Merged New video! Architects and Engineers - Solving the Mystery of Building 7

[Dave Rogers]

"Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed," he said. "The building structure would still be there."

Now, for extra credit, when was this analysis carried out, and how far advanced was the state of the art in structural modelling and fire modelling at that time?

The answers are that: (a) The analysis was carried out in the 1960s, and (b) according to Leslie Robertson the sum total of calculations was three pages of written calculations.

Now, if I had a three-page written analysis of a highly complex set of phenomena, and a second analysis that involved months of computer simulations that gave a contradictory result, I would be inclined to believe that the approximations used to reduce the problem to three pages of calculations had resulted in excessive errors, and that the simpler analysis was therefore worthless. I've yet to hear a truther explain why this is wrong, and three pages of mathematics will give a result so much more reliable than extensive computer modelling that the latter must be immediately rejected in favour of the former.

Dave

 

[WildCat]

In fact, I really wish members of this forum would stop referring to cognitive biases, such as cognitive dissonance or that thing that everyone calls the Kruger-Dunning Effect. I have yet to see anyone use these terms correctly -even once.

I have used it many times to refer to truthers making mutually exclusive claims, such as tmd2-1 claiming Boeing is in on it one minute and not in on it the next. Or truthers claiming the buildings fell in their own footprint, then claiming debris outside the footprint is proof of explosives. Or when they claim nobody heard explosives because thermite was used, then whip out their cherry-picked list of explosions.

This is cognitive dissonance, and truthers are champions at it.

 

[Sabretooth]

An example of cognitive dissonance: Form your opinion by telling that "the collapse of the towers should have been brought by fire and structure failure.

Everybody who thinks it could be controlled demolition is crazy. Because our government would never do that and NIST tells also there is no evidence we can see."

So there are lot of emotions.

a lot of fallacies

and a lot of wrong assumptions.

And they also ignore people(conscious or unconscious) who might have an answer for questions they could not answer or contradict their assumptions.

and thanks to that all they formed their conclusion and thinks thats the truth.

This isn't about NIST...it's about common sense.

If the building(s) were a CD, that requires the following items:

- Loud(!) Explosions
- Pressure Waves
- Bright Flashes of Light
- Siesmic Recordings
- Ejected Materials

Also, the presence of obvious and clear utilization of demolition materials (signs of prep work, det cords, residues of explosives, etc.).

NONE of these items were present, which discredits any "CD Theory".

Iron spheres and "it looks like a CD" is not enough...and it never will be. I've said it before...just because you found traces of flour in your kitchen, it does not prove the existance of chocolate chip cookies.

 

[Scott Sommers]

cognitive dissonance seems to fit Marokkan. pretty well. He "knows" the 911 was an inside job but also see that there is no plausible evidence for that belief.

He then is faced with the choice, either that his beliefs are wrong or the evidence is wrong......he takes the, easy, cowards route out and blames the evidence no matter how convoluted the claims against it become.

I do think many Truthers experience dissonance from their beliefs. I'm quite sure that Tont Szamboti and some of the more technically trained Truthers have problems with dissonance. I don't know if Marokkan would know enough technical information to have this experience.

A really good example of this problem is Charlie Veitch. If you listen to videos of Charlie explaining why he's changed his mind about 9/11, it's clear he never had a problem with dissonance. Prior to hid trip with the BBC, he was quite sure than many technical experts in relevant fields also felt that the WTC buildings had been exploded with thermite or dustified or whatever he thought. The BBC trip pointed out that this was not the case.

My point that Charlie had no problem with dissonance is not he was able to overcome his dissonance and solve the problem correctly. My point is that he never experienced dissonance because he had no opinions that ran counter to his experience. He simply believed that construction and demolition experts also believed this 9/11 Truth slop.

 

[Scott Sommers]

I have used it many times to refer to truthers making mutually exclusive claims, such as tmd2-1 claiming Boeing is in on it one minute and not in on it the next. Or truthers claiming the buildings fell in their own footprint, then claiming debris outside the footprint is proof of explosives. Or when they claim nobody heard explosives because thermite was used, then whip out their cherry-picked list of explosions.

This is cognitive dissonance, and truthers are champions at it.

I have not seen these examples. I may be wrong in the universality of my statement. Cognitive dissonance is not the holding of two mutually exclusive claims. NOr does explain the ability to hold two mutually exclusive claims. This is an entirely different thing from what cognitive dissonance is.

 

[Marokkaan]

You are wrong. You are confusing syllogism with cognitive dissonance. This is a very common mistake. In a sense, who cares? But this is wrong.

Than you do not understand my example, but yes you can see it also as syllogism


Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation.

 

[DC]

Than you do not understand my example, but yes you can see it also as syllogism


Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation.

ah like the feeling you had when i pointed out Kevin's false claim about the NIST FEA Model? when i showed you that NIST indeed did heat up the concrete slabs?

