Joined: Jan 2011 Gender: Male Posts: 74 Location: Red Deer Alberta
The best argument I came up with yet « Thread Started on Feb 1, 2011, 9:08pm »
I am not sure that this is here but I am pretty sure this argument has been used by someone here. After debating this event with a "truther" off and on for about 4 months on a forum I finally seemed to have shut him up for awhile.
After being called a mind controlled sheeple and a robot and other countless amounts of insults and grade school names I posed this question. I asked if I was such a moron and although never claimed to be the most intelligent person out there if there was any measurement of how smart someone actually is and also that APPLIES this intelligence. His arrogant reply of " Well University degrees and more so where they are from such as Ivy League schools and so forth.
I then made him a deal " You find me someone that has a masters degree from a Ivy League school that believes we never went to the moon and I will write Buzz Aldrin a letter calling him a phony and a fraud and a fake and asked for him to punch me out"
With the only exception being literature but said if he could find that even I would be surprised. Well that was two weeks ago and every time I log into that forum and see his name on the current members board it is usually gone with ten minutes! The funny thing is I have never used vulgarity towards him and his last post was look who's being the a-hole and beligerants <yes I know I am that whatever it is.
I never seen the argument used before and I would be surprised if one even exists!! Love this forum as it has taught me to think outside the box when ......"debating" with these folks!
« Last Edit: Feb 1, 2011, 9:09pm by redneckr0nin »
Joined: Nov 2009 Gender: Male Posts: 375 Location: Old Lyme, CT
Re: The best argument I came up with yet « Reply #1 on Feb 1, 2011, 9:48pm »
I would not try that again. There is always some degreed nut out there will will believe anything. You got lucky this time.
He's not from the Ivy League but Jim Fetzer meets the nutty criteria so you have to be careful with that kind of challenge. John Mack from Harvard might have believed the landings were a hoax but the aliens took him out before he could say anything.
"Show us a photo of either the descent or the ascent rockets firing and the exhaust plume. And exactly how does a space craft fly when "The engine is NOT ON"" -Stelios at the DIF Google search this site
Re: The best argument I came up with yet « Reply #2 on Feb 2, 2011, 6:58am »
I would limit the qualifications to engineers or scientists with BS degrees or better from a major accredited university in a relevant field such as electrical, aerospace or mechanical engineering, astronomy or astrophysics, and ideally to individuals with actual aerospace-related experience. I would specifically exclude technical writers, journalists and shop technicians even if they are frequently in contact with people who are qualified.
Whenever Jarrah White attempts to quote an expert in support of some claim of his, Jay Windley always shuts him up rather quickly by asking if the person he is trying to quote-mine agrees with Jarrah's conclusion that Apollo was hoaxed.
If you can stomach listening to Jarrah White as he questions an authority whose reputation he wants to exploit, you will note that he never comes right out and asks his one real question: "Do you agree that the Apollo missions were faked because of X (e.g., space radiation)?" In fact, he words his questions very carefully to avoid revealing his true intentions. He behaves like an attorney conducting a deposition, repeatedly asking the same indirect questions in subtly different ways and getting a variety of slightly different answers until the respondent gets tired or annoyed. Jarrah then leaves with a set of responses that he can mine as needed.
I would limit the qualifications to engineers or scientists with BS degrees or better from a major accredited university in a relevant field such as electrical, aerospace or mechanical engineering, astronomy or astrophysics, and ideally to individuals with actual aerospace-related experience.
You certainly should be careful even with that.
There's a pro-hoax supporter on youtube called hunchbacked who claims to have gone to Supaero which is one of the best engineering schools in France. And it specialises in aerospace engineering.
"Show us a photo of either the descent or the ascent rockets firing and the exhaust plume. And exactly how does a space craft fly when "The engine is NOT ON"" -Stelios at the DIF Google search this site
There's a pro-hoax supporter on youtube called hunchbacked who claims to have gone to Supaero which is one of the best engineering schools in France. And it specialises in aerospace engineering.
He may well have been to the place, but a visitor's pass is not the same as a duly accredited Masters. And he assuredly doesn't have one of the latter...
I guess we should be explicit about the implied caveat that the qualifications must in fact be real? Yeah.
There's a pro-hoax supporter on youtube called hunchbacked who claims to have gone to Supaero which is one of the best engineering schools in France. And it specialises in aerospace engineering.
Oh yes, I'm very well acquainted with him.
As an engineer who actually knows something about this stuff, his objections to Apollo designs (his "incoherences", as he called them) often had me laughing out loud. His common theme: "If I don't understand it, then it couldn't possibly have worked".
