Just from the standpoint of someone who reads the give and take, and only occasionally weighs in, I don't mind when someone comes on and starts poking holes here and there and raising new questions. I think it can lead interesting places. What does get useless, and I get frustrated with it, is when people take an adversarial point of view just because, in their view, an adversarial point of view is useful for its own sake in "kicking the tires" so to speak.
I have not taken an adversarial point of view, Adam. I merely see additional questions - and if they happen to challenge standing assumptions, so be it. You are of course welcome to 'poke holes' in my analysis all you will, that might lead to interesting places as well.
Jeff, you made an interesting analogy about that being the method of a legal inquiry and I like the way you put it. But this is not a forum of law, but of exchanging ideas, there are people, and boy do a lot of them inhabit message boards, who simply like to play gadfly. They believe in skepticism for skepticism's sake and think it has, on its own, evidentiary weight.
I am not an attorney, but I fail to see the problem with using critical thought to analyze a position or to test a hypothesis. I certainly don't believe I'm a gadfly, but YMMV. I am not a participant in any other forum, nor do I believe in skepticism for skepticism's sake; I believe in healthy objectivity and a consideration of all information that may have a bearing on a hypothesis and presumptions therein.
I come here for intellectual stimulation. If I wanted to, I could sit here and poke holes in the TIGHAR theory all day...because any unproven theory has, by definition, holes in it. But unless I can come up with a MORE plausible theory on my own, I'm not really contributing anything. I'm just saying "hey, look how smart I am." This is something that is lost on a lot of naysayers.
Good - then if you like intellectual stimulation you should enjoy the challenge. If you think you can poke a hole in a challenging way, I'm sure it would be welcome and responded to - if TIGHAR has the superior position by an objective standard then the hypothesis is merely stronger for having been challenged.
I did not offer an alternate theory that I believe is more plausible; I merely illustrated that there can be another way of viewing the presumption of an arrival on the LOP some 230 NM south of Howland Island, and why Earhart and Noonan should have been able to realize that if it was the case: a celestial shot of the moon and a reduction to a position of N vs. S, relative to Howland - and for that matter, Gardner.
Why is 'another way of viewing the presumption of an arrival on the LOP some 230 NM south of Howland' of possible import? Because it is problematic in a way I had not realized before, and I don't believe it has really been adequately answered. Perhaps you can be stimulated intellectually to find where TIGHAR has addressed that, as Ric implied, or if not, address it yourself and satisfy the assumption as reasonable and likely.
I've gotten tired of a few people on here, LaPook -- while seemingly a nice enough fellow, and very sorry about the poor guy losing his wife -- being one of them, because it was clear, at least from my admittedly biased perspective, that they had their own conclusions that they were reasoning OUTWARD from, picking up evidence along the way to support the predetermined conclusion and rejecting pieces that don't fit, rather than inducing conclusions from all the available facts and hypothesizing therefrom, which is what TIGHAR has always done and why I support and follow their work. There are a lot of people who think the former method is just as logical or as valid as the latter, but it isn't.
Gary is not posting here, nor am I ghosting for Gary. I do keep in touch with Gary, and he is one of the people who have helped me get a better grasp on celestial and dead reckoning navigation. Gary has been a professional pilot and a CFII and has around 6000 hours of flight experience. He's flown some hairy and long over-water flights to ferry airplanes, so he has direct experience over the sea. He can be a pain in the ass when he's heart-set on making a point, too. Perhaps that was your main observation.
Some might accuse TIGHAR of "reasoning OUTWARD from, picking up evidence along the way to support the predetermined conclusion and rejecting pieces that don't fit, rather than inducing conclusions from all the available facts and hypothesizing therefrom" - I don't believe I have done so. I never said TIGHAR 'rejected' anything about the moon shot or DR errors, for instance - I just don't see for now that these things have been fully addressed, as I now understand them - and TIGHAR's LOP-fall 230 NM south of Howland (somehow I'd missed that point before and picked up on it in a recent post by Ric, which got me wondering a bit).
