This is bad. You know you lack the expertise, and you have an intuitively reached conclusion. In which cases should you believe your own intuition, and to what degree? Only so far as you expect the intuition to compute answers corresponding to reality. Not being trained at understanding such structures makes your intuition even more unreliable than intuition of a trained person, and trained people could also do at least a back-of-the-envelope calculation to calibrate their intuition.

One should learn to doubt oneself more: our minds are nothing but faulty calculators, but are the only means for general intelligence we have, so we should study the user manual carefully, and implement workarounds for known bugs.

Fair enough. But compare this to somebody saying that although they're no biologist, evolution cannot in their opinion explain how all the different species came to be, and therefore studies saying otherwise are unscientific. To many people, me included, your claim doesn't sound much more convincing.

I'm not a structural engineer but IMHO the collapse of WTC7 as portrayed in the video cannot be explained by the failure of one column.

I'm not a structural engineer either but I can guess why intuition built from the breakage of objects on a scale of several feet, as we more typically encounter, cannot apply to the demolition of a skyscraper.

• First, the entire column of the skyscraper should have a lot of inertia -- why would it tip horizontally in one direction or another without a significant continued force to do so?

• You're probably underestimating the cohesion of the floors, one to another. Maybe they're not like layers of cake balanced on toothpicks. Just a few internal structures connecting the floors (like concrete staircases?) make a vertical crumbling fall seem much more reasonable.

• An impact that is strong enough to break a hole in an exterior wall doesn't just affect that wall, presumably the whole building would be agitated, shaking and wobbling at various sonic and supersonic frequencies. (Thunder during a storm is enough to cause my house to resonate and rattle the mirrors on my wall.)

I'm not saying that I would have predicted that the building would fall vertically rather than tip over. I'm just saying that I would expect that the fall of an enormous building with lots of external and internal structure to be more complex than my intuition could accommodate.

If I was worried about there being a conspiracy, and it was because the fall of this building was nagging at me, what I would do -- because I know from experience this is what I do when I worry -- is I would go to youtube and google "building collapse" and see if buildings typically fall in ways that I expect, and if there's a lot of variation, etc. I would see if after watching a few buildings collapse at that scale, if my brain could extract enough information to really feel comfortable one way or another about the likelihood of identifying a 'false' collapse..

(Seeing what structural engineers have to say about it is not the first thing I would do, because I expect demolition models are like climate models -- you have enough free parameters and undetermined assumptions to get out anything.)