It's old news; from Google I find the following on the first page for "Saddam syria wmd": http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=25309 http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2006/2/18/233023.shtml http://www.nysun.com/foreign/saddams-wmd-moved-to-syria-an-israeli-says/24480/ http://hotair.com/archives/2010/06/05/obama-dni-choice-believes-syrians-have-saddams-wmd/ Et cetera. There was apparently a report saying that they weren't (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/25/AR2005042501554.html), but there's still obviously a good chunk of high-up people who disagree.

As for us finding WMD, we found about 500 in the three years between the invasion in 2003 and this statement in 2006: http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=15918

What you're describing is an evil AI, not just an unFriendly one - unFriendly AI doesn't care about your values. Wouldn't an evil AI be even harder to achieve than a Friendly one?

Here's another possible objection to cryonics:

If an Unfriendly AI Singularity happens while you are vitrified, it's not just that you will fail to be revived - perhaps the AI will scan and upload you and abuse you in some way.

"There is life eternal within the eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their life." OK, that's generalising from fictional evidence, but consider the following scenario:

Suppose the Singularity develops from an AI that was initially based on a human upload. When it becomes clear that there is a real possibility of uploading and gaining immortality in some sense, many people will compete for upload slots. The winners will likely be the rich and powerful. Billionaires tend not to be known for their public-spirited natures - in general, they lobby to reorder society for their benefit and to the detriment of the rest of us. So, the core of the AI is likely to be someone ruthless and maybe even frankly sociopathic.

Imagine being revived into a world controlled by a massively overclocked Dick Cheney or Vladimir Putin or Marquis De Sade. You might well envy the dead.

Unless you are certain that no Singularity will occur before cryonics patients can be revived, or that Friendly AI will be developed and enforced before the Singularity, cryonics might be a ticket to Hell.

Here's explanation of my pro-ultra-behaviorist position.

First, I haven't seen any convincing evidence against ultra-behaviorism, but plenty against ultra-innatism. Look at Flynn effect for example. There's absolutely no way a universe in which ultra-innatism is true is compatible with Flynn effect. There has been so many drastic shifts in behavior without slightest shift in underlying genetic makeup of population - abandonment of violence, shift from large families and low offspring investment to small families and high offspring investment, shift from agricultural to urban lifestyle etc. - these are vastly greater than any of the proposed genetic variations. And not a single kind of proposed genetically-based behavioral variation had a convincing genetic marker found for it (yes, there are heredity studies on twins etc. but I find they highly unconvincing). So my estimate of the truth is far closer to ultra-behaviorist end than ultra-innatist end, so much closer than ultra-behaviorism might be a good "tl;dr" version, even if not 100% accurate.

And second, I find ultra-behaviorism instrumentally useful. Overestimating how much you can change your life leads to better outcomes than underestimating it and just giving up.

Your standard of verification seems to be the Wikipedia standard - if you can find a "mainstream" source saying something, then you are happy to take it as fact (provided it fits your case).

I am "happy to take it as fact" until I find something contradictory. When that happens, I generally make note of both sources and look for more authoritative information. If you have a better methodology, I am open to suggestions.

The "Wikipedia standard" seems to work pretty well, though -- didn't someone do a study comparing Wikipedia's accuracy with Encyclopedia Britannica's, and they came out about even?

you rather snidely reply "You win a cookie!", before conceding that it only took a bit of research to find out that the supposed "anomaly" never existed. But then, instead of considering what this means for the quality of all your other evidence, you then sarcastically cite the factoid that "6 of the alleged hijackers have turned up alive" as another killer anomaly, completely ignoring the possibility of identity theft/forged passports!

I wasn't intending to be snide; I apologize if it came across that way. I meant it sincerely: Jack found an error in my work, which I have since corrected. I see this as a good thing, and a vital part of the process of successive approximation towards the truth.

I also did not cite the 6 living hijackers as a "killer anomaly" but specifically said it didn't seem to be worth worrying about -- below the level of my "anomaly filter".

Just as an example of my thought-processes on this: I haven't yet seen any evidence that the "living hijackers" weren't simply people with the same names as some of those ascribed to the hijackers. I'd need to see some evidence that all (or most) of the other hijackers had been identified as being on the planes but none of those six before thinking that there might have been an error... and even then, so what? If those six men weren't actually on the plane, that is a loose end to be explored -- why did investigators believe they were on the plane? -- but hardly incriminating.

If you made a good-faith attempt to verify ALL the facts you rely on (rather than jumping from one factoid to another), I'm confident you would find that most of the "anomalies" have been debunked.

I verify when I can, but I am not paid to do this. This is why my site (issuepedia.org) is a wiki: so that anyone who finds errors or omissions can make their own corrections. I don't know of any other site investigating 9/11 which provides a wiki interface, so I consider this a valuable service (even if nobody else seems to).

