Science vs Teleology: Which lens is best for viewing 911?

[Max Photon]

Lysenkoism

Your rambling irrelevancies suggest that you understand how devastating to your fantasies the mathematical argument is. Seven thousand FBI agents, a thousand NIST researchers, over a thousand police and firefighters, air traffic controllers, metallurgists, seismologists, thousands of civil engineers, forensic examiners, demolition experts, and on and on--NOT ONE PERSON HAS SPILLED THE BEANS.

ALL of these people know "da twoof" and NOBODY has leaked ANYTHING.

Admit it. All of you know, deep down inside, that Pomeroo isn't even trying to use different font sizes.


Here Pomeroo, print this out, toss it in the bathroom, read it a few times, and learn:

Tainted Research
Lysenkoism-American Style

 

[Max Photon]

Okay Max, let me not understand this....

Myriad, as usual, you sure put a lot of energy into confusion.

 

[Max Photon]

Slick move, Max!

Well, first off, the chaos and destruction [of 911] was truly minuscule compared to that which we have delivered upon Iraq. (I forget, why did we attack?)

Sadam had violated every U.N. resolution and condition of the cease-fire following the Gulf War, had stifled every effort by U.N. weapons inspectors, had fired on U.S. and other Allied planes patrolling the no-fly zone, had a history of using chemical weapons on his own people, was known to have pursued a nuclear weapons program, and had basically defied any and all demands by the international community to prove that his chemical weapons program and the weapons it produced had been eliminated.

As a side effect of the attacks by al-Qaeda, the U.S. had no tolerance for any further defiance to international law by a tyranical dictator, and was not about to give Sadam any room to breath, let alone reestablish any weapons program that might threaten the U.S. or any of our allies.

"the Iraq War is largely about oil."

Alan Greenspan

 

[pomeroo]

Admit it. All of you know, deep down inside, that Pomeroo isn't even trying to use different font sizes.


Here Pomeroo, print this out, toss it in the bathroom, read it a few times, and learn:

Tainted Research
Lysenkoism-American Style

I could take this desperate throw as a concession speech, but I think I'll continue beating you up. Your irrelevant nonsense ignores--obviously--everything I said.

THOUSANDS of people, according to the myth propagated by your evil movement, know the "truth" about the attacks of 9/11/01. NOT ONE PERSON has revealed ANYTHING that supports your fantasies--NOT ONE!

Please, Max, I and all of the rationalists who post here are much smarter than you. We don't want mindless drivel about "Lysenkoism": we want to know how it is possible that thousands of people accept their complicity in a monstrous crime without ever saying a word. What is the coercive muscle that knocks everyone into line?

Let's take a more concrete example. You are an aging hippie who knows absolutely nothing about science. Ryan Mackey is a real scientist. You are vastly his intellectual inferior, so you can't hope to con him with your puerile fabrications. Now, unless you want to recant and abandon your pernicious nonsense (unthinkable--you wouldn't be a loon if you were capable of displaying intellectual integrity), you must accuse him of a) lying, i.e. he knows he's wrong, but is artfully dressing up flawed arguments, or b) incompetence, i.e., he just doesn't know what he's talking about.

You see the problem? No? I'll spell it out: either way, you have to show that he's wrong. Conspiracy liars like to steal bases. They accuse rationalists of "lying" to slide past the rather awkward business of actually making their case. So, if the 1,000+ NIST researchers are guilty of bad science, someone somewhere has exposed their glaring errors. Who might that person be?

Your imaginary conspiracy is MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE, Max.

Put up or shut up.

 

[pomeroo]

"the Iraq War is largely about oil."

Alan Greenspan

And we're not supposed to know that Greenspan clarified this rather misleading comment? Seriously?

When will we start "stealing" some oil, Max? I know that Russia and China have inked sweetheart deals with Iraq. When do we get our turn? You probably haven't noticed, but the price of gasoline is pretty high. It was in all the papers. You're saying we invaded Iraq in order to drive the price of oil UP???? That would be part of the Impossibly Vast Conspiracy's plan to elect more Democrats, right?

 

[R.Mackey]

Perhaps we can spend a little more time teasing out the word "teleology." You're probably the perfect person for the task.

