You are making this more complex than it has to be.
No, we're facing the problem in its full complexity. You're making it "simple" by skipping the parts you don't have answers for and pretending that they therefore don't matter. A great way to get rid of fleas on a cat is to incinerate the cat. It's a great solution unless you "complicate" it by stipulating that the cat has to be alive after the process. In the real world you don't get to ignore the parts of the problem that don't fit your solution just because you really, really like your solution. The problem of determining Apollo authenticity
is more complicated than you're making it, and you come off sounding rude and arrogant when you belittle people who are looking at the whole problem while you remain focused on one narrow piece.
If an unmanned lander had been sent to the moon while the astronauts faked their portion then the deception would have involved less than fifty people.
And you can say this from your vast experience designing, building, and operating spacecraft? That would be like me saying, "All you need to do to start the engine on a submarine is get in and turn the key." You don't seem to realize that you're talking to people who do this for a living and telling them that
they don't know what
they're talking about. I'm not sure that you realize how arrogant you're being. No, it would not need "less than fifty people" to design, build, and operate a remotely controlled and/or autonomous spacecraft that can land on the Moon and do all the things on the Moon that the humans were supposed to do. That's a very naive proposal.
I am not a rocket scientist...
Then kindly stop pretending you are.
I digress.
You do, and it's not for a good reason. You don't digress into the other areas of evidence because you have reasonable explanations for them. You digress only to remind your critics how inept they seem to be at reasoning out what might have happened
vis-à-vis that evidence. People point out that interplanetary S-band communications pose a problem for an LEO-only mission, and you digress from your prepared remarks -- not to solve the problem, but to scoff at your critics for not realizing how easy a problem it would be to solve.
Early in the debate you tell us NASA in the 1960s lacked the technology to design, build, and operate a spacecraft that a highly-skilled pilot could use to land on the Moon. Now you're telling us that "less than fifty people" in the same technology-limited environment could (in secret) design, build, launch, and operate a remote-control or autonomous vehicle that could land on the Moon without a pilot and perform all that Apollo indicates would be required of a human presence on the surface. When we point out not only your contradictory argument but also the difficulty in doing what your theory suggests, once again we don't get an explanation of how it was done. We don't even get an expression of interest in determining how such a thing was done. Instead we get only more deprecation over how intellectually deficient your critics must be for not realizing how easy it would be to do.
I'm baffled at why you think a rational person would buy such an argument.
The reasons for the digressions are even more worrying for this debate. First, you're obviously willing to bluff. You don't have any expertise in orbital mechanics, rocket science, or radio communications, but you're quite willing not only to spew ignorant rubbish pertaining to those fields but also to deride people who don't take it as gospel truth --
even when they have demonstrated they know better. You're willing to bluff, and then to double-down on the bluff by browbeating any who disagree. That's just pseudo-intellectual bullying, not debate. It's dishonest at a fundamental level. It means no one can, or should, trust you to report and interpret accurately. It also means no one should attempt to engage you until you're willing to grow up and stop arguing like a petulant six-year-old. You asked to consider whether we're being deceived or not. Well, we have determined that we
are being deceived, just not in the way you had hoped we'd see it. You're deceiving your readers by pretending you know what you're talking about and that you're willing to have a mature discussion.
Second, you claim you want to focus on radiation, but experience shows you're all too willing to talk about other things -- not to resolve them, but only as opportunities to remind your critics how much smarter you are than they. Your digressions are purely an ego reinforcement exercise, not an intellectual or rhetorical one. And you seem to think people don't notice that you do this. You pretend that zeal for the truth excuses all your arrogance and vitriol, but that's clearly not where you aim it.
The only thing that is important is the fact that there is an incongruency in the data.
No, that's
not the only thing that's important. You've just arbitrarily enthroned it as such because it's a vocabulary you know from your Navy days. So you figure you can b.s. enough about it to keep casual critics at bay, or pretend to be some sort of hotshot investigator, or whatever your real point is here. You obviously don't know enough about the other points of evidence to keep up your end of a conversation on those points, so you just pretend they don't exist or don't matter.
Thing is, in the real world they
do matter. Not everyone you talk to is going to weigh the evidence the same as you. You propose an approach where one piece of evidence arbitrarily decides the whole issue because the set of explanations for that one piece of evidence is so very decisive. But in doing that, you ignore 99 pieces of evidence which -- under the explanation you propose for your bellwether -- have no explanation, or speculative explanations at best. That's not an improvement. Instead of having only one bit of evidence that has a problematic explanation, now you have 99 bits of evidence that have problematic explanations. To people not confined to the one-trick-pony style of thinking you're using here, that's a deal-breaker. If we must resort to speculation to explain things, let's explain the fewest bits of evidence as possible that way.
If the stated NASA values are correct then it is impossible for the the Apollo mission to have left ELO.
No, that's just a false dilemma. You want the dilemma to be "
Either these figures from NASA are incorrect
or Apollo was in LEO." We stipulate the data are reasonably correct, so you conclude an LEO-only mission. But as we've all pointed out, there's a third explanation:
Tim isn't interpreting the data correctly. And despite that being by far the most credible explanation for all the evidence, you categorically refuse to put it on the table.
There may be ego-related reasons why you've declared off-limits the real reason your argument doesn't convince anyone. But the role your rampant denialism plays in your argument is to let you pretend that your GCR syllogism has deductive strength. You excise from your argument any and all semblance of the notion that your interpretation of the data comes into play at all. You lay it all at NASA's feet, suggesting that because it's their data, every inference
you want to draw from it must therefore also be laid at their feet and not yours. Thinking just doesn't work that way. It's the same error religious scriptural literalists commiit: they don't want to have to defend their abstraction of meaning while reading the text, so they deny that there's any interpretive exercise at all -- even when it's plain as the nose on their faces.
