Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« on: November 25, 2017, 08:25:42 PM »
Occam's Razor is a philosophical principle that may be stated in several different ways, perhaps most straightforwardly as 'the simplest explanation is the most likely to be true'

Over the years I've personally converged on a rule of thumb that smacks of Occam's Razor, but which isn't quite captured by the original. I can't believe it's a novel principle, so if anyone recognises it, shout out :)

First attempt at expressing it: "The explanation that is least capable of explaining anything else is the most likely to be true."

My personal poster-child for this principle is evolution. I find the fact of evolution (the truth of common descent with modification, as distinct from any particular theory describing the mechanisms by which it happened) overwhelmingly compelling precisely because its explanatory powers are so limited. Only things that self-replicate with potential for modification can evolve. Everything must be a modification of that which came before - even more specifically: the embryonic development of everything must be a course-change of embryonic development that came before.

The fact that all life ticks these incredibly specific, limiting boxes - with the shared ancestry and course-changes visible in its DNA - is what seals the deal for me. Anyone who comes at me brandishing Intelligent Design, telling me that it's a better explanation because an intelligent designer is more capable than no designer, is completely missing the point as far as I'm concerned. An intelligent designer could have done anything. Frankly, Minecraft is a better designed habitat for humans than reality is. Positing an intelligent designer merely begs the question: why would he limit himself in these precise ways?

I'm posting this here because Flat Earth Theory rings all the same alarm bells in my head as Intelligent Design. I don't reject FET because it requires deformations of perspective, curved rays of light, non-euclidean space, or whatever. I don't even reject it because it requires an implausible worldwide conspiracy involving corporations acting against their own financial self-interest. No: I reject FET because these deformations of perspective, curved rays of light, and non-euclidean spaces by an incredible and inexplicable coincidence just happen to make it look exactly as though the world is a ball, and make the conspiracies possible.

Think about it: if we asked someone to create a universe based on the general statement "Ok, the world is flat, and rays of light curve sharply over short distances, and space is profoundly non-euclidean" we would in 99.999999999% of cases see a total mess when we looked up at the sky, or into the middle distance. Stars and the sun and the moon warping and shifting. Objects bending and squashing as we moved towards or away from them. And in those 99.999999999% of cases, nobody would even think of claiming the world was a ball, let alone foster a worldwide conspiracy to that effect.

That's why the conspiracy theories are bullshit: because they require the universe to be in on the con. I can step outside my back door on any clear night, point my camera at Polaris and take a long exposure picture that confirms RET. Why the hell would that be the case if the world were flat? What are the chances of everything being fucked in the exact way and exact degree necessary to mislead me?

devils advocate

Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #1 on: November 25, 2017, 09:42:10 PM »
Another solid post JS, you ask questions that as yet the FE have been unable to answer. The universe certainly doesn't care about ANY human conspiracy theory and in its unbiased demonstration of round earth is consistent. Still I don't expect the FE faithful (Tom) to let these facts stop them..........

Offline wil

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Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #2 on: November 28, 2017, 01:05:21 PM »
These are the exact questions that made me join this site. I just don't see how people can be so certain that such improbable scenarios and physics can be true, and that it really seems like people are stretching things to make 'evidence.' There are so many things that would seem to disprove the theory, yet people make 'evidence' or 'proof' to continue backing the theory, whether or not it contradicts previous ones.

Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #3 on: November 28, 2017, 02:36:11 PM »
These are the exact questions that made me join this site. I just don't see how people can be so certain that such improbable scenarios and physics can be true, and that it really seems like people are stretching things to make 'evidence.' There are so many things that would seem to disprove the theory, yet people make 'evidence' or 'proof' to continue backing the theory, whether or not it contradicts previous ones.
I've noticed in my time here and on the other site, nearly every idea for how something works begins with "The Earth is flat and X happens. So Y must be correct in order to make X happen upon this clearly flat Earth." Or something to that effect. The other site has no less than 4 different explanations for how we stick to the Earth, all four quite radically different. Each proponent convinced they have the correct answer. Add in the two 'standard' FE models for gravity, and you've got a half dozen ideas on that alone! I applaud them for their creativity, but when everyone has their own thoughts and ideas on how something works one begins to wonder if we're all looking at the same information.

