These Goddamn Kids and Their Ideas

Nothing really can compare to good old internet satire. Maddox puts out another funny April fool's webpage, but this time there is a lack of trying to make it look real (to a degree.) I would imagine that soon after this article is published, the link given above will go back to the usual site, but I imagine it to be archived somewhere.

Right, so - the notion of the Titanic as being a conspiracy is beyond silly. Simply fucking unbelievable, to be specific. Yet, I pity the poor bastard who fell for it, or at least bought into the idea that someone was being serious. (I found it hilarious that the graphs used on one of the "Truth" pages were taken from structural analysis of the World Trade Center steel beams. It doesn't outrightly say it anywhere, but they're talking about the shear strain of steel at certain temperatures...)

And it's just these sorts of people/ideas that find their way into and pollute the community pool of knowledge and ideas. Ignorant people clutching dearly to that one scrap of information that may look as though it debunks an entire situation as we know it. Trying to contrive some story and some fear-based initiative against the government from a few frames of grainy videos, and hearsay.

In science, when you want to want to experimentally get the most accurate results for your hypothesis, you would want to take a large sample size. I believe that this works philosophically, too.

Lets say, for example, we're going to try and determine the guidelines for human blood composition. Plasma and then the actual cells. A quick and easy guideline that can be used is to run a PCV (packed cell volume, see Hematocrit,) and a chart used to yield a number. So you obtain small amounts of blood from, lets say yourself, a colleague, and a family member. You will have obtained three very different values. This level is independent on body size, which makes sense, but it is dependent and can change on several values. Sex, menstruation, disease (even minor undetectable influences,) and the like. Age can be a slight factor, too. So in your quest to determine the typical human PCV, you have obtained no close values.

The immediate source error is sample size. If you compile data from thousands of people, and finding an average. And if you're adventurous, you'd see that getting data from hundreds of thousands of people would produce an extremely accurate set of values. So accurate that it allows you to divide up average values into subgroups, like a value for women, and another for men.

So, for all of you amateur conspiracy theorists and those obsessed with the end-all-be-all "smoking gun" for every single natural disaster or social event, there you have it. You're rushing to conclusions. I can understand people feeling strongly on an issue, and not being able to explain why, just saying "because," for one reason or another. But you need to be where the facts are. You need to be able to read all the hard data on whichever interchangeable socio-economic* saga is at hand.

The more data you sample, the more accurate your conclusion. Nobody said, however, that it had to match (or even come close to,) your hypothesis.

So, before you make the documentary on how you can identify the detonation sequence of explosives down the destroyed World Trade Center tower 2, think more. Read it all, watch it all. Not that I am ever going to put people on what side I see as being true, but at least I can offer some kind of suggestion on how to handle what you see/hear. It really is difficult to weed out the people telling the truth in a world filled with liars, so you can't always believe anything you want to, I know. This is just proof of concept at how difficult believing in something can be. I wouldn't dare start talking about relative truths versus an absolute truth, but that would be valid here. So, if you really believe that the United States government launched a cruise missile into the pentagon, that's fine, (only because if I said it wasn't I would be a hypocrite.) In the end, you are going to believe what you want to believe, despite all fact and fiction.

*Global warming, September 11th, the Iraqi war, Darfur, religion, the death penalty, abortion, immigration, gay marriage, and the list goes on.