The Great Thermite Debate...

[OnTheOtherHand]

129. I don't think your quotation is quite on point

I agree that the admonition to "put on your management hat" is damning. However, I haven't seen any evidence that the engineers rigged their models or analyses to give the results that the managers wanted. In fact, the engineers didn't say what management wanted; if they had, Lund wouldn't have been told to take off his engineering hat! When Bob Lund cast his vote to launch, he wasn't rigging a model or analysis: he was engaging in standard-issue wishful groupthink.

If I understand Tufte correctly, everyone was looking at a chronological launch-by-launch infographic that showed a bunch of O-ring problems, and a bunch of non-problems, and a bunch of temperatures, and O-ring problems at a wide range of temperatures, but nothing that focused attention on the relationship between temperature and O-ring problems. If the engineers had thought to do plot O-ring problems by temperature, as Tufte illustrates, I think they would have -- and then they might even have won their argument. Even if they had thought to sort the launches by temperature instead of chronology, they might have won.

I think there are several professionals in this forum who can empathize with your concerns about rigging analyses to reach predetermined conclusions. That empathy contributes to the intensity of the debate. Rather than try to speak for the engineers, I'll follow your lead and speak for myself: I had no predisposition or incentive discernible to myself to suppress or misrepresent evidence that the 2004 election had been stolen. On the contrary, finding such evidence would have been personally gratifying and professionally advantageous. I did not, in any way discernible to myself, prejudge any aspect of the "exit poll debate." If I had seen any sign that Edison/Mitofsky was cooking their post-election analyses, I would have taken great satisfaction in joining the howls of outrage. On the contrary, it always seemed to me that Warren Mitofsky (in particular) was much more open to following the evidence wherever it led than his heated critics were -- and I thought I had a responsibility to say so. My wife thinks that attempting to take those critics seriously, as if they were amenable to rational argument, is one of the worst mistakes I've made in my life, and she may be right. I have a lot of regrets. But I don't regret trying to get it right, and I don't regret standing up for the people who were trying to get it right.

If I understand correctly, the extensively considered opinion of several forum participants with some basis for a considered opinion is that NIST fundamentally was trying to get it right. That doesn't mean that NIST's models or analyses or conclusions are beyond critique. It means that in a contrived cage match between the folks who see NIST as cynically purveying the Official Conspiracy Theory, and those who don't, neutrality seems impossible.

As long as that contrived cage match continues, it tends to obstruct serious inquiry. The time squandered arguing that no, Michael Mann's so-called "hockey stick" from 1998 was not a perverse act of scientific fraud is time lost to ongoing climate scientific research, or even rational discussion. It is fortunate, in my view, that the 9/11 Truth Movement apparently has much less capacity to waste the time of people doing the most important building safety research -- at least, I hope that that is the case. But the critiques of Bazant and Zhou 2002 seem both as crabbed and as unproductive as the critiques of Mann et al. 1999, and that seems true of the physics arguments generally. They seem to fall into three broad categories: (1) bad arguments that non-CD collapses are impossible; (2) largely irrelevant arguments that non-CD collapses haven't been proven; and (3) strained, poorly developed arguments for alternative mechanisms. (The climate change and election fraud debates are rife with similarly fruitless approaches.) So, now what?

(edited the title for clarity: I thought the last part of your post was very much on point)