It seems to me that when scientists study something, they try to minimize their influence on that being studied. They try to minimize noise. They try to minimize feedback. Hard for electrons, easier for gravel, a bit harder for animals. But what happens when scientists study something where humans are involved? Psychologists will typically conduct experiments using subjects who aren't privy to the experiment. Why? To minimize feedback - to minimize nonlinear effects - to preserved the linearized world of causality.

That's a good summary of experimental design. A scientist will attempt to estimate sources of experimental error ("feedback"), quantify those errors, and try to mitigate them. Minimizing noise, eliminating interference of apparatus and other experiments, and ultimately including what experimental error remains in the analysis are all standard techniques of good science.

But what happens when the subject of the psychology experiment knows what the experiment is about, and starts gaming the system? Surely this is no longer "science," and causality is lost to curvature.

Well, that depends. Physical law rarely treats self-aware particles or forces, so this problem never arises. But it does show up in other sciences of varying degrees of hardness, such as economics and political science. A clever psychology experiment can actually use the "gaming the system" factor as part of its design, e.g. the Stanford Prison experiment. In others, the most accessible analogue I can think of at the moment is in polling, where pollsters attempt to isolate populations likely to game the system from others (e.g., "likely voters" versus "registered voters").

Of course, these mitigations don't always work out. Some polls are wildly incorrect. Others are subtly manipulated through polling technique to produce a desired result. Soft science is more prone to this than the hard sciences due to the influence of population dynamics.

My question is, what word should we use for such situation? Science? I used "teleology." Can you or anyone else suggest a better term, or a different way to view the problem? I'm certainly open.

I don't use the word "teleology" very often, but the textbook definition includes the following (cribbed from dictionary.com:

• The doctrine that final causes exist
• The study of the evidences of design or purpose in nature
• The belief that purpose and design are a part of or are apparent in nature

This is what I was alluding to in my previous post -- teleology is about the "why." In natural processes, there isn't always a "why." In philosophy, there is, but it is rarely possible to verify any hypothesis. Think of all the raging debates over the intent of symbolism in movies or literature... was Shakespeare really sending secret messages that he was gay in his sonnets?? Who knows? This is why philosophy and science really cannot be compared to each other. They serve different purposes entirely.

As far as dealing with subjects who know of the system and are trying to influence it (viz. hypothetical conspirators), I don't see any need to diverge from science. This situation is treated all the time in criminology, and is usually disentangled through forensics, a branch of science. Science gives us a way to separate opinion from fact and hard evidence.

If no hard evidence exists, then we are left with only deduction. This follows from logic, a branch of mathematics, also science. Philosophy is a last resort in my opinion, after we've given up on ever creating a case that will stand up in court, and merely want to speculate, trading our own ideas, alongside what Rudolph Hess was thinking or whether King Arthur was real...

 

[Max Photon]

What is the coercive muscle that knocked 911 investigators into line?

I could take this desperate throw as a concession speech

Sorry Pomeroo, that speech was made when you played the Jew card on RedIbis a few posts ago.

THOUSANDS of people, according to the myth propagated by your evil movement, know the "truth" about the attacks of 9/11/01. NOT ONE PERSON has revealed ANYTHING that supports your fantasies--NOT ONE!

Please, Max, I and all of the rationalists who post here are much smarter than you. We don't want mindless drivel about "Lysenkoism": we want to know how it is possible that thousands of people accept their complicity in a monstrous crime without ever saying a word. What is the coercive muscle that knocks everyone into line?

Shock
Nationalism resonating from media overdrive
Irrational jingoism
Heroism
Machismo
Fear
Cowardice
Pressure to confirm
Irrational submission to authority
Need for a paycheck
Need for institutions to perpetuate institutions
Lack of creative thinking
Cohesion behind leadership
Need for consensus
Inability to envision the US doing anything bad (sort of the Madonna/Whore complex of nationalism)
A lack of awareness of the concept of self-organizing deception through market forces
Linear thinking
No thinking - just following orders
Thinking like Pomeroo

The systemic bias of no one ever viewing the problem as possibly an inside job




Good question Pomer

 

[Max Photon]

Teleology and nonlinear kcabdeef

Thanks Ryan, that's a great post. I basically agree with you. But let's chat some more....

On the word "teleology", I think I see the confusion. It seems that one definition is that of viewing a problem from the standpoint of motive.