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Offline Tom Bishop

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Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #4 on: November 28, 2017, 07:17:05 PM »
These are the exact questions that made me join this site. I just don't see how people can be so certain that such improbable scenarios and physics can be true, and that it really seems like people are stretching things to make 'evidence.' There are so many things that would seem to disprove the theory, yet people make 'evidence' or 'proof' to continue backing the theory, whether or not it contradicts previous ones.
I've noticed in my time here and on the other site, nearly every idea for how something works begins with "The Earth is flat and X happens. So Y must be correct in order to make X happen upon this clearly flat Earth." Or something to that effect. The other site has no less than 4 different explanations for how we stick to the Earth, all four quite radically different. Each proponent convinced they have the correct answer. Add in the two 'standard' FE models for gravity, and you've got a half dozen ideas on that alone! I applaud them for their creativity, but when everyone has their own thoughts and ideas on how something works one begins to wonder if we're all looking at the same information.

Since you think you have gravity all worked out, where is your nobel prize?

Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #5 on: November 28, 2017, 07:41:56 PM »
These are the exact questions that made me join this site. I just don't see how people can be so certain that such improbable scenarios and physics can be true, and that it really seems like people are stretching things to make 'evidence.' There are so many things that would seem to disprove the theory, yet people make 'evidence' or 'proof' to continue backing the theory, whether or not it contradicts previous ones.
I've noticed in my time here and on the other site, nearly every idea for how something works begins with "The Earth is flat and X happens. So Y must be correct in order to make X happen upon this clearly flat Earth." Or something to that effect. The other site has no less than 4 different explanations for how we stick to the Earth, all four quite radically different. Each proponent convinced they have the correct answer. Add in the two 'standard' FE models for gravity, and you've got a half dozen ideas on that alone! I applaud them for their creativity, but when everyone has their own thoughts and ideas on how something works one begins to wonder if we're all looking at the same information.

Since you think you have gravity all worked out, where is your nobel prize?
Where did I imply that anywhere? Cavendish is evidence for attraction of masses and gravity. The community agrees on this, and uses it pursue the question further. The only thing any two FE people have in common appears to be belief that the Earth is flat. You don't think that's a problem for a movement a few hundred years old? Especially considering some of the really out there ideas? I mean, have you looked at denpressure?

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Offline Tom Bishop

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Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #6 on: November 28, 2017, 08:51:10 PM »
Quote
Since you think you have gravity all worked out, where is your nobel prize?
Where did I imply that anywhere?

Considering you were criticizing us for debating on different forms of gravity, I had assumed you had gravity all worked out, and so I expected to see your nobel prize to show for it.

Quote
Cavendish is evidence for attraction of masses and gravity. The community agrees on this, and uses it pursue the question further.

http://milesmathis.com/caven.html

Quote
The only thing any two FE people have in common appears to be belief that the Earth is flat. You don't think that's a problem for a movement a few hundred years old? Especially considering some of the really out there ideas? I mean, have you looked at denpressure?

There are multiple mechanisms for gravity in the Round Earth model. Don't you think that's a problem? Talk to one scientist and he says that gravity is a "puller particle," talk to another one and he says that it's "bendy space." Why all of these wacky theories? Where is the Grand Unified Theory?

Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #7 on: November 28, 2017, 09:02:22 PM »
There are multiple mechanisms for gravity in the Round Earth model. Don't you think that's a problem? Talk to one scientist and he says that gravity is a "puller particle," talk to another one and he says that it's "bendy space." Why all of these wacky theories? Where is the Grand Unified Theory?
You DO understand the difference here and the difference between UA/Denspressure/dextrorotatory strings of receptive subquarks/Aether flows towards that low concentrations/Sku push/Flipper Earth/Infinite Earth, right?

