This controversy reminds me of an astronomy professor of mine. He was semi-obsessed with showing that the moon landing was not faked, to the point of conspiracy-nut enthusiasm, despite supporting the status quo. He'd go off on long anecdotes in class about how he saw some light at such and such a latitude at a certain time, which showed unquestionably that there must have been a man-made vehicle at such-and-such a point. Then, he said one thing that stuck with me: if it were faked, that means there are at least hundreds, more likely tens of thousands, of low- and mid-level government employees who are keeping their lips absolutely, perfectly sealed.
That was all the argument I ever needed to hear to dissuade me from crackpot government conspiracy theories. Once an event reaches a certain magnitude of size, cost, and planning, P:Everyone stays quiet rapidly approaches zero. The payoffs and probability of a guilty conscience are simply too high with a large enough N.
Then, he said one thing that stuck with me: if it were faked, that means there are at least hundreds, more likely tens of thousands, of low- and mid-level government employees who are keeping their lips absolutely, perfectly sealed.
I've always disliked this argument. We do know of programs with tens of thousands and more employees who have kept quiet and regard their silence as a great and honorable accomplishment.
They are the employees of the US federal government's black budget, a >$50 billion annual sink about which the public knows next to nothing whatsoever, and probably never will because records are easily destroyed when they are secret.
If we are lucky, we may get some bare descriptions of what happened, decades after the fact. For example, you've heard of the sick abuses of MKULTRA (which we only know even this much about because the coverup missed some documents), but MKULTRA was only one of many projects being run by the CIA technical division. What do we really know about the MKULTRA programs overseas, like MKCHICKWIT or MKDELTA? Where are all the whistleblowers there, hm? And these were some of the most evil programs around, literally direct descendants from the N...
On review, I will admit my original point was framed somewhat imprecisely. I did not mean to imply that it is highly unlikely that the government can manage to keep any large projects secret. I meant (as I think was obvious from the context) that it is very unlikely that the government would be able to keep something as large-scale, civilian-intensive, public, and high-profile as faking a series of moon landings secret for four decades. This probability is particularly low considering the alternative of, "They just did it." As my original point was a rather offhand comment, I did not bother going into this level of detail.
Someone is being intransigent here.
I will confess to not really giving a damn about the details up to now, because I thought my point was rather obvious. I see there's a bit of an inferential gap. In short, I think you vastly underestimate the prior improbability of your own claim, and vastly overestimate the relevance of your counterexamples, all of which are substantially different on numerous dimensions. I'll spell things out in greater detail.
[Having taken two minutes to look at wikipedia, there does seem to be rather solid evidence of its verac...
An even more unassailable bit of evidence, for me, is that Russia never claimed it was a fake, despite having the obvious capacity to verify (just by training their best telescopes on the landing site, and probably a dozen other ways) and the obvious benefit to them if they could show America had faked it.
No conspiracy short of a One World Government could have pulled off a fake moon landing— and if a conspiracy were powerful enough to orchestrate a fake Cold War, one wonders why they would have even bothered with PR stunts.
Once an event reaches a certain magnitude of size, cost, and planning, P:Everyone stays quiet rapidly approaches zero.
I wonder if there is data/examples supporting this, e.g. a list of failed conspiracies due to someone not being able to stay quiet (or any other relevant reason). Of course we'd also need a list of successful fairly large conspiracies too..
Did you happen to see that episode of South Park? It turns out that the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are all government agents trying to make the government seem more competent than it actually is. ;)
Beat me to it! It's also a great episode to watch from a Bayesian standpoint, because throughout it, you see people having to radically shift their views because they see extremely improbable evidence.
Since you've already spoiled it, I want to highlight one scene in particular: Kyle, Stan, and a Truther guy are taken to the White House, where Bush and his cabinet (falsely) admit to having orchestrated 9/11 and then execute the Truther (which later turns out to be fake too). All Kyle can do is respond with, "REALLY?", more incredulous each time.
Link again, thanks Jayson_Virissimo for posting it.
As Napoleon reportedly said, P(incompetence was the cause | bad things happen) > P(conspiracy was the cause | bad things happen).
The googler invasion that results from this will be ten times worse than influx following the Knox discussion.
You missed a critical factor. Volume. It's not about making up one single ludicrous claim. If you really want to distort the discussion you put 100 different ludicrous claims out. If the noise is greater than the amount of real evidence, truth won't come to light.
I almost made such a point myself, in the post I made on the subject. This was the essence of what I learned about counter-intelligence when I worked in Europe during the Cold War... "The Noise to Signal Ration must be kept high enough that those without the appropriate filter will have no clue as to what is going on."
The goal for the Counter-Intelligence agent is to make others think that they have found the correct filter.
Low enough that I didn't much expect to have to take the post down by accident, high enough that I could still honestly say afterward that it was probably coincidence.
