9/11 conspiracy theorists in retreat (avec assorted musings)

An interesting article from The Skeptic about how the ranks of 9/11 Truthers are thinning out:

Today, the 9/11 conspiracy movement is a shell of what it once was. The website masquerading as an academic journal, Journal of 9/11 Studies, has dropped from a high of six or seven articles published per issue to one....The introduction to the main hub of 9/11 denier activity, 911truth.org, welcomes its visitors with a plea that announces, “we’ve cut to the bare bones, but are still far short of our basic budget needs.” Prominent “truthers” like Mark Dice, Dylan Avery, Jimmy Walter... and Kevin Ryan have dropped into obscurity.

I can't say I'm terribly upset by all this. The 9/11 Truthers were probably the most useless and pointless fringe group in the modern world, whose only real purpose seemed to be deflecting the very real criticisms of Bush's leadership and foreign policy, by retreating into a fantasy world of unprovable and outlandish accusations.

The areas of real interest - how badly was the intelligence managed by the executive and various security organizations before 9/11, has faded into obscurity as people have debated ludicrous theories involving missiles, gold, Reichstag Fire scenarios, entirely fictitious terrorist organizations and insurance scams.

I also found the organic growth of a sceptical counter-movement to oppose the Truther's very interesting:

Staking their fortunes almost solely on Internet-based content may have been the 9/11 deniers’ biggest mistake. What seems like a perfect place for pseudoscience — the Internet is un-edited, without fact-checkers or minimum publishing standards of any kind — also became a perfect place for a rapid-response system of blogs and forums to fight back. Drawing on the freely available technical information from the NIST, FEMA, and academic journals which most colleges let their students access for free, skeptical sites like ScrewLooseChange.blogspot.com and debunking911.com are able to defuse 9/11 denier claims as they arise.

Web 2.0 may be useful after all! Now we need to get this going on the media a little more...maybe even the government as well. Government 2.0 perhaps. Its not very catchy, but instant feedback could be interesting.

This also may help explain the failure of US Presidential Candidate Ron Paul, whose internet support was huge, and yet offline was not worth mentioning. Barack Obama, by contrast, has a powerful grass-roots campaign online, but has anchored himself fairly strongly offline too. In Ron Paul's case, the online communities filtered through his policies and discovered many of the key flaws in them....by contrast, the Obama-supporting web in many cases has been used to debunk several myths and nasty rumours about him. Ron Paul's online support didn't translate into offline success and collapsed....Obama by contrast carried his offline success online and it helped him. A parable here, maybe.

Anyway, back on topic. Recently, I read an interesting little document that goes by the name of "The Creators of Loose Change Speak" by Mark Roberts. Its an interesting 98 page long document which shows the general contempt the people behind Loose Change seem to have for...well, everyone really. It pretty much convinced me that one reason behind the attempted spread of 9/11 conspiracy theories, especially this case, was the financial incentive. Because I am a kind and forgiving blogger (and more importantly, I forgot where it was hosted) I have uploaded this PDF document to Rapidshare, should anyone want to read it. Just follow the link.

Anyway, I think that's all I have to say on the topic for now. Cheers to Blairwatch for the link.

Black Swan 101

I unashamedly stole these from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's wonderful book Black Swan, as a sort of condensed version of his ideas. Have a read through, and you'll probably see why I like him.

What you don't know is far more relevant than what you do.

Being unexpected is what gives the Black Swan its impact.

'Experts' are no better at making predictions than anyone else – only at using technical jargon to maintain a plausible narrative.

Planning does not work, however allowing people to tinker and experiment and get rewarded for fortunate accidents does.

We learn specifically from a Black Swan event. They do not help us generate metarules.

Recursive events (events that cause other events, feedback loops) are key to creating Black Swans and maintaining complexity.

There are few rewards or recognition for acts of prevention.

Platonicity: what happens when we mistake the map for the territory, the abstract for the real, the neat concepts for the messy reality. Potentially useful, but limited and have random and unforeseen side effects when they do fail (Anerstic Delusion).

Sterile scepticism: talk is cheap, talk about language problems, philosophy and pseudo-scepticism that plays around with word definitions to eliminate the problems of randomness are even cheaper.

Stories replace stories. You need a better narrative to replace a bad or ineffective one.

The triplet of opacity: everyone thinks they know more than they do, they assess history retroactively (hindsight is 20/20) and the over evaluation of factual information and “authoritative” persons.

History jumps, it does not crawl or steadily progress.

People will cluster around the same framework of analyses, no matter how non-factual or temporary these frameworks are. This is a result of pathological categorization – wanting to put people in boxes to explain their behaviour.