Your Cavendish site has been discussed and refuted elsewhere, I see no reason to dig into it again.

Offline StinkyOne

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Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #8 on: November 28, 2017, 09:48:53 PM »
Quote
Since you think you have gravity all worked out, where is your nobel prize?
Where did I imply that anywhere?

Considering you were criticizing us for debating on different forms of gravity, I had assumed you had gravity all worked out, and so I expected to see your nobel prize to show for it.

Quote
Cavendish is evidence for attraction of masses and gravity. The community agrees on this, and uses it pursue the question further.

http://milesmathis.com/caven.html

Quote
The only thing any two FE people have in common appears to be belief that the Earth is flat. You don't think that's a problem for a movement a few hundred years old? Especially considering some of the really out there ideas? I mean, have you looked at denpressure?

There are multiple mechanisms for gravity in the Round Earth model. Don't you think that's a problem? Talk to one scientist and he says that gravity is a "puller particle," talk to another one and he says that it's "bendy space." Why all of these wacky theories? Where is the Grand Unified Theory?

Tom - do you have any legit evidence problems with the Cavendish experiment? Miles Mathis isn't exactly a credible source.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Miles_Mathis
I saw a video where a pilot was flying above the sun.
-Terry50

Offline mtnman

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Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #9 on: November 29, 2017, 12:03:49 AM »

Since you think you have gravity all worked out, where is your nobel prize?
Does this suggest that you consider the Nobel Prize a gold standard of sorts and that you would then accept as factual any theories that had received that award?

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Offline Tom Bishop

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Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #10 on: November 29, 2017, 12:27:09 AM »
Quote
Since you think you have gravity all worked out, where is your nobel prize?
Where did I imply that anywhere?

Considering you were criticizing us for debating on different forms of gravity, I had assumed you had gravity all worked out, and so I expected to see your nobel prize to show for it.

Quote
Cavendish is evidence for attraction of masses and gravity. The community agrees on this, and uses it pursue the question further.

http://milesmathis.com/caven.html

Quote
The only thing any two FE people have in common appears to be belief that the Earth is flat. You don't think that's a problem for a movement a few hundred years old? Especially considering some of the really out there ideas? I mean, have you looked at denpressure?

There are multiple mechanisms for gravity in the Round Earth model. Don't you think that's a problem? Talk to one scientist and he says that gravity is a "puller particle," talk to another one and he says that it's "bendy space." Why all of these wacky theories? Where is the Grand Unified Theory?

Tom - do you have any legit evidence problems with the Cavendish experiment? Miles Mathis isn't exactly a credible source.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Miles_Mathis

That page does not address the points Mathis brings up, and appears to be nothing more than an article someone wrote on an alternative Wikipedia-style humor website.

It describes Al Gore as:

Quote
Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. is a former Senator and Representative from Tennessee who served as Vice President under Bill Clinton (1993–2001). He is a prominent liberal boogeyman. The excuses for this boil down to:
  • People think he claimed he invented the Internet.
  • Conservatives treat him as the Final Boss of global warming. If they beat him then they win the debate forever.
  • He's an old white man with a "D" next to his name, which obviously stands for Douche. An "R" would mean Righteous!
In the 2000 presidential election, he won the popular vote but lost the judicial electoral vote to George W. Bush, forcing his retirement. His daughter was a writer for Futurama, and Al voiced himself in 5 episodes.

The following appears on Hillary Clinton's page:

Quote
Crooked Hillary Diane Rodham[2] Clinton is an American politician, a member of the Democratic Party, and the wife of former President Bill Clinton. Renowned for her Machiavellian past, drinking a bottle of oak-aged fortified orphan blood every night,[citation NOT needed] and steering her husband like a fine automobile, HRC was elected Senator of New York in 2000, and ran twice for President, in 2008 and 2016. She was the second-most hated presidential candidate in US history, slightly behind her 2016 opponent Donald Trump.[3] On November 8, she proceeded to lose to Trump despite winning the popular vote[4], ensuring she will be the most hated member of her party for years to come.