I was using the term to mean the class of problems where the nonlinear terms can no longer be ignored because the subjects - people - smart people - are consciously not only trying to influence, but to dominate the "experiment."

I have also tried to point out in the past that this situation - this teleological situation as I've been putting it - is characterized by two opposing processes or spirals - usually major and a minor (the research vs. tricking the research).

And I have also said that opposing processes or spirals - such as activation/inhibition in biology - are meta-pattern (or image) generators. That was the message of Buddha's Daisy Lecture: All This emerges from the dynamic union of opposing spirals or processes.


http://www.nga.gov.au/Exhibition/SculpturePrize03/Images/MED/122554.jpg


Apollo20, opposing processes or spirals can be used to generate simulacra!


A good example of all of this is seen in the Quantity Theory of Money, which is a linear model that ignores nonlinear feedback, in this case speculation (because it isn't "economically rational"). But look at the data and one sees that speculation, far from being zero, is two orders of magnitude greater than the real economy! Far from being negligible, the soon-to-be quadrillion dollar derivatives inverted pyramid shapes the entire structure of and our entire picture of the global economy! The housing bubble was just a tiny room in the House of Mirrors.


Let's go one step farther! Financial "scientists" - who are comfortable working with the "softer" terms (which oddly make the problem harder) - actually deliberately induce the higher order terms - speculation - to prop up the USDollar, the economy, and so on. This is standard stuff. It doesn't mean the process can't get away from them. It will. That's the lack of hubris. But the point is, some scientists try not to minimize noise, but maximize it. They create feedback and then play with it, use it, even make music with it. Think of Jimi Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner.

Deception artists and humorists do the same thing. They deliberately overdrive systems to create nonlinear terms - folds (like cusp catastrophes) - two-valued functions - and then exploit their intrinsic ambiguity.

Please remember not to hotlink.

Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: LibraryLady

 

[pomeroo]

Sorry Pomeroo, that speech was made when you played the Jew card on RedIbis a few posts ago.

Hey, that's a good one! A rationalist plays the "Jew card" on a Jew-hater by pointing out that the extremely silly myths conspiracy liars have invented concerning the collapse of WTC 7 are entirely based on the fact that the building's owner is a Jew.
A bold try, Maxie, that deserved a better fate. But, alas, you have failed, as usual, to reckon with the presence of adults here.

Shock

THOUSANDS of people are willing to accept complicity in a monstrous crime for almost SEVEN years because they're still shocked??? Frankly, Max, I'm shocked at your silliness.

Nationalism resonating from media overdrive
Irrational jingoism
Heroism
Machismo
Fear
Cowardice
Pressure to confirm
Irrational submission to authority
Need for a paycheck
Need for institutions to perpetuate institutions
Lack of creative thinking
Cohesion behind leadership
Need for consensus
Inability to envision the US doing anything bad (sort of the Madonna/Whore complex of nationalism)
A lack of awareness of the concept of self-organizing deception through market forces
Linear thinking
No thinking - just following orders
Thinking like Pomeroo

One of your weakest efforts ever, and that's sayin' sumphin'! THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE ACCEPT THEIR COMPLICITY IN A MASS MURDER FOR THESE EMBARRASSINGLY FEEBLE REASONS??? If you tried claiming that ten percent of the accomplices remain silent for whatever reason, you'd have a very tough sell. But you are making the FANTASTIC and LUDICROUS claim that EVERYONE is content to live with a horrible secret.

What is necessary is for ONE person who knows that the mainstream account is wrong to offer SOMETHING--a single piece of real evidence that supports your mad fantasy.

The systemic bias of no one ever viewing the problem as possibly an inside job

Ooops! You seem to be saying that people who KNOW that it was an inside job have trouble viewing it as one. Now, that's a bit dumb, even by your generous standards. Perhaps you might want to rethink (yes, the catch is that you can't do that until you've done some thinking in the first place).

Good question Pomer

R-e-a-l-l-y bad answer, Max.

 

[RedIbis]

Sorry Pomeroo, that speech was made when you played the Jew card on RedIbis a few posts ago.

Aint that the truth.

 

[RedIbis]

Hey, that's a good one! A rationalist plays the "Jew card" on a Jew-hater by pointing out that the extremely silly myths conspiracy liars have invented concerning the collapse of WTC 7 are entirely based on the fact that the building's owner is a Jew.

Did you just call me a "Jew-hater"?