 

[Scott Sommers]

Than you do not understand my example, but yes you can see it also as syllogism


Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation.

This definition appears to be cut & paste from the internet.
http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/dissonance.htm

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation.

So while you are very good at using Word, you still have not demonstrated any knowledge of what cognitive dissonance look likes.

I don't mean to sound like a snob, but you took an undergraduate course in Psychology. Right? And that's about where your knowledge of cognitive bias ends. Sorry, but your example is not an example of cognitive dissonance.

 

[Marokkaan]

If that had anything to do with how we formed that conclusion, then you'd have a point. As it is, we don't start from the presumption that everybody who thinks it was CD is crazy; rather, we assess the argument that has been put forward for collapse due to fire and structural damage, and find it to be compelling and consistent, and we assess the argument that has been put forward for collapse due to CD and find it to be riddled with internal contradictions, to contradict a large part of the available evidence, and to have wide-ranging implications which imply self-contradictory attributes on the part of the supposed conspirators. Nor do we start from the assumption that our, or somebody else's, government would never do such a thing; again, it is a conclusion, not an axiom, that the US government did not play a part in the collapses.

Cognitive dissonance is rather better displayed in a person who tries to reconcile a belief that 9/11 was an inside job with the incompatible knowledge that the majority of people do not agree with him, and is only able to do so by adopting the belief that the majority of people are easily led, unintelligent and incapable of critical thought. This forum presents a major difficulty to that particular form of cognitive dissonance, because it's frequented by people who are practised in critical thought, and indeed apply it very effectively to a wide range of subjects, including the wrongdoings of the US government. A common recourse is then to adopt the belief that the members of this forum are co-conspirators. Both of these are classic examples of an a belief being adopted without supporting evidence purely to reconcile two otherwise incompatible belief systems, which is more or less the definition of cognitive dissonance.

It is certainly not cognitive dissonance to say "This theory implies many other things which contradict the evidence, therefore it is a poor theory." It is, rather, another classic example of cognitive dissonance to say "This theory may or may not imply many other things that contradict the evidence, so I will refuse to make any attempt to understand the wider implications of the theory."

Dave

Just an example, if an alien did it and there is proof or big signals of evidence, a person who has cognitive dissonance, will ignore it, because the person has the assumption aliens does not exist, and its crazy to believe in aliens because the majority does not believe in aliens.

Just the same with a lot of debunkers. They have the assumption, the government will never do that or its crazy they used planes for there targets.

So the new information, that contradicts their believe in the official story, they will ignore no matter there are signs of evidence or something else.

 

[Marokkaan]

This definition appears to be cut & paste from the internet.
http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/dissonance.htm

So while you are very good at using Word, you still have not demonstrated any knowledge of what cognitive dissonance look likes.

I don't mean to sound like a snob, but you took an undergraduate course in Psychology. Right? And that's about where your knowledge of cognitive bias ends. Sorry, but your example is not an example of cognitive dissonance.

Well tell me whats cognitive dissonance. Amaze me.

 

[Marokkaan]

Now, for extra credit, when was this analysis carried out, and how far advanced was the state of the art in structural modelling and fire modelling at that time?

The answers are that: (a) The analysis was carried out in the 1960s, and (b) according to Leslie Robertson the sum total of calculations was three pages of written calculations.

Now, if I had a three-page written analysis of a highly complex set of phenomena, and a second analysis that involved months of computer simulations that gave a contradictory result, I would be inclined to believe that the approximations used to reduce the problem to three pages of calculations had resulted in excessive errors, and that the simpler analysis was therefore worthless. I've yet to hear a truther explain why this is wrong, and three pages of mathematics will give a result so much more reliable than extensive computer modelling that the latter must be immediately rejected in favour of the former.

Dave

The quote is from 1993....

And what demartini told is 2001...

 

[Dave Rogers]

Just the same with a lot of debunkers. They have the assumption, the government will never do that or its crazy they used planes for there targets.

So the new information, that contradicts their believe in the official story, they will ignore no matter there are signs of evidence or something else.

Repeating a fantasy doesn't make it true. However, if you suffer from cognitive dissonance, you may feel compelled to repeat it, more and more forcefully if necessary, because the possibility of it not being true is too painful for you to entertain. And so this is another classic example. You've claimed that debunkers believe the government uncritically, but when this is denied, you don't address the response but simply repeat your claim. It's not us you're trying to convince, but your own nagging doubts that you're trying to quell.

So, go ahead, say that debunkers would never believe bad things about the government a few more times. Maybe it'll make you feel better.

Dave

 

[Dave Rogers]

The quote is from 1993....

And what demartini told is 2001...

But the calculations were carried out before the towers were built. Robertson said so. Although, of course, nobody can actually find these calculations; which is very convenient for conspiracy theorists, who will therefore simply claim that their conclusions are irrefutable.