This is your source?
« Last Edit: November 29, 2017, 12:34:06 AM by Tom Bishop »

Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #11 on: November 29, 2017, 12:42:04 AM »
Quote
Since you think you have gravity all worked out, where is your nobel prize?
Where did I imply that anywhere?

Considering you were criticizing us for debating on different forms of gravity, I had assumed you had gravity all worked out, and so I expected to see your nobel prize to show for it.

Quote
Cavendish is evidence for attraction of masses and gravity. The community agrees on this, and uses it pursue the question further.

http://milesmathis.com/caven.html

Quote
The only thing any two FE people have in common appears to be belief that the Earth is flat. You don't think that's a problem for a movement a few hundred years old? Especially considering some of the really out there ideas? I mean, have you looked at denpressure?

There are multiple mechanisms for gravity in the Round Earth model. Don't you think that's a problem? Talk to one scientist and he says that gravity is a "puller particle," talk to another one and he says that it's "bendy space." Why all of these wacky theories? Where is the Grand Unified Theory?

Tom - do you have any legit evidence problems with the Cavendish experiment? Miles Mathis isn't exactly a credible source.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Miles_Mathis

That page does not address the points Mathis brings up, and appears to be nothing more than an article someone wrote on an alternative Wikipedia-style humor website.

It describes Al Gore as:

Quote
Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. is a former Senator and Representative from Tennessee who served as Vice President under Bill Clinton (1993–2001). He is a prominent liberal boogeyman. The excuses for this boil down to:
  • People think he claimed he invented the Internet.
  • Conservatives treat him as the Final Boss of global warming. If they beat him then they win the debate forever.
  • He's an old white man with a "D" next to his name, which obviously stands for Douche. An "R" would mean Righteous!
In the 2000 presidential election, he won the popular vote but lost the judicial electoral vote to George W. Bush, forcing his retirement. His daughter was a writer for Futurama, and Al voiced himself in 5 episodes.

The following appears on Hillary Clinton's page:

Quote
Crooked Hillary Diane Rodham[2] Clinton is an American politician, a member of the Democratic Party, and the wife of former President Bill Clinton. Renowned for her Machiavellian past, drinking a bottle of oak-aged fortified orphan blood every night,[citation NOT needed] and steering her husband like a fine automobile, HRC was elected Senator of New York in 2000, and ran twice for President, in 2008 and 2016. She was the second-most hated presidential candidate in US history, slightly behind her 2016 opponent Donald Trump.[3] On November 8, she proceeded to lose to Trump despite winning the popular vote[4], ensuring she will be the most hated member of her party for years to come.

This is your source?
Mathis and his erroneous information have been put to bed on this site before. Do you also believe Pi=4? If you like I can go dig up those points so you can ignore them again. Or attempt to discuss any of the other issues currently waiting on FE input that you've left. Otherwise I'd love to hear why you believe a disagreement over the precise mechanism of gravity is analogous to 6+ radically different ideas that are attempting to replace Newtonian Gravitation. Which works in nearly all scenarios to explain the movements of what is observed.

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Offline Tom Bishop

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Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #12 on: November 29, 2017, 01:01:31 AM »
Mathis and his erroneous information have been put to bed on this site before. Do you also believe Pi=4?

Pi can equal 4. It depends how we interpret the scenerio. I describe how pi can equal 4 in this thread.

Quote
If you like I can go dig up those points so you can ignore them again. Or attempt to discuss any of the other issues currently waiting on FE input that you've left. Otherwise I'd love to hear why you believe a disagreement over the precise mechanism of gravity is analogous to 6+ radically different ideas that are attempting to replace Newtonian Gravitation. Which works in nearly all scenarios to explain the movements of what is observed.

What are you talking about? Gravity does not explain the "movements of what is observed".