So this seems like the most logical thread to bring this up in. There's now a suggestion that the towers were brought down in part by thermite that was inadvertently created by a combination of the airplane hulls and the water from the sprinkler systems. (Yeah, you probably weren't expecting that sentence to end as it did...)
This looks wrong to me simply because the quantities seem to be too small unless they happened to be in exactly the right places with near perfect mixtures. But this does worry me in that if this was a major part of what brought down the towers then this indicates a substantial failure of rationality if this was actually necessary. I strongly suspect that this is not going to go anywhere. But if it does, it should worry us that engineers and laypeople looking at this essentially dismissed truthers claims that this looked like a thermite fire.
Ok. Faster than light neutrinos, potential contradiction in Peano Arithmetic, and now the WTC may have been brought down by thermite. Quite an interesting last few days.
I used to work with someone, when I lived in Europe during the Cold War, who did something very similar to exactly what Eliezer has described.
I doubt that it was done for 9/11, as it doesn't seem to fit with the profile of what/when/where they would use this sort of counter-intelligence, but the theory behind it is absolutely founded.
Usually, it was so that everyone would be looking east when something very wrong was going to be happening in the west. Every time I hear about the Dancing lights in the sky that are claimed by the ignorant to be UFOs, yet the military says "No, those were just Hi-MAT (Highly Maneuverable and And Tactical) flares" (I'm pretty sure they changed the names since 1986) I believe that they were flares... But, I wonder... "What was on the opposite side of the sky that they wanted everyone looking at the flares for?"
It is amazing some of the things that they do in Mil-Intelligence and that spooks get up to (course, spooks have really been trying to get back in the game since the end of the Cold War...). So, as my own contribution to the meta-conspiracy:
It was all CIA spooks who were doing a budget op in order to get themselves re-funded af...
Just curious, but didn't those buildings really come down faster than they should've, assuming structure was intact?
Be careful not to explain data that turn out to be false. IIRC (someone else could look it up if they were really interested) the "free-fall" part is bogus, the free-fall time was 9 seconds and the actual time was 15 seconds or something like that.
I'm puzzled over why the comments in this thread are being downvoted, as well. I can't help the feeling that there's more "we'll downvote things that we disagree with" going on in this community than there should be - this is far from the first place where it has looked like that.
Count me as one of the meta-truthers - more or less. As George Carlin said "When you've got a bunch of people with similar backgrounds, similar social scenes, and similar interests, who are out of touch with contemporary society, you don't actually need a formal conspiracy to have the same effect."
To be honest though, I don't mind living in a dystopia. It's a lot more interesting, right? I mean, if you could actually trust the cops to perform their jobs with dignity, and politicians to serve the community rather than their own interests, how boring would that get?
The point about the buildings not needing to fall was always my favorite objection.
I do like one 9/11 theory, that flight 93 might have been shot down. Here's a piece on it from Stuart Buck (occasional OB contributor) on the idea, dating back to Oct '01.
http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/1001/1001flight93.htm
Add to this Rumsfeld's odd slip that the terrorists "shot down" the plane over Pennsylvania (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6Xoxaf1Al0) and I think p=.5 that that plane was shot down and the authorities took advantage of the cal...
See, now that is at least plausible (on the surface, I know nothing of details). I can very easily see a responsible military officer making that call and deciding to keep it a secret.
Do also consider the fact that even if the story of flight 93 occurred exactly according to the official story, the heroic passengers saved zero lives. Jets had been scrambled. Shoot down orders had been given. The flight was not going to hit its target.
Yes, the passengers may have been heroes in the sense that they did not "freeze up" and tried to save themselves or (possibly) others.
Yet the most popular story presented by the press and government, and lodged in the public consciousness, is that the passengers prevented a final strike.
Realistically, they may have prevented a fighter pilot from having to commit an act that could have scarred him emotionally.
So, yes, I am confident the event was "spun." The question is to what degree.
As long as we're on the subject, my latest fictional piece is here. One of those story ideas that got stuck in my head and wouldn't leave until I wrote it. The philosophical depths thereof wouldn't be new to this audience, but it might serve for those who know aught of Suzumiya Haruhi. I'll delete this notice shortly.
Wow. I hadn't heard of the series but that piece caught my attention. I've just ordered all the books.
Eliezer kudos for you to touch such a hot iron! There is at least one professor in the US who lost his tenure because of his contrarian views in regard to 911.
IIRC, I think that case was about a lot more than just his contrarian 9/11 views, although I suppose they were instrumental in shining a spotlight on him bright enough to reveal all the other ways in which he was a fraud.
