Thanks for the acknowledgement; we all have lives outside the Internet. Because we are bound to respect each other's time, please stay on topic. This forum is about Apollo, not 9/11. There is a separate place for 9/11 discussions. Kindly do not distract from the Apollo questions you raised and which we are answering in this thread. When you are ready to continue discussing your Apollo questions, we'll be eager to resume the debate. In the meantime it's not necessary for you to supply busywork.
I never represented myself as objective. I say I'm merely well-informed and reasonable. Objectivity is not a prerequisite for intelligent debate on controversial subjects because there must be at least two opposing points of view advocated. The prerequisites for such a debate include the ability to support one's claims with sound reasoning and careful observation, and the willingness to acknkowledge when opposing reasoning has prevailed.
Conspiracy theorists tend to take a "Who is the most credible or believable?" approach to debate, and so their rhetoric often focuses on trying to question motives, associations, and to argue for bias. It centers around discrediting the debators rather than addressing the allegations of fact and the lines of reasoning. Consequently, conspiracy theorists often wrongly assume that the objections to a conspiracy theory derive from the objector's predilections -- i.e., that they're based on faith. Hence their rejoinders often take the form of accusing the objector of avoiding fact he fears will deny that faith.
Debunkers tend to take a "Who knows most about the relevant principles?" approach to debate, and so their rhetoric focuses on examining the underpinnings -- logical, factual, interpretational -- of the claims. It centers around testing claims to see whether all the relevant facts support it, especially if that means going out and looking for additional relevant facts.
Ironically, since the conspiracy theorist's mindset emphasizes whether trust is rightly placed, they'll often belittle objectors for relying on established authority (e.g., allegedly taking NASA's word for it) but remain largely blind to their own unquestioning reliance on principal conspiracy authors like David Percy.
Trust and expertise are largely orthogonal. That's why you have a lot of people here trying to show you how much they understand about photography, and you respond with trying to test how trustworthy and objective we are. No headway possible unless we can reconcile this.
It's useful to compare the approaches. Even the most trustworthy person will make mistakes if he doesn't understand the principles that govern what he proposes to do. You can be the world's most honorable and objective person, but if you don't know anything about the art and science of photographic interpretation, then whatever well-meaning thing you say might be utter hogwash. Contrary to lay belief, most sciences are counterintuitive to one extent or another. Someone who makes naive, elementary mistakes -- however inadvertently -- is still making mistakes.
The other problem with the trustworthiness approach is that you can never know what someone's motives, biases, or predispositions might be. Even if you make a strong case that someone would be subject to a motivation, you cannot be sure that his actions ultimately derived from it. In short, you can
never determine whether someone's predilection (or apparent lack of one) made a difference. Therefore citing someone's apparent or likely influences is not a reliable way of testing his statements. And that's precisely why it is the good old
ad hominem fallacy. We are accustomed to equating
ad hominem arguments with personal attacks, but the essence of
ad hominem is precisely judging someone's statements by what you believe about the person, not by the merits of what was said.
Contrast that with the notion of expertise. Conspiracy theorists tend to equate claims to expertise with undeserved claims to authority and demands to be believed. That is, they often reject the entire notion that expertise on some subject is real and important. But it's not hard to get past that superficial objection and demonstrate that the conspiracist really does grudgingly accept the notion of genuine expertise. Photographic analysis is one of the many fields that requires prior understanding, experience, and background before it can be attempted successfully. You cannot fake your way through it, just as you cannot fake your way through brain surgery or electronics design.
People who have studied photographic analysis are simply less likely to make errors out of ignorance, just as experienced electronics designers are less likely to short the power supply to ground and experienced brain surgeons are less likely to do something dangerous to the patient. They can demonstrate being able to bring additional pertinent knowledge to the table that well-meaning but inexperienced people miss. And more often than not, those are the key elements in solving the problem.
And there is little doubt that empirical observations are far more reliable than estimates or claims of someone's trustworthiness. Observable facts don't require anyone to attest to them, so credibility is just not a factor. Properly constructing a test to visualize some principle is far more useful than having someone swear with great conviction that he thinks the universe behaves a certain way. As most engineers will say, "A single data point is worth a hundred expert opinions." The same holds even more true for non-expert opinions.
I mentioned that expertise and trustworthiness were largely orthogonal, so it is legitimate to ask, "Even an expert can have malicious intent" That's very true; an expert can be untrustworthy. But how do you detect that? The orthogonality ends when you realize it all comes down to facts in either case. An expert who behaves in an untrustworthy manner must, at some point, contravene a known fact or employ specious reasoning. At that point another expert can correct him. This is what happens all the time in a court of law, and to a lesser extend in academic and public intellectual discussion. Experts soon realize that it's to everyone's best interest to police each other. You'll find that I and my colleagues here grant each other surprisingly little quarter when it comes to an accurate and complete representation of facts.
But in that case too it comes down to an examination of facts. How do you detect a rogue expert? By showing that his representation of the facts is wrong. How to do that? Again, by appeal to better or more facts, and usually then by showing more defensible lines of reasoning from those new facts and the original ones. At no point do you need to try to guess at what he's thinking or what his motivations "must" be. In fact, you never needed to. Why is it important to detect a rogue expert? Because a rogue expert is likely wrong, and not to be trusted. So what you really want to know is whether he's wrong, and you can study that directly and easier. You don't have to infer it from rogueness, which is harder to prove.
