Wednesday, December 20, 2006

The Money Quote

As we have long been saying, the 9/11 denial movement is more representative of a religion, than a science. In their recent debate, Avery and Bermas provide the perfect example of this:

Wieck: I want to ask both of you quickly, what would falsify your beliefs? What would it take? What would we need to change your mind about this?

Avery: There is nothing. I have talked to so many rescue workers, I have talked to people who crawled out of the Pentagon. I have talked to people who ran away from building 7. I have talked to people who were affected by 9/11. I have talked to the victims. I have talked to countless people.

Wieck [to Bermas]: Anything that would falsify your belief?

Bermas: I gotta tell you, maybe before I really started looking into controlled demolition, but after you really take a look at 1,2, and 7 and I feel that you if you spend the time there, there is no way around it.
What does this mean though? Well, for those of you who fell asleep during high school science class, Bermas and Avery apparently among them, let's have Sir Karl Popper explain it for us:


1. It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory — if we look for confirmations.

2. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory.

3. Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.

4. A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.

5. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.


Something which cannot be logically falsified is not a theory, it is dogma.

3 Comments:

At 20 December, 2006 13:55, Blogger shawn said...

I don't think Avery and Bermas understand falsification, and just walked right into Ron's question.

By the way, I retract my earlier comment about Avery not really believing this nonsense. It's quite obvious he and Bermas are both mindless zealots, and I apologize for my earlier statement.

 
At 20 December, 2006 17:15, Blogger The Artistic Macrophage said...

What I would like to know, given all the people Avery has talked to, what new and earth shattering things did they tell him, that they did not tell the MSM/Public, to convince him it was an inside job.

I mean, as far as I know, of those he mentions (rescue workers, pentagon survivors, victims families) they certainly have not spoken of publicly, any evidence or opinion that would support an "inside" job. Has Avery spoken to different people than the rest of the world???

TAM

 
At 21 December, 2006 09:58, Blogger tym said...

I'm still not convinced Avery buys into it, though I'm not sure I'm willing to give him credit for being smart enough to be pulling off this manipulation for so long without really slipping up.

And I'd gladly change my tune in the face of a truly convincing evidence that actually stands up to scrutiny as well as stuff like what chf suggested (i.e. reputable structural engineers and people who work in demolition speaking out, whistleblowers, etc)

Part of what sets me off to the whole thing so much is the logical fallacy that some of the case is on. Refusing to acknowledge the scientifically proven things that the official story could have taken place the way it did seems fundamentally flawed.

I don't think you'll find a debunker that says any type of controlled demolition is impossible, just that's highly improbable and impractical and there's an astonishing lack of evidence for conventional means being used, there's no recorded of use of thermate based compounds for that purpose and that the Judy Wood microwave beam technology is something that there is zero tangible evidence of any such weapon actually existing.

It's like they sacrifice intellectually honest presentation for something that looks far more damning as long as you don't think about it too hard and try to research into it a little bit deeper.

Incidentally, it's a tactic that completely shatters the credibility of anyone who uses it.

 

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