Consider how Galaxies move. Galaxies move as if they were solid disks. Describing the movements of galaxies with "gravity" has been a challenge to astronomers. In the Round Earth model stellar systems like this aren't supposed to move as if they were solid disks. According to Newtonian mechanics the bodies towards the interior of the disk should move at a faster rate around the center than the bodies on the outside of the disk. This is opposite of what is observed.

See this article on softpedia.com:

    "According to theory, a galaxy should rotate faster at the center than at the edges. This is similar to how an ice-skater rotates: when she extends her arms she moves more slowly, when she either extends her arms above her head or keeps them close to the body she starts to rotate more rapidly. Taking into consideration how gravitation connects the stars in the galaxy the predicted result is that average orbital speed of a star at a specified distance away from the center would decrease inversely with the square root of the radius of the orbit (the dashed line, A, in figure below). However observations show that the galaxy rotates as if it is a solid disk – as if stars are much more strongly connected to each other (the solid line, B, in the figure below)."

See this article on Wikipedia:

    "In 1959, Louise Volders demonstrated that spiral galaxy M33 does not spin as expected according to Keplerian dynamics,[1] a result which was extended to many other spiral galaxies during the seventies.[2] Based on this model, matter (such as stars and gas) in the disk portion of a spiral should orbit the center of the galaxy similar to the way in which planets in the solar system orbit the sun, that is, according to Newtonian mechanics. Based on this, it would be expected that the average orbital speed of an object at a specified distance away from the majority of the mass distribution would decrease inversely with the square root of the radius of the orbit (the dashed line in Fig. 1). At the time of the discovery of the discrepancy, it was thought that most of the mass of the galaxy had to be in the galactic bulge, near the center.

    Observations of the rotation curve of spirals, however, do not bear this out. Rather, the curves do not decrease in the expected inverse square root relationship but are "flat" -- outside of the central bulge the speed is nearly a constant function of radius (the solid line Fig. 1). The explanation that requires the least adjustment to the physical laws of the universe is that there is a substantial amount of matter far from the center of the galaxy that is not emitting light in the mass-to-light ratio of the central bulge. This extra mass is proposed by astronomers to be due to dark matter within the galactic halo, the existence of which was first posited by Fritz Zwicky some 40 years earlier in his studies of the masses of galaxy clusters. Presently, there are a large number of pieces of observational evidence that point to the presence of cold dark matter, and its existence is a major feature of the present Lambda-CDM model that describes the cosmology of the universe."

Physicists usually try to explain these observed discrepancies as "Dark Matter did it." The fact that gravity does not really work to explain the movements seen in astronomy (there are plenty of other examples besides galaxies), is a major stain on the theory of gravity.
« Last Edit: November 29, 2017, 01:08:13 AM by Tom Bishop »

Offline StinkyOne

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Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #13 on: November 29, 2017, 01:05:54 AM »
Quote
Since you think you have gravity all worked out, where is your nobel prize?
Where did I imply that anywhere?

Considering you were criticizing us for debating on different forms of gravity, I had assumed you had gravity all worked out, and so I expected to see your nobel prize to show for it.

Quote
Cavendish is evidence for attraction of masses and gravity. The community agrees on this, and uses it pursue the question further.

http://milesmathis.com/caven.html

Quote
The only thing any two FE people have in common appears to be belief that the Earth is flat. You don't think that's a problem for a movement a few hundred years old? Especially considering some of the really out there ideas? I mean, have you looked at denpressure?

There are multiple mechanisms for gravity in the Round Earth model. Don't you think that's a problem? Talk to one scientist and he says that gravity is a "puller particle," talk to another one and he says that it's "bendy space." Why all of these wacky theories? Where is the Grand Unified Theory?

Tom - do you have any legit evidence problems with the Cavendish experiment? Miles Mathis isn't exactly a credible source.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Miles_Mathis

That page does not address the points Mathis brings up, and appears to be nothing more than an article someone wrote on an alternative Wikipedia-style humor website.

