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JoshuaZ comments on What is missing from rationality? - Less Wrong
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Person X drops down dead with a perforation of his head. Claim: he was killed by a bullet. This can be examined independently of the question: Who had a motive to do so? Do you agree that it would be wrongheaded to start the investigation with: X was a well known and popular person and so no one would have a motive to kill X therefore the claim of death by bullet is extremely unlikely and we shouldn't even bother investing much time in its investigation.
That's a really bad analogy with multiple problems: First, stray bullets exist. Second, insane people shooting at random individuals exist. Third, the assumption that no would have a motivation to kill the person in question is an incredibly strong one. Moreover, even in that situation, if you did have a very high confidence that no one would deliberately shoot the individual, that would in fact reduce the confidence value that the person had been killed by a gunshot since it reduces the probability of certain gun-shot hypotheses being correct. You might think it doesn't reduce it by enough to matter but it can't no alter it if the presence of motivations would increase the probability. Conservation of evidence and all that.
Moreover, the notion you've constructed of not even bothering to investigate the hypothesis is a strawman. No one has said that alternate investigation might not have made sense at one point. But it simply isn't a useful tool at this point. To extend your analogy, slightly differently, if the doctors all say that the person died from a random piece of shrapnel and have a lot of evidence for that claim (including videos of the shrapnel impact) then at a certain point it isn't useful to spend resources investigating the bullet hypothesis. If you can't construct a plausible motive for the shooter that becomes yet another reason to reduce confidence in the (already low) probability assigned to the bullet hypothesis.
Eliezer managed to write much more eloquently what I'm trying to say:
In the art of rationality there is a discipline of closeness-to-the-issue - trying to observe evidence that is as near to the original question as possible, so that it screens off as many other arguments as possible.
The question in this case is: "Were explosives planted in WTC7?".
How much explosive charge would it take to cause the failure observed? Where would it have to be installed? How many hours would that take, and how many workers? How many people would have to be displaced so as not to witness the building being prepared to blow? Where did the explosives come from? Who paid for them? Who delivered them, and to whom, where? Why would the project be timed to go on September 11th? Why would the denotation of the explosives be delayed to seven hours after the debris struck the building? Why didn't the fire interfere with the operation of the explosives? How much noise would the explosives make? How quickly would the building collapse after the explosion?
Even if you think the official story is not well supported, I have to say it stacks up positively magnificently compared to the building-implosion theory.
Aside from the fact that ata is right and WTC7 was actually brought down from fires and structural damage caused by the falling tower, not the airplanes themselves, this strikes me as a reasonable response to persistent and uncorrectable wrongness. Do people disagree? If so, what is the appropriate response?
WTC7 was not one of the buildings that got hit by a plane.
(Lest anyone misinterpret my motives... I'm just correcting a statement of fact. I am absolutely not defending the claim that any of them were brought down by explosives, which I do not believe.)