For example, you seem to think it's unlikely that hijackers could take over a plane using "only box-cutters", because the pilots were "professionals" who were somehow "trained" to fight and might not have found a knife sufficiently threatening. So you think two unarmed pilots would resist ten men who had knives and had already stabbed flight attendants to show they meant business? Imagine yourself actually facing down ten fanatics with knives.

The idea that this is unlikely is one I have seen repeatedly, and it makes sense to me: if someone came at me with a box-cutter, I'd be tempted to laugh at them even if I wasn't responsible for a plane-load of passengers -- and I've never been good at physical combat. Furthermore, the "Pilots for 9/11 Truth" site -- which is operated by licensed pilots (it has a page listing its members by name and experience) -- backs up this statement.

And that's the best authority I can find. If you can find me an experienced pilot (or a military veteran, for that matter) who thinks that this is nonsense, I would very much like to hear from them.

The rest of your arguments that don't rely on debunked facts are about framing perfectly reasonable trains of events in terms to make them seem unlikely - in Less Wrong terms, "privileging the hypothesis". "How likely is that...

I did that precisely as a counter to someone who was doing the same thing in the other direction -- to show that if you accepted "how likely..." as a valid form of argument, then the case is just as strong (if not stronger) for a conspiracy as it is against.

I do not accept "apparent likeliness" as a valid form of argument, and have said so elsewhere.

Well, since it was piloted by a suicidal hijacker who had been trained to fly a plane, I guess it's not unlikely that it would manouevre to hit the building.

You're missing the point; it would have been much easier to hit the other side, the one that wasn't heavily reinforced -- which would have caused more damage, too. On top of that, the maneuver necessary to turn around and hit the reinforced side was, to all accounts, an extremely difficult one which many experienced pilots would hesitate to attempt.

(I suppose one might argue that he overshot and had to turn around; not being skilled, he didn't realize how dangerous this was... so he missed that badly on the first attempt, and yet he was skillful enough to bullseye on the second attempt, skimming barely 10 feet above the ground without even grazing it?)

But that's just one of the "how likely"s, and I shouldn't even be rising to the bait of responding; it's not essential to my main point...

...which, as I have said elsewhere, is this: 9/11 "Truthers" may be wrong, but they are (mostly) not crazy. They have some very good arguments which deserve serious consideration.

Maybe each of their arguments have been successfully knocked down, somewhere -- but I have yet to see any source which does so. All I've been able to find are straw-man attacks and curiosity-stoppers.

I was interested in your defence of the "truther" position until I saw this this litany of questions. There are two main problems with your style of argument.

First, the quality of the evidence you are citing. Your standard of verification seems to be the Wikipedia standard - if you can find a "mainstream" source saying something, then you are happy to take it as fact (provided it fits your case). Anyone who has read newspaper coverage of something they know about in detail will know that, even in the absence of malice, the coverage is less than accurate, especially in a big and confusing event.

When Jack pointed out that a particular piece of evidence you cite is wrong (hijackers supposedly not appearing on the passenger list), you rather snidely reply "You win a cookie!", before conceding that it only took a bit of research to find out that the supposed "anomaly" never existed. But then, instead of considering what this means for the quality of all your other evidence, you then sarcastically cite the factoid that "6 of the alleged hijackers have turned up alive" as another killer anomaly, completely ignoring the possibility of identity theft/forged passports!

If you made a good-faith attempt to verify ALL the facts you rely on (rather than jumping from one factoid to another), I'm confident you would find that most of the "anomalies" have been debunked.

Second, the way you phrase all these questions shows that, even when you're not arguing from imaginary facts, you are predisposed to believe in some kind of conspiracy theory.

For example, you seem to think it's unlikely that hijackers could take over a plane using "only box-cutters", because the pilots were "professionals" who were somehow "trained" to fight and might not have found a knife sufficiently threatening. So you think two unarmed pilots would resist ten men who had knives and had already stabbed flight attendants to show they meant business? Imagine yourself actually facing down ten fanatics with knives.

The rest of your arguments that don't rely on debunked facts are about framing perfectly reasonable trains of events in terms to make them seem unlikely - in Less Wrong terms, "privileging the hypothesis". "How likely is that no heads would roll as a consequence of this security failure?" - well, since the main failure in the official account was that agencies were "stove-piped" and not talking to each other and responsibilities were unclear, this is entirely consistent. Also, governments may be reluctant to implicitly admit that something had been preventable by firing someone straight away - see "Heckuva job, Brownie".