You are not infallible (or even competent). But you won't entertain any discussion regarding errors you may have made. Well, that's not entirely true; you resolve disagreements between you and your critics by suggesting you're smarter than they and therefore necessarily right. But in a broader scope, you want the argument to be that all of your inferences aren't actually inferences but rather self-evident facts that need no defense and cannot possibly be in error. You want to deny that you're doing any thinking (because then you'd have to defend it) while at the same time profess that you're the best thinker in the room (because you got the "right" answer, whether the sheeple can see it or not). You soothe the dissonance from so many people disagreeing with you by insinuating they're all either sheep or wolves. You effectively deny categorically that there
can be a rational disputation to your belief.
You don't have to prove all of the conditions to prove the deceit, you only have to prove one point. If that one point is proven then by default all the other points are false.
No, that's not how proof works. That is, however, how almost all conspiracy theories work. Most conspiracy theories work out on the frayed edges of the field of evidence. In any case, conspiracy theories always pick one or two outlying bits of evidence and -- ignoring the main body of it -- assert that those bits of evidence are so significant that by any objective standard they must disqualify the conventional narrative, which allegedly can't explain it. This is where your false dilemma comes in -- "can only be two ways of thinking about this." Your argument demands that you dismiss the prevailing narrative with deductive effect, even though it's patently an indirection. That in turn is why you will never allow a discussion of whether you know what you're talking about, such that you can interpret scientific findings correctly.
And make no mistake, you pull out all the stops keeping the discussion away from that. You shame people away from questioning your knowledge. You throw tantrums. You call people names. You try desperately to change the subject. Good grief, when you finally get dragged kicking and screaming to an obvious factual error you've made, you brush it aside and say you're "moving on." That tells us two things. First, we know what the weakest part of your argument is. It's always the thing that's most irrationally defended. Second, we know it's deliberate. Your avoidance of such things as competence and qualifications is calculated. And that means you're not having an honest debate. If you were having an honest debate, it would sound more like, "I'm not sure an unmanned spacecraft would be possible, but let's hear what you professionals have to say about it." No, you don't know what you're talking about. And you
know that you don't know what you're talking about. You just want credit anyway.
But I digress too. Having declared by one standard of proof that the conventional narrative cannot possibly stand, the conspiracy theory then brings in a wholly new standard of proof to measure its own hypotheses. That standard generally looks like, "not entirely impossible." All the rest of the evidence is explained away by wholly fanciful or facially farfetched speculation. It's good enough that the evidence was "somehow" made to look like that.
This is not how rational people think. Rational people apply roughly the same standards of proof to all the evidence. They don't arbitrarily single one bit out and say that it must decide the question irrespective of everything else, because they know that may require them to postulate even more farfetched and frankly impossible things to explain the "everything else" than they would have to apply to the one bit. In the real world it's never possible to fully explain every bit of evidence. Your ability to observe will always outstrip the ability to explain, simply because you will never have a comprehensive view of the evidence. Some bits that you can see (e.g., the cumulative dosimeter readings) may seem out of place only because you can't see the other evidence that helps it make sense (e.g., hypothetical differences in detection methods). This is necessarily in inductive reasoning. That's what makes it hard to do. You don't get around those difficulties by pretending inductive reasoning has deductive strength.
This is why conspiracy theories rarely catch on. They all follow this pattern, and it is objectively unconvincing.
I.e. if you prove Apollo 11 never left LEO then it follows that all the Apollo missions were faked.
No, that doesn't follow; it's a generalization error.
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
That's actually not a principle of logic. That's a quote from a fictional character invented by a guy who believed in faeries. Not exactly the sort of reference you want to cite for critical thinking. In the real world, especially relying upon inductive reasoning, you can never fully enumerate and eliminate the possibilities and therefore you can never hold up by default a hypothesis that's facially improbable. Conan Doyle is putting words in Holmes' mouth that make it sound like deductive strength can arrive from induction. It cannot, but Doyle needed it for his stories. And here's a literary tip: Holmes is not a good example of how to apply logic. Most of the Holmes' stories are really
deus ex machina stories that rely on Holmes magically knowing things via his "superior acumen."
A better aphorism for this situation is Occam's Razor, the statement made by the monk William of Occam. It states that, all other things being equal, the simplest explanation that explains all the observations is most likely to be true. By "simplest" Brother William meant the least reliant upon speculation or factors that could not be observed. He understood that inductive reasoning requires us to explain as much as we can, and then speculate on the rest. He advocates doing that parsimoniously, which is why his statement is often called the Rule of Parsimony.
In this case the simplest explanation is that you don't know what you're talking about, and that your interpretation of the radiation data has been shown by those with superior knowledge of physics, engineering, and mathematics to be wrong. It's not the explanation you like, or want to hear. But it's the simplest. Even overlooking your vast inexperience and incompetence -- even considering (for the sake of argument) that your interpretation were correct and the astronauts' cumulative exposure reads too low -- the simplest explanation is
still not that they were in low-Earth orbit the whole time. Why? Because of all the things that remain unexplained in your theory and about which you can only speculate. And because you "eliminate" from among only the hypotheses you're willing to consider, not all the hypotheses that exist. If the data are correct and the Apollo missions were genuine, then another explanation would be that Tim has misinterpreted the data. That hypothesis also explains the ridiculous floundering around you're doing here in this forum, trying to convince professional scientists and engineers that you know what you're talking about.
The math does not work for me.
And we've show that that's because you don't know math, but you're quite willing to bluff.
Somebody is lying.
Yes, and we've proven it's you.