ETA: Okay, found his name: Ward Churchill. Intro matches my summary:
In January 2005, Churchill's work attracted publicity, with the widespread circulation of a 2001 essay, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. In the essay, he claimed that the September 11, 2001 attacks were provoked by U.S. policy, and referred to the "technocratic corps" working in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns".
In March 2005 the University of Colorado began investigating allegations that Churchill had engaged in research misconduct; it reported in June 2006 that he had done so. Churchill was fired on July 24, 2007, leading to a claim from some scholars that he was fired over the ideas he expressed.
So he was officially fired for research misconduct, but that misconduct would probably have gone unnoticed if not for his look-at-me-I'm-a-contrarian spiel.
Note: If you have a cushy job predicated on fraudulent work you've done in the past, and ethics don't trouble you, try to keep a low profile, moron.
It doesn't tie directly with this story, but several years ago (I didn't date the note I jotted) I wrote:
Of course, if there really is some vast conspiracy out there, it is to the conspirators' advantage to have everyone automatically discount "conspiracy theories".
Mostly from reading Hogan's "The Mirror Maze", Fellows's "Operation Damocles", and especially Chalker's "A War of Shadows" within a relatively short time.
Even if it isn't quite the same as the actual conspiracy, what is the probability from known evidence that Bush actually liked the fact 9/11 happened due to the political opportunities it gave him?
Replying to Jonathan_Graehl in the other thread:
Evidence of how the alleged demolition was accomplished is best eliminated by demolishing the building?
No, I'm saying this METHOD of committing the crime allows the evidence to be more easily cleaned up, much as a murderer would chop a person into small pieces. They don't commit the murder to conceal the murder, that would be idiotic.
Ironically, what you find to be an ironic coincidence sends the signal that you're inappropriately excited by cute but totally non-causal coincidences.
I don't see how tha...
I had a theory that the faked Iraqi soldier abuse photos were faked by the government to cast doubt on the [genuine] photos of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse. I had zero evidence for this theory; I just knew someone had faked photos of British soldiers abusing Iraqi POWs and thought about who would be the most likely group to benefit from this.
Similarly, I think that if 9/11 was a plot by the US government [I am very, but not totally, confident that it wasn't], it would have been far simpler to actually train suicide bombers to fly into the World Trade Centr...
The way people interpret the data in favor of one side or the other has more to do with the basic assumptions under which they operate. I want to write an article about this.
So if you are one who generally distrusts the government like most libertarians you will find it easy to see a conspiracy. If you generally trust the government you will tend to dismiss any conspiracy.
One question you have to ask yourself in this specific context is: what do you think about secret services in general(not only the american ones), what is their mission? Once you understand that they are not there to protect the people or democracy but to advance the geopolitical interests of their respective nations you are set.
Not a contradiction, but they are two distinct claims. Whether the government is untrustworthy and whether it's competent are separate arguments.
Most libertarian criticisms of the government that i've heard have focused on arguments that the government is inefficient and incompetent.
I, Eliezer Yudkowsky, do now publicly announce that I am not planning to commit suicide, at any time ever, but particularly not in the next couple of weeks
ROFLcopters.
You might be interested to know that there are plenty of truthers who believe controlled demolition IS disinformation. Your whimsical idea is not a new one.
Personally, I think controlled demolition was necessary to bring down the buildings, as flying an airplane into a skyscraper won't make the skyscraper fall down. Why the planes, then? To prove that it was terrorists. Planes = suicide = zealots = terrorists.
I didn't watch your video, but most of the "impossible" calls were from flipping GTE Airphones, not cell phones.
The calls that were actually made by cellular phones (near the end) would certainly have been possible.
(I was an RF engineer for a mobile phone company until I changed jobs this year)
I hesitate to post this, because... debating 9/11 conspiracy people on Less Wrong?!
Date: September 11th, 2001.
Personnel: Unknown [designate A], Unknown [designate B], Unknown [designate C].
A: It's done. The plane targeted at Congress was crashed by those on-board, but the Pentagon and Trade Center attacks occurred just as scheduled.
B: Congress seems sufficiently angry in any case. I don't think the further steps of the plan will meet with any opposition. We should gain the governmental powers we need, and the stock market should move as expected.
A: Good. Have you prepared the conspiracy theorists to accuse us?
B: Yes. All is in readiness. The first accusations will fly within the hour.
C: Er...
A: What is it?
C: Sorry, I know I'm a bit new to this sort of thing, but why are we sponsoring conspiracy theorists? Aren't they our arch-nemeses, tenaciously hunting down and exposing our lies?
A: No, my young apprentice, just the opposite. As soon as you pull off a conspiracy, the first thing you do is start a conspiracy theory about it. Day one.
C: What? We want to be accused of deliberately ignoring intelligence and assassinating that one agent who tried to forward specific information -
A: No, of course not! What you do in a case like this is start an accusation so ridiculous that nobody else wants to be associated with the accusers. You create a low-prestige conspiracy theory and staff it with as many vocal lunatics as you can. That way no one wants to be seen as affiliating with the conspiracy theorists by making a similar accusation.
