Truthers and Sandy Hook

[Patriotdiscussions]

But there has been enough things I have seen

There always are. I have been involved professionally in a number of major crime scenes (including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing), and have seen this every time. Scenes of major disasters are not laid out neatly like lab experiments. Anyone looking for something "suspicious" will find it.

Welcome back, James. How are you doing?

Sweet, you were in loved in the 93 wtc investigation, what can you tell us about the FBI involvement in that bombing?

[wserra]

Quite a bit, and I have. "Non-involvement", when there was reason to get involved, is much more accurate, though. And how the embarrassment from that non-involvement led to the arrests a short time later of the defendants in the case I tried, Omar abdel-Rahman ("The Blind Sheikh") and company. It's not a pretty story.

[Patriotdiscussions]

No I mean do you got any dirt on the tape the FBI informant made of his handlers in the New York office?

[fortinbras]

The "Truthers" have gone well beyond good taste and even common decency with Sandy Hook. Grieving parents have been accused, on the internet and, God help me, even face-to-face, of faking the existence or the death of their child. And this is all done to try to unseat the Sandy Hook massacre as a talking point for gun legislation.

[wserra]

No I mean do you got any dirt on the tape the FBI informant made of his handlers in the New York office?

I have the tapes. What do you think they show?

[morrand]

No I mean do you got any dirt on the tape the FBI informant made of his handlers in the New York office?

I have the tapes. What do you think they show?

Not dirt, I hope. Would have made it awfully hard to play back without ruining the tape heads.

[arayder]

No I mean do you got any dirt on the tape the FBI informant made of his handlers in the New York office?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

[Patriotdiscussions]

No I mean do you got any dirt on the tape the FBI informant made of his handlers in the New York office?

I have the tapes. What do you think they show?

Well if your the prosecuter Mary jo then you know they were not top secret.

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/28/nyreg ... blast.html

[Patriotdiscussions]

No I mean do you got any dirt on the tape the FBI informant made of his handlers in the New York office?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Please don't embarrass yourself trying to act like you understand psychology.

[arayder]

No I mean do you got any dirt on the tape the FBI informant made of his handlers in the New York office?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Please don't embarrass yourself trying to act like you understand psychology.

My, it appears I have struck a nerve.

Anybody who goes around sovcit, survivalist, and even NJ cop, forums and websites searching for a way to get out from under the certainties of Obamacare, auto registration, mortgage obligations and Lord knows what else is a good candidate for one having a confirmation bias, which btw is not a psychological disorder.

With your high I.Q. and all you may see yourself as a mysterious and complex stranger in our presence, but the the fact is your bias would be obvious to a grade schooler.

I mean all this in the kindest possible way, of course.

[wserra]

Well if your [sic] the prosecuter [sic] Mary jo then you know they were not top secret.

Where did I say they were?

What an idiot.

I mean all this in the kindest possible way, of course.

I don't.

[Pottapaug1938]

Some years ago, Carl Sagan came out with his "Baloney Detection Kit". It was designed for combating pseudoscience, but it works just as well for the willfully clueless such as PD. Here's a summary of the Kit:


Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts.

Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.

Arguments from authority carry little weight (in science there are no "authorities").

Spin more than one hypothesis - don't simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.

Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it's yours.

Quantify, wherever possible.

If there is a chain of argument every link in the chain must work.

"Occam's razor" - if there are two hypothesis that explain the data equally well choose the simpler.

Ask whether the hypothesis can, at least in principle, be falsified (shown to be false by some unambiguous test). In other words, is isttestable? Can others duplicate the experiment and get the same result?

Additional issues are:

Conduct control experiments - especially "double blind" experiments where the person taking measurements is not aware of the test and control subjects.

Check for confounding factors - separate the variables.

Common fallacies of logic and rhetoric

Ad hominem - attacking the arguer and not the argument.

Argument from "authority".

Argument from adverse consequences (putting pressure on the decision maker by pointing out dire consequences of an "unfavourable" decision).