I was especially amused by how his observations often revealed his age and where he had gained just enough knowledge to be dangerous. Electronic schematic drawing styles do change over the years. As new components are invented, new symbols are devised to represent them. At first there may be several ways to draw something, and eventually one wins out and the others fall into disuse. And as with nearly everything else, there are well-established differences between American and European electronic schematics.
The differences are especially apparent in digital logic, which was radically new during Apollo. There were no standard, complete "logic families" so Apollo used a mixture of logic gates and discrete, ad-hoc logic involving switches, resistors, capacitors, diodes and relays. Today this design style is sometimes derisively termed "Mickey Mouse Logic".
One Apollo schematic depicted a switch between a power rail and the input of a logic gate. The function was obvious: when the switch was closed, the gate saw a logic '1'; when the switch was open, the input became a logic '0'. Hunchbacked fumed at this obvious "mistake" stating that "everybody knows" you apply power to the power pin of a logic gate, not its input!
The Apollo Guidance Computer was the first computer constructed from integrated circuits, and "hunchbacked" was convinced that it couldn't possibly have worked because its architecture was so different from the modern microprocessors he had learned about!
And he strenuously objected to another schematic in which a set of wires merged into one and separated again elsewhere on the page. When I explained that this is a common way to minimize drawing clutter, he continued to protest that the circuit could not possibly have worked with such obvious short circuits, and whoever drew it must have been trying to blow the whistle on the Apollo hoax!
He had many other "findings" just like these, many just as funny.
I do wonder if he was merely pulling my leg, as I often do about many hoax believers. If so, he certainly acted sincere.
I'm reminded of an anecdote from some engineers who helped investigate the Challenger accident. They wanted to locate and retrieve the orbiter's computers to see if any interesting information was still in main memory. The younger engineers couldn't understand how this was possible since "everybody knows" RAM is volatile, i.e., its contents are lost when power goes away. The Shuttle's onboard computers still used magnetic core memory, which they apparently hadn't learned about in school. So they didn't realize that while core memory may already have been largely obsolete in 1986, it did have the advantage of being non-volatile!
Joined: Jan 2011 Gender: Male Posts: 74 Location: Red Deer Alberta
Re: The best argument I came up with yet « Reply #8 on Feb 6, 2011, 9:20pm »
Yeah guys I figured I might get burned but that's almost the glory of it. I have yet to see a "Truther" do any research. I won't be using this argument again but figured if there was someone out there with a masters degree that doesn't believe we went to the moon one of you would have heard about it.
Joined: May 2005 Gender: Male Posts: 3,122 Location: Space City, Texas
Re: The best argument I came up with yet « Reply #10 on Feb 7, 2011, 10:22am »
One of the problems with asking for a masters degree qualification is that in some programs, it is considered a booby prize for those who cannot complete a PhD. Those who pass their classes but cannot write or defend a dissertation. That leaves plenty of opportunity for insufficient claims of expertise.
One of the problems with asking for a masters degree qualification is that in some programs, it is considered a booby prize for those who cannot complete a PhD. Those who pass their classes but cannot write or defend a dissertation. That leaves plenty of opportunity for insufficient claims of expertise.
By the time I got my master's degree, they had already split into at least two versions: the "consolation prize" for those who couldn't complete their PhDs (or a "stepping stone" for many who did), and a goal in itself for those who were headed for industry.
I was in the latter category when I went to work for Bell Labs. They required all their rank-and-file members of technical staff to have MS degrees or better, so they sent all their BS hires back to school for another year at their own expense. That certainly made it easy to decide which offer to accept.
The inconsistent terminology could get confusing. At Cornell, where I got my undergraduate degree, the "consolation" version was the Master of Science while the "industry" version was the Master of Engineering. But at CMU where I got my master's degree, those two terms were reversed. I always thought Cornell had it right.
Joined: May 2005 Gender: Male Posts: 3,122 Location: Space City, Texas
Re: The best argument I came up with yet « Reply #12 on Feb 7, 2011, 11:58am »
My primary experience is in economics, where a MS degree in the programs I was familiar with is the consolation degree. There may well be some universities that offered a professional degree in economics. As you say it varies from school to school and the inconsistency heightens the need to look beyond degrees to a proven ability to produce knowledge.
Joined: Aug 2005 Gender: Male Posts: 1,682 Location: Cornwall
Re: The best argument I came up with yet « Reply #13 on Feb 7, 2011, 1:42pm »
It's changed a lot over the years. When I started out in the aerospace industry in the 1960s, there were engineers around without degrees, they'd come up through the company apprentice system plus sub-degree courses at technical colleges. Some of them were only a few years older than me. By the time I retired, most new starters had at least a masters and some had PhDs.
I would not claim that those later ones were better engineers than the earlier ones without degrees. In particular, someone straight out of university always has a lot to learn on the job.
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