I have nothing against Elizabeth Loftus at all. What I objected to was your claim that the Estonia survivors might have had faulty memories about what they experienced and I pointed out that Loftus specialises in being a gun-for-hire to challenge prosecution witnesses...
You have no idea what she specializes in. You skimmed a bit of a summary of her scholarship, ignored her colleagues in the field, and immediately latched onto her contribution to testimony at law. She wrote the definitive text on eyewitness testimony, now in its second edition and still the standard text when the science of memory is taught.
The issue of her role as an expert witness arose only when you asked whether she had ever put her money where her mouth is. That she was an important witness in the McMartin Preschool case seems to have escaped your brief flyby of her career. (The McMartin case is still taught in law schools as an example of improper prosecution. Quite a lot of subsequent research exposed the so-called Satanic Panic.) When, in response to your question, I mentioned her instrumental role in changing the false beliefs about eyewitness testimony at law, you couldn't seem to find enough bad to say about her supposedly getting criminals off the hook. I gather criminal defense is a real hot button for you.
Despite your documented low opinion of her, she remains the pioneer of an important and academically vital field, and she is not by any means the only practitioner of it. I cited three other researchers and their work, some of which dealt directly with the malleability of memories formed in connection with PTSD. As you do with many other experts who disagree with your naïve declarations, you left them entirely alone. You seem to have great respect for science, but only when it confirms your lay beliefs. If science disagrees with you, you show no respect for it at all. Therefore I repeat: your sanctimonious pretense to virtue is fooling no one.
...and in addition, her work revolves around long term memory when people fill in missing information with what seems logical but is actually a 'false memory'.
I honestly cannot see what Loftus has to do with the Estonia survivors' accounts, which were given from their hospital beds immediately after the accident.
Which means we can add long-term memory to the list of things you don't understand. Long-term memories are those which
can be retained for a long time, not those that
have been retained for a long time. Anything remembered for more than 30 seconds is long-term memory. The key concept here is that long-term memories begin forming at the same time as short-term memories, but for a period of about two weeks after the remembered event, they remain exceptionally malleable.
You say you made a careful study of psychology. That study does not seem to have included the basic neurological function of memory and the work of some of its most noted practitioners. Just like your study of physics, you claim to have done quite a lot of it, yet retained little useful information from it.
Nobody was pressurising them 'to remember' and nor were they grappling to locate some ephemeral memory from a distant past.
Long-term memory doesn't mean memory from the distant past. Changes to long-term memory do not occur only because the subject is "pressured" to remember.
The big problem with these survivors' accounts is that they are 'classified' and no-one can access them.
And there's the inevitable pivot. The topic at hand is
your inconsistent, self-serving approach to expertise. Can you please try to stay there until long-term memory of it takes hold?
