No, I'm helping you to stay consistent with the reminder that external factors like funding and politics do not just influence Hulsey's work.
Strawman.
I never argued how the presence of money influences the results.
I argued that Hulsey and AE911Truth are breaking promises - promises they made while soliciting MONEY.
That is probably not fraud in a legal sense, but if I were a donor, I'd feel defrauded morally.
But the key point is evidence.
To me, to NIST, perhaps even to you - but apparently not to Hulsey and AE911Truth, who already claimed to know with 100% certainty what the result would be, a year prior to having even developed the evidence.
Whether or not the study came under pressure, whether or not the researchers knew the preferred conclusions, whether or not funding was at stake - we can only really judge the conclusions by looking at how well supported it is by evidence.
What are you talking about? Strawman still/again, or moving goal post?
With NIST, trust is the operative word. We must trust they got it right. We can't evaluate whether any political pressure biased their interpretation of the data, as they have not made their model public, or submitted their work for publishing in a peer-reviewed journal.
Trust is earned.
NIST has earned that trust through a history of sterling work.
Even Peter Ketcham has expressed this sentiment in his letter to the EPN.
The same is of course true for Hulsey and AE911Truth: Trust is an operative word. AND they have a history of breaking promises and not delivering on their priorities - not to mention a broad body of work that includes deceptions galore.
There is precisely zero reason to "trust" them at this point.
But you, John85, wrote earlier that Hulsey had "said something reassuring" (about the panel's independence). You need to explain how you can perceive anything these people says about this project as "reassuring", given the documented history of let-downs!
Plus, having a view about where the study will lead at the beginning does not mean the conclusions are invalid.
Wrong.
The conclusions may, theoretically, turn out (by pure coincidence) to be
correct, but the way they arrived at them - prior to gathering the evidence - is
invalid.
It is perfectly plausible that an engineering professor could take a look at somebody's work and spot an egregious error straight away, but still need to do painstaking work to provide a sophisticated model to prove it to the level required by his profession and position.
No. If you spot the error and can assess that it is "egregious", then you can spell it out without further ado. If you can't, then it's only a hunch, or a guess.
Indeed, Bazant had a hypothesis of how WTC 1&2 collapsed which he disseminated on Sept 13 2001, almost immediately after the event and before any data was available. He then got it published in Jan 2002 and defended it again in 2007.
a) It wasn't a theory of "how" the towers collapsed. It was a (largely valid) estimate of "why" the collapse progressed and accelerated - by enveloping (finding a best-case limit) the energy dissipation potential of the structure. This best-case scenario was not "how" the collapse actually progressed. Bazant, like most Truthers, assumed (for his limiting case!) that the columns would be the limiting factor. It's what Gage, stupidly, calls "the path of most resistance", and it's at the core of Tony Szamboti's papers ("Missing Jolt" etc.). But in reality, the columns were almost entirely bypassed: The collapse progressed mostly by breaking the floor-jost to columns connections, and because that is a path of very little resistance, collapse speed was mostly limited by Conservation of Momentum, not by column strength.
I do not disagree with him on the grounds that he formed his idea first and (possibly) looked for evidence second. I disagree because I think there is evidence against his position.
I disagree with Bazant, too, at least with his follow-up papers (the original 2002 limiting case was wonderful - even if it's possible to nitpick). He, too, has a false model of collapse progression in his head. Still today.
But Bazant is a distraction here, as is any talk of the twin towers. We are not discussing him, nor the twins.
Once Hulsey's work is released, you will have to look at it, decide if you agree, and if you do not, provide evidence of why his conclusions are invalid. As I've said before, it is still too soon to say.
Agreed - we will have to look at the work once released.
But our criticism is still
- that he broke promises so far (you lamented this already)
- that he will break the promise of publishing through a real engineering journal
- that he will studiously avoid exposure to the actual academic and professional communit by not publishing in a real journal, not planning to present this at real conferences, and instead catering to gullible donors through the production (
give more MONEY for this production!!) of slick propaganda videos on YT.
And, mark my words: I predict that they WILL brutally censor any and all criticism. You can bet your sweet arese that several of us will submit criticism of the draft, and that none of it well ever see the light of day.