This article is a deliberate meta-troll. To be successful I need your trolling cooperation. Now hear me out.
In The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You Eliezer talks about asognostics, who have one of their arm paralyzed, and what's most interesting are in absolute denial of this - in spite of overwhelming evidence that their arm is paralyzed they will just come with new and new rationalizations proving it's not.
Doesn't it sound like someone else we know? Yes, religious people! In spite of heaps of empirical evidence against existence of their particular flavour of the supernatural, internal inconsistency of their beliefs, and perfectly plausible alternative explanations being well known, something between 90% and 98% of humans believe in the supernatural world, and is in a state of absolute denial not too dissimilar to one of asognostics. Perhaps as many as billions of people in history have even been willing to die for their absurd beliefs.
We are mostly atheists here - we happen not to share this particular delusion. But please consider an outside view for a moment - how likely is it that unlike almost everyone else we don't have any other such delusions, for which we're in absolute denial of truth in spite of mounting heaps of evidence?
If the delusion is of the kind that all of us share it, we won't be able to find it without building an AI. We might have some of those - it's not too unlikely as we're a small and self-selected group.
What I want you to do is try to trigger absolute denial macro in your fellow rationalists! Is there anything that you consider proven beyond any possibility of doubt by both empirical evidence and pure logic, and yet saying it triggers automatic stream of rationalizations in other people? Yes, I pretty much ask you to troll, but it's a good kind of trolling, and I cannot think of any other way to find our delusions.
Ok, not to be a rabid Truther here, but I consider the article to which you linked to be exactly the sort of rationalization we're talking about. (Here's another; there's no shortage.)
Just taking the firs few objections:
Objection #1: controlled demolition goes from the bottom up, while the twin towers clearly collapsed from the top. The obvious responses are:
Answer A: Is it not reasonable to think that someone demolishing a building for other-than-legitimate purposes might possibly not follow all the standard CD protocols? In particular, top-down demolition would be more frightening and look more like the "collapse" claimed by the official story.
Answer B: Compare for yourself (and tell me if I'm missing any points of comparison, or have anything wrong here) - various attributes of different causes of building collapse, compared to the attributes observed in the collapses of WTC1, 2 and 7.
Answer C: WTC7 did collapse from the bottom.
Objection #2: "what are the chances that those planning such a complicated demolition would be able to predict the exact location the planes would impact the towers, and prepare the towers to begin falling precisely there?"
Objection #3: WTC2 "did not fall straight down, as the North Tower and buildings leveled by controlled demolitions typically fall."
There certainly are a few really wacky 9/11 "theories" out there (e.g. the "no planes" theory, the "laser beams" theory -- their numbers are legion), and certainly those need to be debunked; I'm not saying that all debunking is itself bunk -- but I've looked at the evidence, and I've looked at the "debunkings", and what I see in the latter is mostly rationalization.
I really wish I could link to xkcd and leave. I really do.
*deep breath*
Okay. Let me take it point by point.
Point 0 - Three may keep a Secret, if two of them are dead.
In order for your claims to be true, hundreds of people would have to be involved. First, everyone involved in setting up the controlled demolition (no easy task) has to plan, prepare, and execute the task. Second, every witness has to be found and suppressed. Third, everyone in the chain of command to plan, order, and fund the project has to keep mum. Fourth, everyone whose job it is to moni... (read more)