It describes Al Gore as:

Quote
Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. is a former Senator and Representative from Tennessee who served as Vice President under Bill Clinton (1993–2001). He is a prominent liberal boogeyman. The excuses for this boil down to:
  • People think he claimed he invented the Internet.
  • Conservatives treat him as the Final Boss of global warming. If they beat him then they win the debate forever.
  • He's an old white man with a "D" next to his name, which obviously stands for Douche. An "R" would mean Righteous!
In the 2000 presidential election, he won the popular vote but lost the judicial electoral vote to George W. Bush, forcing his retirement. His daughter was a writer for Futurama, and Al voiced himself in 5 episodes.

The following appears on Hillary Clinton's page:

Quote
Crooked Hillary Diane Rodham[2] Clinton is an American politician, a member of the Democratic Party, and the wife of former President Bill Clinton. Renowned for her Machiavellian past, drinking a bottle of oak-aged fortified orphan blood every night,[citation NOT needed] and steering her husband like a fine automobile, HRC was elected Senator of New York in 2000, and ran twice for President, in 2008 and 2016. She was the second-most hated presidential candidate in US history, slightly behind her 2016 opponent Donald Trump.[3] On November 8, she proceeded to lose to Trump despite winning the popular vote[4], ensuring she will be the most hated member of her party for years to come.

This is your source?

Oh Tom, don't take my word for his idiocy, take his own words.
Here is Miles rambling on about how Sandy Hook was fake. http://mileswmathis.com/sh.pdf Some one fake killed a bunch of kids.
He has a bunch of other fake death stories. Why should anyone take him serious?? He is already saying the Las Vegas killings were a hoax. He is a joke. If this is your go to guy, it says a ton about what you think is proof.
I saw a video where a pilot was flying above the sun.
-Terry50

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Offline Tom Bishop

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Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #14 on: November 29, 2017, 01:28:01 AM »
Oh Tom, don't take my word for his idiocy, take his own words.
Here is Miles rambling on about how Sandy Hook was fake. http://mileswmathis.com/sh.pdf Some one fake killed a bunch of kids.
He has a bunch of other fake death stories. Why should anyone take him serious?? He is already saying the Las Vegas killings were a hoax. He is a joke. If this is your go to guy, it says a ton about what you think is proof.

I haven't really looked into the Sandy Hook debate. But if you were having this debate and if your opponent pointed out the same discrepancies, you would need to actually address the evidence. You can't just dismiss everything and point to a news article that says things were "debunked" without actually showing that it was debunked.

From the PDF you linked:

Quote
To see the mainstream response to the story unwinding, I encourage you to read this article called
Newtown Conspiracy Theories Debunked,” at the Atlantic. As usual, I recommend you read both
sides and decide for yourself. As with the so-called debunking of the 911 theories, what we get here is
just a list of the theories and then the assurance that they are wrong. Notice there is no counterargumentation
here or presentation of evidence. Not even a clarification or an explanation of
anomalies. Apparently this author thinks all she need do is title the article “Debunked,” and it will do
the job of debunking. The word “debunk” is so powerful, in and of itself, that all an author need do is
chant it. I clicked on the article hoping to hear the other side of the story, but I got nothing.

[Update, January 19, 2013. We now have debunking from CNN, TIME, Yahoo, HuffPost, Salon, and
just about every other mainstream source. But none of these pieces does any real debunking. None
explain any of the anomalies, or even try to. They simply attack those asking questions and try to spin
the already spun information. Again, I encourage you to read them, since all the debunkers simply end
up shooting themselves in the foot, giving more credibility and attention to the anomalies. Other than
that, the only purpose these debunking pieces serve is to highlight and circle which sources are being
written by the government. If you are smart, you will simply catalog every magazine or TV program
that is debunking, filing them away as compromised. The CIA trains journalists to write these articles,
and you are seeing the articles they write: it is that simple.]

