Questions for OCTers and observations about inductive vs deductive thinking on 9/11

[HamdenRice]

<I posted something like this in a thread where it is likely not to be read, so I am resposting a modified version of it as a new thread. Also, although the subject line asks this of OCTers, I of course welcome any observations by those who are suspicious of the OCT.>

It seems to me that there is a fundamental difference in the ways that some people think, epistemologically, about 9/11. That is, some people can only think about it deductively, and others are capable of both deductive and inductive thinking.

Generally deductive reasoning begins with certain principles such as postulates and already proven theorems, asserts a theory, and moves logically using only the already established principles to prove the theory.

Inductive reasoning begins with observation, looks for patterns and correlations and suggests theories based on observations.

Both are valid methods of both science and social science. For example, the harm caused by smoking was proven inductively long before it could be proven deductively. In other words, public health researchers were able to show there was a strong statistical correlation between smoking and lung cancer before they were able to show how the chemicals in smoke caused the cell mutations that caused cancer.

I remember many years ago sitting in on an autopsy, by a pathologist I know, just for fun. The elderly decedent had died of pneumonia. But during the autopsy, the pathologist examined every organ, took samples of many kinds tissue, slit open the entire intestinal track to look for polyps, sliced brain sections, etc. I asked why she was doing this, and she said all this information goes into a data base with all the information gathered from all the other autopsies and then pathologists do "meta" research to look for patterns of disease. This is classic inductive research.

Many hard core OCTers seem to be incapable of inductive thinking. They seem also to be unable to look at a particular fact in the context of other facts. If you look at the Skeptics/Science forum for example, where some OCTers hang out, you can come across threads in which the participants actually don't believe in certain public health problems because they were proven inductively rather than deductively. In other words, many people who think they are scientific actually are incapable of many kinds of scientific thought. The same pathologist whose autopsy I watched once told me that she thought that many engineers she had met in particular were nearly incapable of inductive reasoning.

Here's a law school-like exercise in inductive reasoning and context. The police arrive at the trailer park where Slick and Joe live. They are directed to a baseball field where Joe is laying on the ground dead, bleeding from his skull. Slick is holding a baseball bat. (Do you think Slick intentionally killed Joe now?) However, there are about a dozen other people there, all dressed in baseball uniforms, as is Slick. Slick explains that they were playing baseball, and while taking a wild swing at a pitch as batter, the bat slipped from his hands and struck Joe who was playing catcher. All the uniformed baseball players confirm Slick's story. (Do you think Slick intentionally killed Joe, now?) Later, however, detectives discovered that Joe was sleeping with Slick's wife and the two had had heated public arguments about it in which death threats were made; that the baseball team is actually a club activity of a Hell's Angels chapter that deals meth throughout the county, and several members of the chapter have been convicted and are serving time for murder for hire; that several of the baseball players have fled the state and others refuse to talk when brought in for interviewing by the police; that Joe was caught by the other members stealing from the chapter's cash stashed at the club house just last week. (Do you believe Slick intentionally killed Joe, now?) Did your view of Slick's guilt change depending on the context?

It seems to me that many arguments about the events of 9/11 are discussed either in context or out of context. Arguments degenerate into the technical specifications of the steel in the towers or the exact amount of time it takes a jet fighter to respond to a hijacking under various protocols.

So this is my question: Is your view of various LIHOP/MIHOP or "inside job" theories affected by the context? Do you ever look at particular allegations within the big picture? Do you think the following anomalies raise your suspicions:

the 30 year business connections between the Bush and bin Laden families;

the many years of official support by the US of al Qaeda-linked terrorists;

the evacuation of the bin Laden family;

the pre-Bush administration PNAC war mongering;

the criminal records of many bush administration officials as a result of former acts of US sponsored terrorism and near treason (Iran-contra);

the refusal of Bush and Cheney to be interviewed separately (perfect example of game theory's prisoner's dilemma);

the inability of the air force to respond to the hijackings;

the utterly bizarre 9/11 behavior and statements of Rumsfeld, the official charged with defending the country;

the confusing exercises;

the anthrax attacks;

the ignored urgent warnings of the CIA and Israeli, Russian, German, Egyptian, Jordanian and other intelligence services;

the meetings between alleged hijacking funder, Lt. Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad and intelligence and defense figures in the days and weeks before 9/11;

the obviously planted evidence after 9/11;

the truly unprecedented degree of administration obstruction of investigations;

the disclosure after the 9/11 Commission completed its work that it was lied to;

the unprecedented collapse of three buildings within hours;

the extremely difficult maneuvers of the plane that hit the Pentagon by a pilot who demonstrated just weeks before that he could not fly a Cessna;

the visceral experience in the US of a coup-like, martial-law like environment in New York after 9/11, with National Guardsmen armed with automatic weapons on many subway trains, stations and street corners for almost a year after 9/11 for the first time in US history -- a militarization worse than during WWII, Korea, Vietnam;

the evidence that has developed about the un-Islamic behavior of the hijackers in Florida and their connection to drug runners and intelligence figures;

the stupifying decision to pull back from Tora Bora allowing bin Laden to escape;

the Patriot Act;

the abolition of habeas corpus;

the illegal, unconstitutional NSA wiretapping program;

the massive lying that led to the war in Iraq;

the Bush administration's now publicly demonstrated callousness toward human life in Iraq and in New Orleans after Katrina.