C: That works? I know I'm not the brightest fish in the barrel - sometimes, hanging around you guys, I feel almost as dumb as I pretend to be - but even I know that "The world's stupidest man may say the sun is shining, but that doesn't make it dark out."
B: Works like a charm, in my experience. Like that business with the Section Magenta aircraft. All you need is a bunch of lunatics screaming about aliens and no one respectable will dream of reporting a "flying saucer" after that.
C: So what did you plan for the 9/11 cover conspiracy theory, by the way? Are the conspiracy theorists going to say the Jews were behind it? Can't get much lower-prestige than anti-Semitism!
B: You've got the right general idea, but you're not thinking creatively enough. Israel does have a clear motive here - even though they weren't in fact behind it - and if the conspiracy theorists cast a wide enough net, they're bound to turn up a handful of facts that seem to support their theory. The public doesn't understand how to discount that sort of "evidence", though, so they might actually be convinced.
C: So... the Illuminati planned the whole operation?
B: You know, for someone who reads as much science fiction as you do, you sure don't think outside the box.
C: ...okay, seriously, man. I don't see how a theory could get any more ridiculous than that and still acquire followers.
(A and B crack up laughing.)
B: Hah! What would you have done to cover up the Section Magenta aircraft, I wonder? Blamed it on Russia? To this day there are still people on the lookout for hidden aliens who overfly populated areas in gigantic non-nanotechnological aircraft with their lights on.
A: So what did we pick for the 9/11 cover conspiracy, by the way?
B: Hm? Oh, the World Trade Center wasn't brought down by planes crashing into it. It was pre-planted explosives.
C: You're kidding me.
B: Seriously, that's the cover conspiracy.
C: There are videos already on the Internet of the planes flying into the World Trade Center. It was on live television. There are thousands of witnesses on the ground who saw it with their own eyes -
B: Right, but the conspiracy theory is, the planes wouldn't have done it on their own - it took pre-planted explosives too.
C: No one is going to buy that. I don't care who you bought out in the conspiracy-theoretic community. This attack would've had the same political effect whether the buildings came down entirely or just the top floors burned. It's not like we spent a lot of time worrying about at what angle the planes would hit the building. The whole point was to keep our hands clean! That's why the al Qaeda plot was such a godsend compared to the original anthrax plan. All we had to do was let it happen. Once we arranged for the attack to go through, we were done, we had no conceivable motive to risk exposure by planting explosives on top of that -
B: Don't take this the wrong way. But one, you don't understand conspiracy theorists at all. Two, they bought the aliens, didn't they? And three, it's already online and the usual crowd of anti-establishment types are already snapping it up.
C: Are you joking?
B: Honest to Betsy. People are claiming that the buildings fell too quickly and that the video showed ejecta corresponding to controlled demolitions.
C: Wow. I don't suppose we actually planted some explosives, just to make sure that -
A: Oh, hell no, son. That sort of thing is never necessary. They'll turn up what looks to them like evidence. They always do.
C: Aren't they going to, um, suspect they're pawns?
A: Human nature 101. Once they've staked their identity on being part of the defiant elect who know the Hidden Truth, there's no way it'll occur to them that they're our catspaws.
B: One reason our fine fraternity has controlled the world for hundreds of years is that we've managed to make "conspiracy theories" look stupid. You know how often you've ever heard someone suggest that possibility? None. You know why? Because it would be a conspiracy theory.
A: Not to mention that the story would be too recursive to catch on. To conceal the truth, one need only make the reality complicated enough to exceed the stack depth of the average newspaper reader.
B: And I've saved the dessert for last.
C: Really?
B: Yeah. You can go totally overboard with these guys. They never notice and they never suspect they're being used.
C: Hit me.
B: We've arranged for them to be called "truthers".
I hereby dub any believers in this theory 9/11 meta-truthers.
I, Eliezer Yudkowsky, do now publicly announce that I am not planning to commit suicide, at any time ever, but particularly not in the next couple of weeks; and moreover, I don't take this possibility seriously myself at the moment, so you would merely be drawing attention to yourselves by assassinating me. However, I also hereby vow that if the Singularity Institute happens to receive donations from any sources totaling at least $3M in 2010, I will take down this post and never publicly speak of the subject again; and if anyone asks, I'll tell them honestly that it was probably a coincidence.
The really big problem with that theory is that one can hear sounds of struggle and the terrorists saying, "Is that it? I mean, shall we pull it down?" just before the plane entered a steep dive into the ground. If the plane had been shot down, the terrorists wouldn't have reacted in the same way, and the flight path from that point on would have been significantly more erratic.