If your standard of evidence is an article from The Atlantic which generically declares that everything is debunked, without actually showing that things have been debunked, then I am afraid that your standard isn't actually very high at all compared to a man who provides some level of evidence for his assertions that the story and motivations of the killer may not be exactly as portrayed.

If you read his PDF he isn't even claiming that no one died and it was all fake; he is questioning why the killer's hard drive went missing, why the families are being told to read from a script when talking to the media, and why there seems to be an organization trumpeting around pictures of little dead girls (some of which were stolen from Imgur of children who are still living, apparently) in an effort to push new gun laws. The underlying implication from that PDF is that there is an organization using and molding this event for their own purposes.

Right or wrong, the points must be addressed and considered before disregarding it, and the points must be addressed on this topic as well.
« Last Edit: November 29, 2017, 01:52:16 AM by Tom Bishop »

Offline mtnman

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Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #15 on: November 29, 2017, 01:49:51 AM »

Consider how Galaxies move. Galaxies move as if they were solid disks. Describing the movements of galaxies with "gravity" has been a challenge to astronomers. In the Round Earth model stellar systems like this aren't supposed to move as if they were solid disks. According to Newtonian mechanics the bodies towards the interior of the disk should move at a faster rate around the center than the bodies on the outside of the disk. This is opposite of what is observed.
Let me stop you here and ask a question. Tom, what do you think galaxies are?

Offline StinkyOne

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Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #16 on: November 29, 2017, 02:34:15 AM »
Right or wrong, the points must be addressed and considered before disregarding it, and the points must be addressed on this topic as well.

No, see, that is where you are wrong. His points don't need to be addressed because he has shown himself to not be worthy of discussion. Here is the thing, I've been around long enough to spot the very common feature of all these whack jobs. They find little pieces of a greater whole and try to make some cover up out of it. Like the parents reading from a script. Seems so sinister. What are they hiding???? The police probably were focusing on building the legal case against the shooter so they could prosecute him. A bunch of people with inside knowledge of the case talking on TV would easily taint the jury pool. This is SOP. Flat Earthers like to do the same thing. "Earth looks flat when I look outside." Yes, it does. That isn't the whole picture though. If you're small enough, a basketball would look flat. It is how gullible people buy into this stuff.

Back to the topic at hand, this guy's OPINION about the Cavendish experiment in no way invalidates it. Cavendish was shown to be accurate to within 1% of today's accepted gravitational strength. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-a-wire-was-used-to-measure-a-tiny-force-of-gravity/ And yes, I will take Scientific American over some Internet conspiracy theorist ANY day of the week.
I saw a video where a pilot was flying above the sun.
-Terry50

Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #17 on: November 29, 2017, 02:51:08 AM »
It is upsetting to see so many potentially great minds, corrupted with the belief that the Earth is round. It's not your fault you were lied to since birth, and that you are so gullible even now. I will pray for those in this forum that need 'science' to prove everything, as at this point I'm unsure if they can ever be converted to the truth. May Gods light shine upon these non-believers and direct them to redemption. Amen.

Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #18 on: November 29, 2017, 05:21:32 AM »
Mathis and his erroneous information have been put to bed on this site before. Do you also believe Pi=4?

Pi can equal 4. It depends how we interpret the scenerio. I describe how pi can equal 4 in this thread.
Fascinating read so far, but all I see is people pointing out how Pi != 4 and the steps you take in an attempt to prove it are erroneous. But maybe that's just me.

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If you like I can go dig up those points so you can ignore them again. Or attempt to discuss any of the other issues currently waiting on FE input that you've left. Otherwise I'd love to hear why you believe a disagreement over the precise mechanism of gravity is analogous to 6+ radically different ideas that are attempting to replace Newtonian Gravitation. Which works in nearly all scenarios to explain the movements of what is observed.

What are you talking about? Gravity does not explain the "movements of what is observed".

Consider how Galaxies move. Galaxies move as if they were solid disks. Describing the movements of galaxies with "gravity" has been a challenge to astronomers. In the Round Earth model stellar systems like this aren't supposed to move as if they were solid disks. According to Newtonian mechanics the bodies towards the interior of the disk should move at a faster rate around the center than the bodies on the outside of the disk. This is opposite of what is observed.

