Scott Sommers
Illuminator
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2009
- Messages
- 3,866
"essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful"
-- statistician George Box
I'm not an engineer or physical scientists of any sort, so I may be missing something here. I have read through this whole thread very carefully, and the only person I can understand is Dave Rogers. This could just be a verbal skill issue and Dave can write better than anyone else here...but I don't think that's the reason why.
All of this takes me back to a thread I once started where I talked about how many involved in the 9/11 Truth Movement are "confused". My point was that this confusion is not stupidity or mental illness or cognitive dissonance. This confusion is just like what happens to your thinking when you spin around for a long time or have to answer questions about something you didn't read properly or is at a level of comprehension that's too high for you. And I suspect that's something like what's going on here.
My wife and I had a baby recently. She was born 2 weeks early. This was not an issue for anyone, but it does point to a flaw in their model. How could a perfectly healthy baby be born so early? The attending physician could give me no explanation. We have a model about gestation that's based on perhaps millions of observations. How could it be so wrong? But in fact, it is routinely wrong.
So we have some JREF friends who have mastered some very complicated software. And with the vast amounts of free time that modern life gives to some of us, they have analyzed to death little bits and pieces of the collapse of buildings during the 9/11 attacks. While doing so, they have concluded that the report written by NIST is flawed. It is claimed that these researchers are not Truthers...or at least not necessarily Truthers.
And this I think is why Noahfence is asking those big bolded and colorful questions,
What is the point of all this? Is it just to show that some small detail of the NIST modeling is incorrect? Who cares? Models are incorrect in the details all the time. It is to be expected. The importance of these deviations from the model is when they point to errors in the interpretation of the phenomena. Tony Szamboti and others seem to feel they have found errors in the NIST model that point to dark and mysterious forces. Tony has told me that we need to examine the role of thermite in the WTC collapses to fully understand the errors he has observed.
I really like the final points of Dave's last post,
So perhaps someone can explain to me why Dave is wrong. By this I mean, why are the points that M_T and femr2 detail significant? Are they much more than just "exactly how a...collapsing structure would be expected to behave"? Do they point to a fundamental flaw with key aspects of the NIST report indicating something really, really, really bad? Or are we talking about some of our friends who spent half their life learning complicated software, analyzing really difficult multidimensional data and then putting up vast websites of their conclusions only to confuse the details of a model commissioned by the government with its correctness.
Tell me what's going on here that anyone should notice? Are we looking at something that only a death ray from space can explain? Do we need the super powers of a Steve Jones thermite attack? Or are we just talking about some guys who are so caught up in their own work, even they don't know anymore why it's important.
-- statistician George Box
I'm not an engineer or physical scientists of any sort, so I may be missing something here. I have read through this whole thread very carefully, and the only person I can understand is Dave Rogers. This could just be a verbal skill issue and Dave can write better than anyone else here...but I don't think that's the reason why.
All of this takes me back to a thread I once started where I talked about how many involved in the 9/11 Truth Movement are "confused". My point was that this confusion is not stupidity or mental illness or cognitive dissonance. This confusion is just like what happens to your thinking when you spin around for a long time or have to answer questions about something you didn't read properly or is at a level of comprehension that's too high for you. And I suspect that's something like what's going on here.
My wife and I had a baby recently. She was born 2 weeks early. This was not an issue for anyone, but it does point to a flaw in their model. How could a perfectly healthy baby be born so early? The attending physician could give me no explanation. We have a model about gestation that's based on perhaps millions of observations. How could it be so wrong? But in fact, it is routinely wrong.
So we have some JREF friends who have mastered some very complicated software. And with the vast amounts of free time that modern life gives to some of us, they have analyzed to death little bits and pieces of the collapse of buildings during the 9/11 attacks. While doing so, they have concluded that the report written by NIST is flawed. It is claimed that these researchers are not Truthers...or at least not necessarily Truthers.
And this I think is why Noahfence is asking those big bolded and colorful questions,
What is the point of all this? Is it just to show that some small detail of the NIST modeling is incorrect? Who cares? Models are incorrect in the details all the time. It is to be expected. The importance of these deviations from the model is when they point to errors in the interpretation of the phenomena. Tony Szamboti and others seem to feel they have found errors in the NIST model that point to dark and mysterious forces. Tony has told me that we need to examine the role of thermite in the WTC collapses to fully understand the errors he has observed.
I really like the final points of Dave's last post,
So perhaps someone can explain to me why Dave is wrong. By this I mean, why are the points that M_T and femr2 detail significant? Are they much more than just "exactly how a...collapsing structure would be expected to behave"? Do they point to a fundamental flaw with key aspects of the NIST report indicating something really, really, really bad? Or are we talking about some of our friends who spent half their life learning complicated software, analyzing really difficult multidimensional data and then putting up vast websites of their conclusions only to confuse the details of a model commissioned by the government with its correctness.
Tell me what's going on here that anyone should notice? Are we looking at something that only a death ray from space can explain? Do we need the super powers of a Steve Jones thermite attack? Or are we just talking about some guys who are so caught up in their own work, even they don't know anymore why it's important.
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