Dave

 

[twinstead]

Holy crap Marokkaan. Take a trip to the politics subforum for a while, and then come back and tell us that debunkers would never believe bad things about the government.

 

[Scott Sommers]

I have no intention of spending hours explaining this. Cognitive dissonance is a technical term that was developed in 1956. It is one of the most researched of all psychological topics. In fact, one could arguably say it is the greatest 'discovery' of psychology. Google scholar gives the term 53,500 hits and Festinger's original study has been cited 16750 times.

The Wikipedia explanation is pretty good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
They provide the example of smoking, which might appear to be like your example. It is not. The details of this difference are long and technical. I don't want to explain this to you.

This is the first page of a cognitive dissonance and smoking study. If you have a good enough understanding of experimental method, you'll understand why what you're talking about is different.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1080/00049536208255449/abstract

You can get some complete studies on Google Scholar. Read them and if you still want to talk cognitive dissonance, I promise I will talk about these papers with you. Anything short of that, just keep using the term any way you want.

But in fact, who cares what I have to say? Just keep using the term to mean anything you want.

 

[Marokkaan]

Repeating a fantasy doesn't make it true. However, if you suffer from cognitive dissonance, you may feel compelled to repeat it, more and more forcefully if necessary, because the possibility of it not being true is too painful for you to entertain. And so this is another classic example. You've claimed that debunkers believe the government uncritically, but when this is denied, you don't address the response but simply repeat your claim. It's not us you're trying to convince, but your own nagging doubts that you're trying to quell.

So, go ahead, say that debunkers would never believe bad things about the government a few more times. Maybe it'll make you feel better.

Dave

Thats the problem, you think everything that contradicts the official theory is a fantasy.

I said a lot of debunkers, pfff talk about understanding reading......

 

[Marokkaan]

I have no intention of spending hours explaining this. Cognitive dissonance is a technical term that was developed in 1956. It is one of the most researched of all psychological topics. In fact, one could arguably say it is the greatest 'discovery' of psychology. Google scholar gives the term 53,500 hits and Festinger's original study has been cited 16750 times.

The Wikipedia explanation is pretty good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
They provide the example of smoking, which might appear to be like your example. It is not. The details of this difference are long and technical. I don't want to explain this to you.

This is the first page of a cognitive dissonance and smoking study. If you have a good enough understanding of experimental method, you'll understand why what you're talking about is different.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1080/00049536208255449/abstract

You can get some complete studies on Google Scholar. Read them and if you still want to talk cognitive dissonance, I promise I will talk about these papers with you. Anything short of that, just keep using the term any way you want.

But in fact, who cares what I have to say? Just keep using the term to mean anything you want.

Its nice you call festinger.

This guy also use festinger, maybe he can explain it better than me. Skip to 3:36

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67AzgIpxwco

 

[Dave Rogers]

Thats the problem, you think everything that contradicts the official theory is a fantasy.

No, I think that your descriptions of the personal motivations of debunkers are a fantasy, given that they disagree with my own understanding of my own motivations. It turns out, on inspection, that every piece of evidence that is claimed to contradict the generally understood narrative of 9/11 is a misinterpretation, a misrepresentation or an outright fantasy, but that is a conclusion, not an assumption. Some day, I may see something that actually stands up to critical analysis, but so far nothing has come close.

I said a lot of debunkers, pfff talk about understanding reading......

It is a fantasy on your part that a lot of debunkers reason from the starting point that the government would not do such a thing as carry out a false flag attack on its own citizens. I have never seen that argument presented other than as a strawman argument by conspiracy theorists.

Dave

 

[Marokkaan]

But the calculations were carried out before the towers were built. Robertson said so. Although, of course, nobody can actually find these calculations; which is very convenient for conspiracy theorists, who will therefore simply claim that their conclusions are irrefutable.

Dave

So you think, demartini and the other made a fault in their statement?

 

[Scott Sommers]

Repeating a fantasy doesn't make it true. However, if you suffer from cognitive dissonance, you may feel compelled to repeat it, more and more forcefully if necessary, because the possibility of it not being true is too painful for you to entertain. And so this is another classic example. You've claimed that debunkers believe the government uncritically, but when this is denied, you don't address the response but simply repeat your claim. It's not us you're trying to convince, but your own nagging doubts that you're trying to quell.

So, go ahead, say that debunkers would never believe bad things about the government a few more times. Maybe it'll make you feel better.

Dave

This is better. I would say this is almost right. The verb "compelled" seems to be used often in research of this sort. I don't do this kind of research so I have to defer to those who do. I don't think this idea that dissonance creates a situation where,

the possibility of it not being true is too painful for you to entertain

is useful. I did a quick search and couldn't find a meaningful relationship between cognitive dissonance and 'pain'. Dissonance is a "motivation drive" as the Wiki puts it. It does not fit into punishment & reward systems and was in fact suggested to explain learning that occurred outside these systems.