,000 tonnage the bow visor just 55 tonnes. In addition, it was afixed to the ship thus had little freedom of movement to do little more than clatter.


In any case, you don't know what came first: the explosion/s and/or the collision or the bow visor loosening.
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55 tons is huge.
 
Vixen said:
Utter rot. At the Maritime Museum in Greenwich is a graphic illustration of the types of early naval grenades. There was a double headed hammer that came at such force it could knock the masts and sails for six. A canon ball flying at 900 mph could break a ship in half. Don't tell me, 'You can't know this had happened if you had never experienced it before'.
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What does any of that have to do with having experience of explosions and collisions?

No RN ship has had an explosion aboard since the Falklands war.
 
Vixen said:
Oh please. The ship was 18,000 tonnage the bow visor just 55 tonnes. In addition, it was afixed to the ship thus had little freedom of movement to do little more than clatter.


In any case, you don't know what came first: the explosion/s and/or the collision or the bow visor loosening.
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There wasn't an explosion or collision
 
erwinl said:
Of course the testimony isn't useless.

Something certainly happened.

If we were both at the same event and we described it as you said, than we can conclude some things.
1. Something, some event happened.
2. I descridbed it as a train rushing at me.
3 you described it as a high speed wind.
4 At least one of us must be mistaken, because both can't be true at the same time.
5 Depending on what was found in an other line of research, it might well be found that we were both mistaken. It was neither a train, nor a high speed wind, but something else (whatever that was, is not important in this particular example).

Like does not equal is.

Edit:
And the ninjas in the shape of JayUtah say it so much better than me.
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It sounds like it was a Finnish guy so if the original was in Finnish there would be no 'like' anyway but would be a direct, 'It sounded (like) an explosion'.

'It sounded like an explosion.'
Altti Hakanpää

'Se kuulosti räjähdykseltä'

What is the difference anyway between 'I heard what sounded like the doorbell' or 'I heard the doorbell ring'?


Just a figure of speech.

The first acknowledges you didn't actually see the source of the sound but describes exactly the same sound as the second. = a doorbell ring.
 
Vixen said:
You do not need to have experienced a ship crash or a ship explosion to recognise it when it happens.
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Yes, you do. If you're in the interior of the ship and all you hear is a loud noise and all you feel is a jolt, experience determines whether its an explosion, the ship colliding with something, or pieces of the ship banging against other pieces of the ship. Experience matters, no matter how much you want lay testimony to be accepted as whole gospel.
 
Vixen said:
So heavy enough to immediately sink in a body of water..?
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There are entire ships well over 100,000 tonnes, and they don't "sink immediately" in water. There is more to an object than just its raw mass that determines how quickly it sinks, or even if it does. Once again, this is an area in which you have no apparent experience. And your uninformed belief doesn't answer the evidence that the visor had significant post-separation contact with the ship.
 
Vixen said:
It sounds like it was a Finnish guy so if the original was in Finnish there would be no 'like' anyway but would be a direct, 'It sounded (like) an explosion'.

'It sounded like an explosion.'
Altti Hakanpää

'Se kuulosti räjähdykseltä'

What is the difference anyway between 'I heard what sounded like the doorbell' or 'I heard the doorbell ring'?


Just a figure of speech.

The first acknowledges you didn't actually see the source of the sound but describes exactly the same sound as the second. = a doorbell ring.
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I have nothing to say about Finnish, but your claim about the two sentences is nonsense.

"I heard the doorbell ring" implies that the doorbell rang. "I heard what sounded like the doorbell ring" tells you something about the sound I heard but not what made the sound. If you were certain that the doorbell did indeed ring and that's what you heard, you would not use the second sentence.

I mean, now you're having a go at plain English just to defend your odd notions about grand conspiracies. Bit silly, ain't it?

The difference between these two sentences gets at the heart of what Jay is speaking about when he talks of conclusory sentences. "I heard a sound like an explosion" is not conclusory, because it just reports the sensory observation. "I heard an explosion" is conclusory, because it goes beyond the directly observed (the sound itself) to draw a conclusion about the unseen cause.

Of course, the distinction is a bit muddy. I wouldn't think "I saw an explosion" is conclusory, though one must admit I could have seen a hologram of an explosion rather than a real explosion. But we don't need to deal in Cartesian doubt to notice that claiming a loud noise whose source is out of view was an explosion rather than sounded like an explosion is conclusory.
 
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Vixen said:
What is the difference anyway between 'I heard what sounded like the doorbell' or 'I heard the doorbell ring'?
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A doorbell is within everyone's experience. Ship collisions and demolition explosions are not.

When we have to evaluate recordings such as cockpit voice recorders, we still have to use non-conclusory language. I have to annote the transcripts with sentences like "sound consistent with stabilizer trim wheel operating." Even though the sound is within my experience, I did not actually witness the scene and cannot actually determine whether that equipment produced the sound. Part of the art of interviewing witnesses and gathering evidence from their statements is determining whether any identification or interpretation proffered by the witness has any foundation.
 
Vixen said:
Oh dear.


American Bar Association
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Ahem.

Firstly, the ABA piece you've quoted is concerned solely and exclusively with

a) eyewitness testimony of the crime itself (eg someone who says that they saw X draw a gun and shoot Y), and

b) (importantly) the proviso that this eyewitness testimony is accepted by the court as accurate and reliable.


Firstly, note particularly (b) above. This means that if a person said that she saw/heard X shoot Y, her testimony is not automatically accepted by the court at face value. The witness is subjected to examination and cross-examination, and counsel for the defence will (prior to its cross of this person) have investigated the veracity/accuracy/reliability of the claim. The defence might find, for example - or elicit from the witness in cross - that her position at the time of the murder meant that she couldn't actually have seen X or Y at the time the shots were fired. And so on, and so on.

If the court concluded, at the end of that process, that her testimony was reliable and credible, then (and only then) it would count as direct evidence of the crime. But of course if the court concluded that her testimony was untrue, inaccurate or unreliable, then her value as an eyewitness would be effectively nothing.

Secondly, take note of (a) above. The overarching critical factor for eyewitness testimony to qualify as direct evidence (even before it's tested for credibility/reliability/etc) is that the eyewitness saw the crime itself being committed.


Once you've digested all of this, let's go back to our relevant example(s) from the Estonia incident. In our case, not one of the eyewitnesses (or earwitnesses) actually directly witnessed anything related to the noises they say they heard. So they all fail the test in (a).

And of course all of the eye/earwitnesses in our case had their inferences (for that is all they were) tested by experts who had access to all the available evidence, and the conclusion was that any of them who claimed to have heard either a heavy collision or explosion were simply mistaken in their inferences. So they all fail the test in (b).


To borrow deux mots justes:

Oh dear.
 
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