"How likely is it that no less than three steel-framed buildings would completely collapse from fire and mechanical damage, for the first time in history, all on the same day?" It would be amazing if they'd all collapsed from independent causes! But all you are really asking is "how likely is it that a steel-framed building will collapse when hit with a fully-fueled commercial airliner, or parts of another giant steel-framed building?" Since a comparable crash had never happened before, the "first time in history" rhetoric adds nothing to your argument.

"How likely is it that the plane flown into the Pentagon would execute a difficult hairpin turn in order to fly into the most heavily-protected side of the building?"

Well, since it was piloted by a suicidal hijacker who had been trained to fly a plane, I guess it's not unlikely that it would manouevre to hit the building. Perhaps a more experienced pilot, or A GOVERNMENT HOLOGRAM DRONE (which is presumably what you're getting at), would have planned an approach that didn't involve a difficult hairpin turn. And why wouldn't an evil conspiracy want the damage to the Pentagon to be spectacular and therefore aim for the least heavily protected side? Since, you know, they know it's going to happen anyway so they can avoid being in the Pentagon at all?

If the plane had manoeuvred to hit the least heavily-protected side of the building, truthers would argue that this also showed that the pilot had uncanny inside knowledge.

"How likely is it that [buildings] would ... explode straight downward?" Well, as a non-expert I would have said a priori that seems unlikely, but the structure of the towers made that failure mode the one that would happen. All you're asking is "how likely is it that the laws of physics would operate?" I'm sure there is some truther analysis disputing that, but then you're back into the realm of imaginary evidence.

"How likely is it that this would result in pools of molten steel?" How likely is it that someone observed pools of molten aluminium, or some other substance, and misinterpreted them as molten steel? After all, you've just said that the steel girders were left behind, so there is some evidence that the fire didn't get hot enough to melt (rather than weaken) steel.

What were your thoughts on Eliezer's Meta-Truther Conspiracy post?

He brings up a lot of hypotheses; let me see if I can (paraphrase and) respond to the major ones.

• "9/11 conspiracy theorists" are actually acting on behalf of genuine government conspirators. Their job is to plant truly unbelievable theories about what happened so that people will line up behind the official story and dismiss any dissenters as "just loony conspiracy theorists".

Well, yes, there's evidence that this is what has happened; it is discussed extensively here.

• The idea that the towers were felled by controlled demolition is loony.

No, it isn't. There is now a great deal of hard evidence pointing in this direction. It may turn out to be wrong, but it is absolutely not loony. See this for some lines of reasoning.

• "This attack would've had the same political effect whether the buildings came down entirely or just the top floors burned."

If anyone really believes that, I'll be happy to explain why I don't.

• The actual government involvement was to stand aside and allow the attack, which was in fact perpetrated by middle eastern agents, to succeed.

This is the lesser of the two major "conspiracy" theories, known as "let it happen on purpose" (LIHOP) and "make it happen on purpose" (MIHOP). MIHOP is generally presumed to be a core belief of all "truthers", though this is not in fact the case; there does not appear to be any clear consensus about which scenario is more likely, and (as I said earlier) the actual core belief which defines the "truther" movement is that the official story is significantly wrong and a proper investigation is needed in order to determine what really happened.

Imagine, for example, what the Challenger investigation would have found if Richard Feynman hadn't been there.

• Conspiracy theorists are all (or mostly) anti-government types.

Well, I can't speak for the rest of them, but I'm not. I strongly dislike how the government operates, but I see it as an essential invention -- something to repair, not discard. The "truther" movement doesn't seem to have any strong political leanings, either, though I might have missed something.

• Conspiracy theorists will find suspicious evidence, regardless of whether anything suspicious happened.

Ad-hominem. Is the evidence reasonable, or isn't it? If not, why not?

If there were a conspiracy, government inaction given foreknowledge of the attacks seems orders of magnitude more likely than any sort of controlled demolition, even for WTC7.

How likely does it seem that groups of foreign hijackers would succeed in taking control of 4 different planes using only box-cutters and piloting 3 of them into targets in two of the most heavily-guarded airspaces in the world, without even an attempt at interception? How likely is that no heads would roll as a consequence of this security failure? How likely is it that the plane flown into the Pentagon would execute a difficult hairpin turn in order to fly into the most heavily-protected side of the building? How likely is it that no less than three steel-framed buildings would completely collapse from fire and mechanical damage, for the first time in history, all on the same day? How likely is it that they would not just fall to the ground towards the side most heavily damaged but instead seemingly explode straight downward and outward into microscopic dust particles, leaving almost nothing (aside from the steel girders) larger than a finger, long after the impacts and when the fires were clearly dying down? How likely is it that anyone would try to claim that this was totally what you would expect to happen, even though the buildings were designed to handle such an impact? How likely is it that this would result in pools of molten steel, when jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel?

Shall I go on?