Appeal to ignorance (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).

Special pleading (typically referring to god's will).

Begging the question (assuming an answer in the way the question is phrased).

Observational selection (counting the hits and forgetting the misses).

Statistics of small numbers (such as drawing conclusions from inadequate sample sizes).

Misunderstanding the nature of statistics (President Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence!)

Inconsistency (e.g. military expenditures based on worst case scenarios but scientific projections on environmental dangers thriftily ignored because they are not "proved").

Non sequitur - "it does not follow" - the logic falls down.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - "it happened after so it was caused by" - confusion of cause and effect.

Meaningless question ("what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?).

Excluded middle - considering only the two extremes in a range of possibilities (making the "other side" look worse than it really is).

Short-term v. long-term - a subset of excluded middle ("why pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?").

Slippery slope - a subset of excluded middle - unwarranted extrapolation of the effects (give an inch and they will take a mile).

Confusion of correlation and causation.

Straw man - caricaturing (or stereotyping) a position to make it easier to attack.

Suppressed evidence or half-truths.

Weasel words - for example, use of euphemisms for war such as "police action" to get around limitations on Presidential powers. "An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public"

[LPC]

"Occam's razor" - if there are two hypothesis that explain the data equally well choose the simpler.

That's major problem for most conspiracy theories.

Let's look at the question raised by this thread. Which is more likely:

1. Lone crazy person takes gun, goes into school, and shoots multiple people.

2. Conspiracy among hundreds of people, including law enforcement personnel, parents, and teachers, to pretend that something happened that didn't actually happen.

To ask the question is to answer it.

[bmxninja357]

Some years ago, Carl Sagan came out with his "Baloney Detection Kit". It was designed for combating pseudoscience, but it works just as well for the willfully clueless such as PD. Here's a summary of the Kit:

when dealing with graduates of youtube university it is often easier to put things in the familiar format.based on carl sagans kit, here is the Michael Shermer: Baloney Detection Kit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUB4j0n2UDU

one must be able to comprehend the information or it will serve little purpose...

peace,
ninj

[Pottapaug1938]

"Occam's razor" - if there are two hypothesis that explain the data equally well choose the simpler.

That's major problem for most conspiracy theories.

Let's look at the question raised by this thread. Which is more likely:

1. Lone crazy person takes gun, goes into school, and shoots multiple people.

2. Conspiracy among hundreds of people, including law enforcement personnel, parents, and teachers, to pretend that something happened that didn't actually happen.

To ask the question is to answer it.

In Loren Collins' excellent book "Bullspotting", he talks, among other things, about how so many people like to engage in "anomaly spotting" (JFK assassination conspiracy buffs are masters at this). They are ready, willing and able to identify anomalies in the timeline; but they never can tie them all together into a coherent hypothesis.

In Charles P. Pierce's book "Idiot America", he quotes members of Dalhousie (Masonic) Lodge in Newton, Massachusetts (the same one of which my father was a member for 50 years) in a section a bout supposed Masonic secret conspiracies to rule the world. At one point, a Dalhousie member observes something like "if people think that we Masons can run a successful conspiracy to rule the world, let them come in and see us try to organize our annual dinner."

[Famspear]

Ironically, the "truthers" or others like them -- the very people who lack fundamental critical thinking skills -- are the kind of people who believe (or at least claim to believe) that it is the members of the public at large who are the "sheeple."

I put people who believe that the Sandy Hook incident was faked in the same broad category as people who believe that world events are influenced by "shape-shifting lizard people".

If there is any one thing that ties all these people together -- whether it be Sandy Hook "truthers," believers in shape-shifting lizard people, tax deniers, or so-called "sovereign citizens" -- it may be a significant lack of critical thinking skill in at least one area. They often are neither deeply mentally ill nor seriously deficient in intelligence over all, but they have (in my non-expert opinion) a psychological problem of some sort, and the lack of critical thinking skill relates to that psychological problem. As I believe other regulars here have pointed out from time to time, these people may be perfectly normal in other areas of their mental lives; they are able to tie their shoes, to operate a motor vehicle without careening into buildings, to fill out a medical information sheet at a doctor's office, to understand that the images and sounds emitted from a television set are not some sort of voodoo, and so on. But in at least one specific area of life, they lack the analytical skills that a normal 12 year old would have.

