Thank you Jimmy, I'm glad you saw the point I was making. As I said, it was not meant to be insulting, only to point out that its easy to throw around qualifications and credentials - we're in an information saturated environment in which people do that all the time. I think it was Marvin Minsky @ MIT who defined "information" as a difference that makes a difference. In theory, stating a degree should qualify as that - but when we encounter so many "experts" who stake out opposing points-of-view, as we do daily, all of whom one-up each other with statements of qualifications, its playing ball on running water. I expected to get grief for that post, but hoped it wouldn't be from you. So thanks again.
What bothers me about the incessant debate everyone is having with Max about these buildings collapsing is that I think people are failing to see what's driving Max, and maybe I am too, but it seems to me that what Max is getting at, however struggling his expression is, is that he's suspicious of the information itself. I am too.
If I didn't have some trust in my brother as a credible person, and he didn't personally know someone he trusts who saw a passenger jet plow into the Pentagon, I'd be just as suspicious of that as I am un-suspicious. We're well beyond being able to trust the evidence of mediated eyes. We can only trust our own, and as Max has repeatedly pointed out, almost all the information being debated regarding the fall of the towers is coming through commercial pipelines, which in the end, are trying to sell us something.
Absent direct experience, its as easy to claim fact as it is to claim credentials. Perhaps Max is out of his depth when it comes to analyzing the images of the tower falling, perhaps not. I'm just a musician and don't know. But when I read this debate, I read people talking across each other about 2 different subjects. I heard for a long time that the floors fell at free-fall speed and that shouldn't be possible. Now it seems it is possible that they could have, but I couldn't find anything that told me for certain that they did - it was presented as fact, but I had no way of knowing if it was in fact, factual.
This is our dilemma - one thing we know for certain, is that much of the so-called information we receive about almost everything doesn't really qualify as information. The signal to noise ratio now is pitiful. And there are innumerable "experts" on payrolls.
DS