Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

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> A friend who does research in the area explained that, in some ways, wooden beams are simpler to engineer than steel beams when dealing with fire.

This is kind of tangential, but I have a question pertaining to your friend's profession (the engineering behind how buildings burn.) I was surprised to learn that literally thousands in that profession (I don't believe them) are claiming 9/11 included "massive evidence for controlled demolition", led by:

>Gage, who is a member of the American Institute of Architects,[2] has worked as an architect for 20 years and was involved in the construction of numerous fireproof steel-frame building.

(Both my quotes are from Wikipedia.) In general if thousands of computer scientists were claiming a random number generator has a backdoor, say, I'd tend to believe them.

What does your friend say on this subject? If you haven't asked yet I would be interested if you would do so, and then write to me at my email contact listed here.

Sorry for the kind of off-topic question.

I went to WPI, which was one of the schools that did the actual research you're claiming was false. They were, at the time, one of only two schools in the country offering a masters degree in fire safety engineering and they had a lot of experience in this area.

The Professor in charge of the investigation is literally the most liberal human being you could imagine (he founded the schools chapter of "BiLAGA", the precursor to many Gay/Straight Alliance clubs), advised multiple progressive clubs, and was rather antiwar. To say that he was not likely to go along with a George Bush conspiracy is an understatement.

My roommate was one of the grad students who literally worked on the studies you are claiming were faked. We've spent hours talking about exactly why the people who faked it were wrong. You can easily google any of the counter arguments yourself, as there is over a decade and a half of the debunking out there.

As a final note though I want to point out that an Architect is not an Engineer. Look through this course description[1] for a bachelor's degree in architecture. Of the 2,300 people who signed on to the petition you're referring to, only 30 claim to be structural engineers. It turns out many of those were unlicensed, several had never worked on tall buildings, and only a few of them had every even read the NIST report[2]. While I can't find the study of the architects with that kind of data, it seems obvious to me that with the lack of background checking done on the petition for the engineers that a significant portion of the 2270 architects remaining are nowhere near qualified to make the claims that this organization has made.

[1]https://cooper.edu/architecture/curriculum/bachelor

[2]http://lies-of-the-truth-movement.blogspot.com/2010/10/richa...

Thanks for your answer. Appreciate that you replied, I see you looked up references. As you reference "hours talking" and "a decade and a half of debunking", likely you're over this and impatient - hopefully I can understand your points quickly.

For my part I certainly had the impression that thousands of engineers and architects were quite convinced that there was a controlled demolition following the plane crashes. Please note that I didn't take any political conclusions from this and would be interested in just sticking to the building structural facts - whether there was a controlled demolition in the opinion of structural engineers and architects.

1. When you write "one of the schools that did the actual research you're claiming was false", what research are you referring to? I didn't reference any study nor have one in mind, I'm a bit confused here.

2. From your last sentence, I think overall you're saying:

"I am certain that following the plane crashes no controlled demolition led to the collapse of the buildings. The 2270 people who signed the petition are not qualified architects. Qualified architects do not claim it was a controlled demolition (let alone obviously one.)"

Can you confirm this - is that right?

Besides these two points of clarification, I'll try not to waste more of your time. Thanks again for the replies.

I am kind of weary making a public statement about this subject, a controlled demolition would have been a crime against humanity. Unlike tedivm I do not claim any authority on this subject. During my teenage years I spent a lot of late nights just surfing the web and researched the 9/11 building collapse quite thoroughly at one point. I can also think. I came to the conclusion that, due to the structural design of the twin towers, if you fly a plane into them a collapse of the kind that was witnessed on the 11. September 2001 is the consequence.

I'm fine with listening to experts. (Of course this is what "Architects and Engineers" purported to be. As detailed by other comments, no, that group is not comprised of architects and structural engineers, which I didn't know.)

Do you really mean "weary" (tired) or "wary" (cautious)? If you are wary about making a public statement you can reply with an email (or write me at mine) I have just 1 or 2 remaining questions. I don't really want to clog this thread any more.

> "The 2270 people who signed the petition are not qualified architects. Qualified architects do not claim it was a controlled demolition (let alone obviously one.)"

No, this isn't what he is saying. What he is saying is "Of the 2270 people who signed the list, only 30 claim to be structural engineers".

The list is actually 2,750 now - anyone can sign it - the vast majority self-report as architects or non-structural engineers (for some reason, many claim to be aeronautical engineers?). For obvious reasons we don't use architects, or aeronautical engineers, to analyze the behavior of steel girders in the presence of fire.