See this article on softpedia.com:

    "According to theory, a galaxy should rotate faster at the center than at the edges. This is similar to how an ice-skater rotates: when she extends her arms she moves more slowly, when she either extends her arms above her head or keeps them close to the body she starts to rotate more rapidly. Taking into consideration how gravitation connects the stars in the galaxy the predicted result is that average orbital speed of a star at a specified distance away from the center would decrease inversely with the square root of the radius of the orbit (the dashed line, A, in figure below). However observations show that the galaxy rotates as if it is a solid disk – as if stars are much more strongly connected to each other (the solid line, B, in the figure below)."

See this article on Wikipedia:

    "In 1959, Louise Volders demonstrated that spiral galaxy M33 does not spin as expected according to Keplerian dynamics,[1] a result which was extended to many other spiral galaxies during the seventies.[2] Based on this model, matter (such as stars and gas) in the disk portion of a spiral should orbit the center of the galaxy similar to the way in which planets in the solar system orbit the sun, that is, according to Newtonian mechanics. Based on this, it would be expected that the average orbital speed of an object at a specified distance away from the majority of the mass distribution would decrease inversely with the square root of the radius of the orbit (the dashed line in Fig. 1). At the time of the discovery of the discrepancy, it was thought that most of the mass of the galaxy had to be in the galactic bulge, near the center.

    Observations of the rotation curve of spirals, however, do not bear this out. Rather, the curves do not decrease in the expected inverse square root relationship but are "flat" -- outside of the central bulge the speed is nearly a constant function of radius (the solid line Fig. 1). The explanation that requires the least adjustment to the physical laws of the universe is that there is a substantial amount of matter far from the center of the galaxy that is not emitting light in the mass-to-light ratio of the central bulge. This extra mass is proposed by astronomers to be due to dark matter within the galactic halo, the existence of which was first posited by Fritz Zwicky some 40 years earlier in his studies of the masses of galaxy clusters. Presently, there are a large number of pieces of observational evidence that point to the presence of cold dark matter, and its existence is a major feature of the present Lambda-CDM model that describes the cosmology of the universe."

Physicists usually try to explain these observed discrepancies as "Dark Matter did it." The fact that gravity does not really work to explain the movements seen in astronomy (there are plenty of other examples besides galaxies), is a major stain on the theory of gravity.
Oh look, you found part of what I was talking about when I said 'most' things. Let's keep it to the solar system for the moment then shall we, as you like to try and dance away from the point, FE doesn't care about any of the rest of that anyway, and has no explanation for it to boot at present. Seems silly to discuss something of that nature.

Newtonian gravity explains the rate objects fall, and the motions of all but 1 planet about the sun to an exceptional degree. FE has 6+ different ideas on how/why an object falls to the Earth, perhaps 2 or 3 of which can even begin to attempt to explain the rest of the motions of objects we see in the sky. Are you understanding how the fact that we aren't quite sure how gravity 'transfers' isn't really on the same level as arguing over why an object goes from my hand to the ground when I let go? Or should I try and spell that out a bit better for you, even though I'm honestly not sure how I can at this point.

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Offline TomInAustin

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Re: Occam's Razor (sort of) - is there a term for this?
« Reply #19 on: November 29, 2017, 03:48:55 PM »


I haven't really looked into the Sandy Hook debate. But if you were having this debate and if your opponent pointed out the same discrepancies, you would need to actually address the evidence. You can't just dismiss everything and point to a news article that says things were "debunked" without actually showing that it was debunked.


Again with the irony.   Tom, you are the master of debunking everything based on one data point.   The GPS bs is a prime example.   One test showed that for runners in a small area the GPS units were not accurate so therefore no GPS is accurate.  Ringing any bells here?

Please.

Do you have a citation for this sweeping generalisation?