The DR and moon shot questions seem fair and valid to me, that's all. If there are other valid answers or things I've missed, fine - maybe you can be stimulated and help with a better answer.
So yeah, while you can make a freedom of speech argument about Ric banning this or that person, from the standpoint of someone who likes kicking around ideas that arise from provisionally accepting the TIGHAR hypothesis, it sure became much less tiresome because there wasn't somebody dragging the conversation in another direction all the time, and in nearly every case that person was functioning on some flawed understanding of the information, a bad data point, etc. ad nauseum. And then someone has to set them straight on this, and it just would go down the rabbit hole. You can make the "groupthink" argument all you want, and there is some validity to that, but OTOH, if you're trying to kick around a particular idea you don't need a constant stream of people who are absolutely insistent that the idea is bogus and will pick on any isolated data point to back up that position. It disrupts any reasoned discussion of the theory and instead channels it into constant defense mode, which only occasionally leads to new ideas and wastes a lot of time.
Not sure I followed all of that, but I'm not making any 'freedom of speech' arguments here - this is a moderated forum which we've been clearly advised is for certain purposes and is intended to have a certain focus. If I want to exercise free speech I'll go to the courthouse square and pass out flyers...
Gary has not been 'banned' by Ric; he simply gave up posting here for his own reasons.
I am not making a 'groupthink' argument, either - I don't believe in herding cats to market, nor cattle to reason.
For the record, Jeff, I haven't been bothered by the tone or substance of your posts,...
I'm glad, the tone and substance are not meant to be bothersome.
...but I do understand how Ric could get impatient -- much of this is likely ground he's gone over, and over, and over again.
I'm sure it is and I have not complained about Ric's 'impatience', if he has been. I did note that I appreciate that this is not a great time for Ric, I realize he has his hands quite full. But when something is written in this place that piques my interest and causes me to dig into the subject for more information and I find that there may be a question, that is when I will write on the subject.
If Ric thinks my point is pointless or stupid and a waste of time because he's rejected if before, that's fine - but it would help if I could understand where that happened. I've read his book, and paid into the 'Literary Guild II' in the confidence that his next one would also be good and look forward to it. But if this point has been adequately addressed there or elsewhere I've not found it, or can't remember it well enough to find it now. Until then I don't understand fully the point of his own assertion of arrival on the LOP some 230 NM south of Howland, that's all.
Having said all that, I never thought AE landing that far south of Howland was that big of a whomp either way. She still had fuel to get to Gardner under most scenarios you can throw up there. I've always felt, on an instinctive level, that the donut hole/200 nm south scenario didn't quite feel right -- but that's a gut reaction with zero evidence to back it up and I'm a lot more interested, frankly, in Ric's and the gang's opinion than my own. If there's a flaw in the scenario, I imagine it'll surface in due time. It has up 'til this point.
Flaws don't surface unless we explore and question; I'm not saying there is a flaw, I have merely raised a question about an assumption because of a new understanding of a navigational foundation in the argument, that's all. I have great admiration for the work that 'Ric's and the gang's' efforts have produced. Like you, I have some gut reservations - I have to realize that no matter how hard they work at it, we are still looking at very circumstantial and at time ambiguous information, not hard fact. I think that's OK - if is all part of a 'hypothesis' - and hypotheses are for testing.
Ric himself said on March 20, 2012 before the world that 'some very smart people think we're right, and some very smart people don't think we're right' (paraphrased - apologies to Ric for not having direct quote at-hand). To me, that was Ric at his best - putting the academic argument up and making the point that we are 'testing a hypothesis'. Obviously there is confidence in it or we would not be here.
But we have to be realistic - we remain in a circumstantial, somewhat ambiguous state of 'proof' so far, at least as far as some are concerned. I have not said "TIGHAR is wrong"; I've merely challenged a particular point in the hypothesis due to a better understanding of the underlying problem.
Enough - too much, didn't mean to write so long...
Good evening.