[Pottapaug1938]

And yet, they think that their critical thinking skills are very highly evolved, because they alone can spot the truth hiding behind the screens of disinformation erected by [insert your paranoid choice of villain(s) here], and can come up with a [to them and their cohorts] credible hypothesis on that basis.

[Patriotdiscussions]

My, it appears I have struck a nerve.

Anybody who goes around sovcit, survivalist, and even NJ cop, forums and websites searching for a way to get out from under the certainties of Obamacare, auto registration, mortgage obligations and Lord knows what else is a good candidate for one having a confirmation bias, which btw is not a psychological disorder.

With your high I.Q. and all you may see yourself as a mysterious and complex stranger in our presence, but the the fact is your bias would be obvious to a grade schooler.

I mean all this in the kindest possible way, of course.

Or it could be someone looking for answers, only an idiot does not question what he is told.

You keep pointing out how my agenda is to run back to these sites that you have stalked me to and gloat in some imagined win.

But yet you seem to come up short on a link to my said gloating/agenda, why is that sparky?

Possibly because your not as wise as your trying to make yourself out to be?

You label me as these types of people only shows your bias friend.

The confirmation bias only works if you found me on sites that people believed the same thing I do, which is close to impossible because I tend not to believe anything.

You see friend it is only someone who knows something for sure that I am weary of.

Some of us see that to understand anything, you have to understand how your mind works, most never will. Sadly, a whole country full of know it all's pointing the finger at each other swearing it was them that brought down the country.

But hey, presume some more about me, say I'm an idiot and pat yourself on the back for being correct.....again,and get on with your life brother, because you my friend have got all the answers.

[arayder]

My, it appears I have struck a nerve.

Anybody who goes around sovcit, survivalist, and even NJ cop, forums and websites searching for a way to get out from under the certainties of Obamacare, auto registration, mortgage obligations and Lord knows what else is a good candidate for one having a confirmation bias, which btw is not a psychological disorder.

With your high I.Q. and all you may see yourself as a mysterious and complex stranger in our presence, but the the fact is your bias would be obvious to a grade schooler.

I mean all this in the kindest possible way, of course.

Or it could be someone looking for answers, only an idiot . . .

Please excuse me for cutting you off, my friend. But I have to ask if you have anything significant to say about the 911 misdeeds you infer occurred when asking about, ". . . dirt on the tape the FBI informant made of his handlers in the New York office?"

Perhaps you might start another thread on this matter since this thread is about Sandy Hook?

Substance, please, PD.

[Patriotdiscussions]

My, it appears I have struck a nerve.

Anybody who goes around sovcit, survivalist, and even NJ cop, forums and websites searching for a way to get out from under the certainties of Obamacare, auto registration, mortgage obligations and Lord knows what else is a good candidate for one having a confirmation bias, which btw is not a psychological disorder.

With your high I.Q. and all you may see yourself as a mysterious and complex stranger in our presence, but the the fact is your bias would be obvious to a grade schooler.

I mean all this in the kindest possible way, of course.

Or it could be someone looking for answers, only an idiot . . .

Please excuse me for cutting you off, my friend. But I have to ask if you have anything significant to say about the 911 misdeeds you infer occurred when asking about, ". . . dirt on the tape the FBI informant made of his handlers in the New York office?"

Perhaps you might start another thread on this matter since this thread is about Sandy Hook?

Substance, please, PD.

I spent 6-8 hours a day for 6 months looking at the evidence, a couple of more years debating it online. We will never know what happened that day, and to speculate whose conspiracy is correct( the government's or the truthers) will never work out.

People are set in those beliefs, one way or the other.