roland comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong

97 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 March 2010 11:23PM

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Comment author: roland 12 June 2011 08:39:32PM 0 points [-]

Following a suggestion from Cayenne:

I don't believe there were explosives planted in the World Trade Center. I believe that all these beliefs are not only wrong but visibly insane.

Eliezer, I don't understand how you arrived at this conclusion, could you explain the reasoning behind it? Specifically I don't understand why this belief is visibly insane.

Comment author: moshez 13 February 2012 06:18:03PM 4 points [-]

I cannot answer for Eliezer, but I can (perhaps) explain why the belief is "visibly insane".

  1. There is footage of the airplanes flying into the building.
  2. In hindsight, several engineering organizations that investigated the phenomena, decided that a collapse from the fires started was likely (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_World_Trade_Center )
  3. In order to be a conspiracy, there would have had to be 3a. Someone who planted the explosives in a way to cause an organized collapse. 3b. People who shipped the explosives. 3c. People on the inside of FEMA and the other investigating organizations who looked into it. 3d. People on the inside of the FBI who swept under the rug the evidence for explosives. 3e. Nobody in the group of 3a-3d who had a change of heart and decided to come clean.

For 3 to be true, too many things to be true. For the non-conspiracy explanation, all that's needed is the (perhaps slightly surprising) fact that the fire caused a specific kind of collapse. Most "truthers" know about as much about physics as me (highschool mechanics, some basics in college). So for a given truther to believe that, the truther needs to assume a high degree of certainty for his or her intuitive physics estimation in the fairly subtle area of civil engineering. In fact, they'd have to have a degree of certainty so high that all the elements in 3 are not enough to sway them the other way. That degree of certainty should be reserved for actual trained civil engineered, and perhaps not even then...