So clearly an appeal to the facts and an expert knowledge of them is best in all cases. You won't make much progress here by trying to show that we must "somehow" be biased or otherwise ill-motivated to represent facts accurately, and by that means undermine our arguments and conclusions.
When you say that we (or others like us) have "dismissed" claims inappropriately, we have to look to see whether that's really true. As I mentioned above, there are many classes of argument, some of which are built on faulty premises. Revealing the flaw in the premise is the right thing to do in those cases. But in many cases, "You don't know what your'e talking about," is a complete and appropriate response. That's just a special case of an unfounded premise. If someone who doesn't know a particular science just guesses at what might be proper premises in the science, and gets them wrong, others who are well-versed in the science are quite well-justified in rejecting the premise. That's not inappropriately dismissive.
Let's say that you are an expert in corporate finance and I am not. Let's say I accuse some company of wrongdoing based on how I think corporate accounting should be done. You come along and tell me that my idea of proper corporate accounting, while possibly appealing to common sense, really isn't right. In other words, you tell me I don't know what I'm talking about -- and you'd be right. You don't have to produce an elaborate defense showing why the company's end result really is above board and legal; you repudiated my assertion by showing it was founded on poor assumptions. The assertion may indeed be true for other reasons (i.e., the corporation may be doing other things that are illegal), but my specific argument is rejected, and you didn't need to prove the company was innocent as a necessary prelude to dismissing my accusation of
specific guilt.
Now that's certainly a
possible way of proceeding. If you can prove that a company has followed every applicable regulation, then on that basis you can reject any subsequent claim of wrongdoing. You know the claim is faulty because it reached a conclusion you know by other means is false.
Similarly if I sit outside all day and verify personally that it never rained, then you -- who were inside all day -- can formulate whatever inferential arguments you want to try to assert that it "must" have rained, but they would all be wrong. I wouldn't have to ferret out exactly how they're wrong. But you can say that any argument for a condition
observed to be false is, by that observation, somehow a wrong argument.
So one powerful class of rebuttal is to observe the inferred condition directly. Another is to knock out a common premise. If a defendant can be proved to have been in Oslo on a certain day, he can be exonerated immediately of all accusations to have committed a crime in Tokyo that same day. It doesn't matter what other kinds of evidence support the accusation; the premise that the defendant was present where the crime was committed is false in each case. These generalized, direct rebuttals form a very powerful class of refutations.
But it's not a
necessary way of proceeding. If someone makes a specific accusation, you can look at just the specific accusation and reject it on its merits without having to prove that the accusation
cannot be true. You could say, "It must have rained today because the sprinkler system didn't come on; the rain sensor must have tripped." I can say, "The sprinkler system didn't come on because it was unplugged, so you can't use the rain-sensor argument to infer it rained." Notice how that defeats the argument without really addressing whether or not it actually did rain.
This option to proceed specifically is important because it's frequently extremely difficult (and occasionally impossible) to prove the overarching general case. It is impossible to prove that Apollo missions were authentic, because that means addressing not only every concern that has been raised, but also every concern that
could ever be raised. That's just impossible. And so the convention in history is that things are authentic until proven otherwise. That is, you can't prove something is real, so don't try -- and don't formulate challenges that require it as a defense to the challenge.
But it is possible to prove that something is false, so that's where the burden of proof lies. Under that necessary provision, specific challenges to authenticity (e.g., "That reflection or that shadow in that photograph is inconsistent with the claim for where it came from.") are addressible by
specific refutations (e.g., "No, the criteria you're using for consistency aren't based in science and are violated by photographs we know to be genuine."). And when that specific defeat happens, authenticity remains vindicated.
And purely hypothetical challenges to authenticity under that provision are automatically rejected -- e.g., "But the moon rocks
could have been faked somehow in a lab." It doesn't matter whether something
could be fraudulent -- anything
could be fraudulent -- it only matters whether it
is fraudulent. So unless you replace the rock-faking hypothesis with some testable proposal for how it was allegedly done, and look for evidence that it
was done by that method, it's not proper to demand any more strenuous a rebuttal than, "That's purely hypothetical."
I don't mean to belabor this to the point of annoyance, nor even necessarily to imply that it addresses your specific complains about Loose Change. But it's important to us that you realize such off-hand dismissals are quite contrary to the culture we try to establish here at Apollohoax. We don't respond well to offhand dismissals offered by others, and we don't tolerate it amongst ourselves. But by the same token it's important to us that you recognize why some rebuttals may seem offand because they don't directly address the proposition, yet they remain logically valid.
Cut, print, check the gate, moving on.
Asking someone just to "analyze a photo" is impossibly open-ended. Photographic analysis is a body of knowledge and an associated set of techniques according to which specific questions about photographs and photography can be discussed. It is not a one-size-fits-all procedure. "Analyze this Apollo photo" is not a fair question. "Are the reflections in these two photos consistent?" is a fair question.