I am not a truther, but I have some sympathy for them. It is hard to understand how the World Trade Center buildings collapsed, and it would be much easier if demolition were involved. I personally can't believe that the buildings were demolished, but I also don't really understand the mechanics of their progressive collapse.
Perhaps it's some kind of intellectual arrogance, but I feel I should be able to understand this. I think that my grasp of physics is strong enough that I should be able to study the topic and arrive at an understanding within a reasonable amount of time. I started wondering about it in earnest in 2005 and I don't think 15 years is a "reasonable" time frame. It should be possible for someone of my intelligence and discipline to satisfy their curiosity.
It is sometimes implied that I'm simply being disingenuous about this. Some have suggested outright that I'm not really "asking questions" but trying push what are actually my truther views. That is, they believe that I think I do understand how the buildings collapsed because I think they were demolished. Others have suggested that my persistent inability to understand is the result of my unwillingness to learn. In all these years, they imagine, I haven't really made an effort to understand the NIST report and related literature.
I'm not going to try to persuade anyone of my sincerity, but I do have a question that I think it would be reasonable to ask even if I were a truther. How much research does one have to do before one can take a position on how the WTC collapsed? And does it matter which position one takes? Presumably, members of the general public who think the buildings collapsed "naturally" (given the damage from the planes and the fires) are entitled to do so without further research? (But consider: how do we feel about people who think they collapsed because the fires melted the cores?)
But what does it take for you to respect someone who, for the time being, finds contolled demolition more plausible than gravity-driven progressive collase? Is there a stage of someone's research where you would grant that their position is reasonable given how far they've gotten? And how long should it take for them to reach your level of understanding (of ROOSD, for example) and you'd now insist that they change their mind about controlled demolition?
I don't want to pin this on anyone in particular (I hope we can all agree that these issues come up in discussion threads here all the time), but I was spurred to write this post by a passing remark from @Jeffrey Orling on another thread.
Consider one last thing. If @econ41 is right (here, for example) then in order to understand how the towers actually collapsed you have to understand exactly how the Wikipedia article gets it wrong. That seems to be a pretty high research standard to set. And it seems to provide at least some provisional ground on which truthers and debunkers can have a civil discussion about what is known and not known about what happened to those tragic structures.
Perhaps it's some kind of intellectual arrogance, but I feel I should be able to understand this. I think that my grasp of physics is strong enough that I should be able to study the topic and arrive at an understanding within a reasonable amount of time. I started wondering about it in earnest in 2005 and I don't think 15 years is a "reasonable" time frame. It should be possible for someone of my intelligence and discipline to satisfy their curiosity.
It is sometimes implied that I'm simply being disingenuous about this. Some have suggested outright that I'm not really "asking questions" but trying push what are actually my truther views. That is, they believe that I think I do understand how the buildings collapsed because I think they were demolished. Others have suggested that my persistent inability to understand is the result of my unwillingness to learn. In all these years, they imagine, I haven't really made an effort to understand the NIST report and related literature.
I'm not going to try to persuade anyone of my sincerity, but I do have a question that I think it would be reasonable to ask even if I were a truther. How much research does one have to do before one can take a position on how the WTC collapsed? And does it matter which position one takes? Presumably, members of the general public who think the buildings collapsed "naturally" (given the damage from the planes and the fires) are entitled to do so without further research? (But consider: how do we feel about people who think they collapsed because the fires melted the cores?)
But what does it take for you to respect someone who, for the time being, finds contolled demolition more plausible than gravity-driven progressive collase? Is there a stage of someone's research where you would grant that their position is reasonable given how far they've gotten? And how long should it take for them to reach your level of understanding (of ROOSD, for example) and you'd now insist that they change their mind about controlled demolition?
I don't want to pin this on anyone in particular (I hope we can all agree that these issues come up in discussion threads here all the time), but I was spurred to write this post by a passing remark from @Jeffrey Orling on another thread.
Which may have been related to a comment @Mendel made to me:
What I hope to discuss in this thread is whether a reasonable, respectable position for skepticism about "the official story" of the WTC collapses can be constructed, at least temporarilly, and what a discussion with a truther who takes that position might look like.
Consider one last thing. If @econ41 is right (here, for example) then in order to understand how the towers actually collapsed you have to understand exactly how the Wikipedia article gets it wrong. That seems to be a pretty high research standard to set. And it seems to provide at least some provisional ground on which truthers and debunkers can have a civil discussion about what is known and not known about what happened to those tragic structures.
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