I'd really like to see you ravel this one out.

 

[pomeroo]

Did you just call me a "Jew-hater"?

I'd really like to see you ravel this one out.

To be precise, I implied that you are a Jew-hater. You will, as usual, present a torrent of evasive and insubstantial froth. At the end, we will understand that you have accused an innocent man of "lying, " although you have humiliated yourself by failing to offer the slightest justification for your slander. Many of your associates in the evil movement you serve are rabid Jew-haters, which, to be sure, doesn't mean that all conspiracy liars are Jew-haters. It's time for you to feign indignation and explain to us why the notion that you share the beliefs of the people whose beliefs you share upsets you. You can save time by affirming Israel's right to exist and by disowning the vicious, stupid myths other liars have circulated about Mossad agents at the WTC, "warnings" to Jews not to go to work on 9/11, and all the other nonsense. You'll surely do that much, right?

 

[RedIbis]

To be precise, I implied that you are a Jew-hater. You will, as usual, present a torrent of evasive and insubstantial froth. At the end, we will understand that you have accused an innocent man of "lying, " although you have humiliated yourself by failing to offer the slightest justification for your slander. Many of your associates in the evil movement you serve are rabid Jew-haters, which, to be sure, doesn't mean that all conspiracy liars are Jew-haters. It's time for you to feign indignation and explain to us why the notion that you share the beliefs of the people whose beliefs you share upsets you. You can save time by affirming Israel's right to exist and by disowning the vicious, stupid myths other liars have circulated about Mossad agents at the WTC, "warnings" to Jews not to go to work on 9/11, and all the other nonsense. You'll surely do that much, right?

I'm not going to waste my time nor energy responding with a torrent addressed to you. Suffice it to say whatever shred of respect I might have had for you has evaporated.

I would have to disclose some personal details to illustrate how stupid your "implication" is. I may not be a particularly religious person but I have respect for my heritage and ethnicity. I don't just support the state of Israel, I have family there. This allows me to see just how corrupt the Likudnik neo cons are there, too.

 

[pomeroo]

I'm not going to waste my time nor energy responding with a torrent addressed to you. Suffice it to say whatever shred of respect I might have had for you has evaporated.

I would have to disclose some personal details to illustrate how stupid your "implication" is. I may not be a particularly religious person but I have respect for my heritage and ethnicity. I don't just support the state of Israel, I have family there. This allows me to see just how corrupt the Likudnik neo cons are there, too.

Yawn. No one expected you to say anything of substance. Many virulent Jew-haters are self-loathing Jews. Academia teems with such types. Are you suggesting that your baseless slander of Larry Silverstein is based on something other than his religion/ethnicity? And what might that be? Yes, that's a joke. We have established, over the course of several threads and hundreds of posts, that your slander of Silverstein is based on absolutely nothing. Tell us why the Likudniks are "corrupt." Are they "liars," too? I detect a trend.
So, you'll agree that no Jews were warned to stay home on 9/11?

Can you dance long enough to escape the Osama Conundrum?

 

[pomeroo]

I'm not going to waste my time nor energy responding with a torrent addressed to you. Suffice it to say whatever shred of respect I might have had for you has evaporated.

I would have to disclose some personal details to illustrate how stupid your "implication" is. I may not be a particularly religious person but I have respect for my heritage and ethnicity. I don't just support the state of Israel, I have family there. This allows me to see just how corrupt the Likudnik neo cons are there, too.

By the way, we all get the idea that you wouldn't have to waste much time and energy to deplore the infestation of the fantasy movement by rabid anti-Semites. You could just say that you don't hate Jews and you find the vicious slanders of Jews by your fellow conspiracy liars to be despicable.

 

[RedIbis]

Yawn. No one expected you to say anything of substance. Many virulent Jew-haters are self-loathing Jews. Academia teems with such types. Are you suggesting that your baseless slander of Larry Silverstein is based on something other than his religion/ethnicity? And what might that be? Yes, that's a joke. We have established, over the course of several threads and hundreds of posts, that your slander of Silverstein is based on absolutely nothing. Tell us why the Likudniks are "corrupt." Are they "liars," too? I detect a trend.
So, you'll agree that no Jews were warned to stay home on 9/11?

Can you dance long enough to escape the Osama Conundrum?