Of the 30 who claim to be structural engineers, only 14 claim they are structural engineers who work on buildings, and of those 14, only one claims to work on high-rises.

TL;DR: One structural engineer with experience of high rises is on the list. And, and I'm going to write this in all caps: HE DOESN'T CLAIM HE THINKS IT WAS EXPLOSIVES!! His official statement is this:

> There seem to be a lot of unanswered questions and it would serve the greater good to re-open the investigation and do a more thorough job to remove any doubt.

You can easily verify this yourself by just going through the official list, here: http://www.ae911truth.org/signatures/ae.html#:/signatures/xm...

You've written 6 paragraphs which mean exactly "Qualified architects do not claim it was a controlled demolition (let alone obviously one.)"

You're right I'm making the same point several times, I'm sorry if it gets repetitive. I do it to try to highlight the point from several angles and to reduce ambiguity.

That said, I didn't intend my 6 paragraphs to mean "Qualified architects ..". Architecture is a discipline concerned with aesthetics, it deals with the design of spaces and how humans interact with them. It does not deal with the structural integrity of those spaces; this is why architectural firms employ and contract structural engineers, and why building plans carry separate architects and engineering seals.

An architect (and you'll note I'm making the same point a second time) is as qualified to make comments on the structural safety of steel girders as, say, an anthropologist, or a chello player.

So, and now I'm making the same point a third time: No, I'm not saying "qualified architects do not claim it was controlled demolition"; because there is no such thing as an architect who is qualified to assess that. What I'm saying is that there are 30 structural engineers on the list, and that among them there is only one who has relevant experience, and he is not making the claim that it was controlled demolition.

OK, "qualified structural engineers do not claim it was controlled demolition." (let alone obviously one, let alone thousands of them saying so.) Fair?

As evidenced by your previous comments in this thread, had he put it so succinctly, you would have asked for more clarification.

I'll put it in one sentence: "9/11 truthers are just as purposefully ignorant and ill-informed as climate change deniers and no longer deserve the time and effort of the mentally capable to rehash a conspiracy theory that is so thoroughly and completely debunked."

Thanks, but I really only care about what structural engineers think. (Also as evidenced by my previous comments.) So no, I don't have any followup.

> In general if thousands of computer scientists were claiming a random number generator has a backdoor, say, I'd tend to believe them.

A) It's not thousands. Out of the ~100,000 members of the AIA, 160 voted to take another look at 9/11.

B) I wouldn't accept an appeal to authority on the computer science side either. They'd have to explain how the RNG is biased.

My apologies, I was quoting the figure "by December 2014, over 2,300 architectural and engineering professionals had signed the petition" and it states "According to the organization, the identities and qualifications of all licensed architects and engineers whose names are being published on its website as well as those of other supporters who are listed separately are subjected to verification before acceptance".

Usually Wikipedia is actually quite harsh on conspiracy theories. For example the Flat Earth article's 7th word is "archaic" (it begins "The flat Earth model is an archaic conception of Earth's shape as a plane or disk".) The final paragraph of the lead states "In the modern era, pseudoscientific flat Earth theories have been espoused". (The flat Earth theory has vigorous, albeit often troll, online defenders.)

So this explains my reaction - from the way the article was written I had thought thousands of architects and structural engineers thought there was massive evidence of a controlled demolition.

You may check out your cousin comment for a reply from someone who has looked into this quite a bit I think. That person (tedivm) seems to think it's a pretty massive waste of time so hopefully this thread won't include much more of it. Sorry to waste your time if this was the case, and thanks for your reply. :)

I'm not either way invested in this, and can not contribute much to the conversation. However, a certain pattern strikes me in the way you are dealing with this conversation, which I've seen before and for personal reasons touches me.

First, I appreciate your politeness and structured responses. It would seem so natural that everyone argue in this manner and yet I find it rare enough that it deserves appreciation.

So for the personal reasons mentioned above, I wanted to ask you this, and you are in no way obligated to answer:

- Do you think most people in this thread are delusional and/or refuse to see a truth which seems painfully obvious?

- Do you sometimes feel this way about people in the real world/other subjects? Often? Always?

- As a thought experiment: if it turned out that masses of people were, as a rule, not ignorant but instead wise, would that impact the way you see yourself?

- Would finding out the truth be equally satisfying for you regardless of what the truth turns out to be?

- Do you find yourself wanting certain statements to turn out to be true?

- Can you identify why?

In any case, I wish you the best of luck with your search.

your questions center on whether I'm a conspiracy nut, and the answer is nope.

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