I concur with Marty.
Disagreement is fine, but a charge of "GIGO" amounts to attack and adds nothing positive to the discussion. This kind of attack chills our forum environment and robs all of us of a higher quality dialogue that we might enjoy.
It's no wonder to me that more than one highly-qualified TIGHAR contributor has stopped working the forum:
What highly-qualified contributor wants their major investment so passionately trampled by attack with so little material basis?
The more I see these impeachment attempts the less objectivity I see in them. I wish it were otherwise, But until the attacker can lay-up a dispassionate alternative - complete with a rational outcome (equal in weight to the Monte Carlo, mind you) it won't carry much weight with me.
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I happen to trust the professionalism of what Jacobson applied in the NR16020 case as relevent and sensible:
- The Monte Carlo never claims to be an end-all - its limits and intents are well explained
- The constraints are openly identified, and thereby the limits of the analysis can be rationally realized
- Contrary to the attacker's opinion, I find the assumption of AE lacking specific cel-observations to be quite conservative: it is abundantly clear to me that any reliable cel-nav points being entered into the equation would bring the probability to somewhere closer to Howland than from the current probable outcomes.
Randy Jacobson did not hide that fact and in fact made it clear enough to me by stating the constraints as he did.
A Monte Carlo, as Jacobson himself makes clear enough, has limits of its own. But we must understand what Jacobson understands well: it has to focus on something to gain anything useful - applying too broad a set of constraints would yield nothing but chaos.
Of course we can consider that cel-nav was just peachy all the way to Howland. However, I find it very odd indeed that if cel-nav had worked so reliably well that somehow our pair completely missed the mark. Something went wrong, and the Monte Carlo outcome gives us a very good glimpse of how that could well have happened and some idea as to the magnitude and placement of the possible error.
In sum, I don't find it 'garbage' when the case is so clearly and fairly stated already. Attacks don't offer any credible new direction for me.
LTM -