Events fall into one of two domains: Extremistan or Mediocristan. Events in Mediocristan are scalable and basically predictable. Randomness is mild, it usually falls within the ranges of a Bell Curve. In Extremistan, events are non-scalable and much more extreme. Usually, Mediocristan events are those related to biology (for example, height) whereas those related to Extremistan are socially based (income, or book sales).

Inductive logic is for suckers: working from particulars to general rules is a recipe for disaster. Past indicators are not a guarantee of future performance.

The Black Swan is a problem relative to expectation and lack of knowledge. Those most certain of the future are the most likely to get tripped up and fall flat on their face.

Most people, given the choice, will choose to believe they live in Mediocristan, even when the evidence shows they do not.

Knowledge is domain specific: we have problems translating abstract classroom knowledge into real world applications. Equally, we can easily navigate a social situation which, when presented as a logical problem, totally confounds us.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. No evidence of disease is not the same as there being no disease, and just because we do not know the function of something does not mean it has no function.

Corroborative facts cannot tell us what is true, only what is false. Negative empiricism is superior to naïve empiricism, where one can 'prove' anything with facts. A negative hypothesis is needed, falsification is needed.

Confirmation bias – we only look for evidence that supports our beliefs.

The narrative fallacy – we like to invent causes for events, even where none exist. We put explanations and an element of causality into a sequence of facts. Post hoc rationalization of events without meaning are common.

Narratives allow us to ignore the unusual.

Dopamine will lower your critical thinking abilities: you'll become susceptible to all sorts of fads, such as New Age mysticism, tarot cards or economic forecasts from a lack of it.

Information is costly to obtain – the more random the information the harder it is to store. Hence stories allow us to store more information, but with the downside of a loss of appreciation of the true randomness present.

Both art and science are symptomatic of our need to reduce complexity and inflict basic order on human existence.

People can and will hold incompatible and disparate beliefs based on the same factual evidence.

In the absence of other information, we will rely on stereotypes or even complete nonsense to explain events.

There are two types of Black Swan, the narrated and the truly unexpected. The narrated Black Swan is an overrated and hyped rare event, the true Black Swan is not talked about.

We are biologically constructed to seek small, yet repeatable and sustainable rewards.

The Black Swan is an asymmetry of consequences – either positive or negative.

You can either be a sucker, and run blindly into the danger you didn't know was there – or you can slowly bleed in the face of dangers you knew existed while hoping that it will lead to a pay-off that is worth it.

Silent evidence: often we are mislead by the sample in any experiment, because we do not take into account those who failed to be counted (the dead supplicants fallacy).

The survivor bias: we work from the fact someone survived to find the secret of their success, but in reality the fact that they survived is the secret of their success. People do not write about or promote knowledge of their failures.

The Ludic fallacy: life is not like a game. The sources of uncertainty are not well defined, the “rules of the game” are not totally apparent. If you treat life like a game, where you know all the rules, the unknown and unexpected will hit you like a truck.

UFO files released

This might interest some of you, I don't know. Via the BBC

Secret files on UFO sightings have been made available for the first time by the Ministry of Defence.

The documents, which can be downloaded from the National Archives website, cover the period from 1978 to 1987.

They include accounts of strange lights in the sky and unexplained objects being spotted by the public, armed forces and police officers.

I've recently been reading Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia, so the subject sort of interests me, but not from the usual point of view.

I am, of course, highly sceptical of much of the UFO subculture, barring our fine Subgenius friends, naturally. Its rife with disinformation specialists, con-men, cultists, the true lunatic fringe of New Age believers, the mentally disturbed, professional paranoids and, very occasionally, a stable but curious individual, such as I believe Jacques Vallée is. And while this makes it a hell of an amusing scene to fall into or lurk around, its not very good for the truth.

But I think Vallée is onto something, when he describes the similarity between folklore and UFO contactee tales. Especially the early ones, coming out of the 50s, are more reminiscent of tales about the faerie folk and their mischevious, odd ways than anything else. And the contactees who are allegedly approached by benevolent, peaceful beings concerned about developments on the planet seem rather similar to angels of past periods. Meanwhile the modern sci-fi monsters, the gray's and reptilians, are reminiscient of ancient demons more than anything else, with their terrifying appearances and disturbing habits. It all seems just a little too...perfect, the way these tales segue from a pre-technological, superstitous and rural society, to an urban, technologically adept one, while retaining so many core characteristics of the story.

Thats not to say either of the above two explanations are true. I certainly don't see a reason why I should accept either presented answer as the 'real' explanation. Only that the similarity between them, when examined closely, is quite astonishing, and suggests another element to the story, a psychological and social component that is worth exploring, perhaps especially in the context of mythology.

Either way, these are only half-formed thoughts, and I don't want the crazies from the UFO crowd to descend on me, demanding explanations for every little thing they think disproves my musings. The archives are yours to peruse at your pleasure, and if nothing else, could make for interesting reading.