Why you're given a larger tether to spew your flame rhetoric, I really don't know. But you cheapen the discourse around here. Most of what you have to say is nothing more than bitter extremism.

 

[pomeroo]

Why you're given a larger tether to spew your flame rhetoric, I really don't know. But you cheapen the discourse around here. Most of what you have to say is nothing more than bitter extremism.

I just offered a friend of mine who dropped in to play chess 50-1 odds that you would totally ignore everything I wrote. How unfair was I being? Would 1,000-1 represent an improvement or are the true odds much, much higher?

 

[R.Mackey]

I was using the term to mean the class of problems where the nonlinear terms can no longer be ignored because the subjects - people - smart people - are consciously not only trying to influence, but to dominate the "experiment."

I have also tried to point out in the past that this situation - this teleological situation as I've been putting it - is characterized by two opposing processes or spirals - usually major and a minor (the research vs. tricking the research).

Struggling to stay on topic... There is an additional distinction to make here. In most "soft" sciences, we are dealing with populations rather than individuals. The population rarely acts in a determined way to dominate an experiment, whereas an individual will. Although it does happen. The best known example of this behavior is probably the Long Term Capital Management collapse, where the market literally evolved new behaviors over time -- risks that were originally uncorrelated became correlated in response, and ultimately sank the company.

Soft science cannot treat individuals, because statistics don't apply even most of the time. Again, we are back to forensics and logical deduction. If that fails, then all we have is philosophy and speculation.

In dealing with individuals, whether or not forensics and logic are enough depends on the specific question. I'm still optimistic that most if not all questions of September 11^th lend themselves to this approach, and thus science is still the best answer.

And I have also said that opposing processes or spirals - such as activation/inhibition in biology - are meta-pattern (or image) generators. That was the message of Buddha's Daisy Lecture: All This emerges from the dynamic union of opposing spirals or processes.

Instead of "spirals and processes," attractors and forcing functions. But in the end, it is turbulence and entropy that dominates. Fine control is rare.

 

[pomeroo]

Thanks Ryan, that's a great post. I basically agree with you. But let's chat some more....

On the word "teleology", I think I see the confusion. It seems that one definition is that of viewing a problem from the standpoint of motive.

I was using the term to mean the class of problems where the nonlinear terms can no longer be ignored because the subjects - people - smart people - are consciously not only trying to influence, but to dominate the "experiment."

I have also tried to point out in the past that this situation - this teleological situation as I've been putting it - is characterized by two opposing processes or spirals - usually major and a minor (the research vs. tricking the research).

And I have also said that opposing processes or spirals - such as activation/inhibition in biology - are meta-pattern (or image) generators. That was the message of Buddha's Daisy Lecture: All This emerges from the dynamic union of opposing spirals or processes.


http://www.nga.gov.au/Exhibition/SculpturePrize03/Images/MED/122554.jpg


Apollo20, opposing processes or spirals can be used to generate simulacra!


A good example of all of this is seen in the Quantity Theory of Money, which is a linear model that ignores nonlinear feedback, in this case speculation (because it isn't "economically rational"). But look at the data and one sees that speculation, far from being zero, is two orders of magnitude greater than the real economy! Far from being negligible, the soon-to-be quadrillion dollar derivatives inverted pyramid shapes the entire structure of and our entire picture of the global economy! The housing bubble was just a tiny room in the House of Mirrors.


Let's go one step farther! Financial "scientists" - who are comfortable working with the "softer" terms (which oddly make the problem harder) - actually deliberately induce the higher order terms - speculation - to prop up the USDollar, the economy, and so on. This is standard stuff. It doesn't mean the process can't get away from them. It will. That's the lack of hubris. But the point is, some scientists try not to minimize noise, but maximize it. They create feedback and then play with it, use it, even make music with it. Think of Jimi Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner.

Deception artists and humorists do the same thing. They deliberately overdrive systems to create nonlinear terms - folds (like cusp catastrophes) - two-valued functions - and then exploit their intrinsic ambiguity.

Max, some of us have noticed that this thread is going very badly for you. May I suggest trotting out some gibberish about Hegelian triads?

 

[RedIbis]

My apologies for getting snared up in derailing a great thread. I just cannot abide someone asserting that I'm a "jew-hater."

I'd be very much happy split this off to another thread where Pom can provide his evidence for this ridiculous charge.