Well, it's "next week." As promised, I will refrain from further specific comment on the main thread topic until I've read Derek's article with sufficient care and study. Late last week one of my clients had something unexpected come up so I've had some unplanned additions to the normal workload. Hopefully we can wrap that up this week and free my time up for a focused examination.
However, this I can address briefly without needing to refer to the article or any specific claim.
You might consider the claims that some of the Apollo missions were faked to be extraordinary, but I don't.
But is your personal judgment the appropriate standard for that determination? The maxim, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof," speaks to the very nature of proof. And the process of proof is an exercise whereby one party attempts to convince another of something that he doesn't already believe. Therefore the receiving party's standard of proof is not irrelevant.
If Tom undertakes to prove something to Dick, he does so with the presumption that Dick doesn't already believe it. If Dick already does, then it doesn't matter whether Tom could have mustered a whole regiment of facts in his favor and marshaled them with unassailable logic; people rarely belabor the reasons why they agree. But if Tom must
convince Dick, then the basis of Dick's current belief and the standard Dick proposes for conviction otherwise are operative conditions. It doesn't matter whether Tom thinks his claim is not extraordinary if Dick thinks it is, if Dick can give good reasons for considering it extraordinary, and if Tom has agreed to attempt to convince Dick. Tom doesn't get to insist Dick lower his standard. He doesn't get to reverse the burden of proof, saddling Dick with having to overcome a hidden premise that his present beliefs are ill-founded.
The degree to which a proposition is extraordinary is the degree to which it is implausible on its face. And if you're trying to convince somebody, it is the degree to which
those people find a proposition implausible on its face that you have to deal with. Your argument may eventually follow the path of showing why their skepticism is irrational, based on unsound logic or a poor comprehension of the facts. But that's still something
you have to show by your affirmative dissection of that rationale. If you insist that your own personal thermostat is what should set the expectations of the argument
for them, that's a rhetorical non-starter. If you want to convince
me that your argument has merit, you must address what
I consider to be extraordinary, and you must be prepared to tangle with
my standard of proof.
Off the top of my head I can name aerospace engineering, astrodynamics, control systems, civil engineering, astrophysics, geology, and planetary science as the foremost sciences that are intimately familiar with the Apollo record and accept the Apollo missions unanimously as authentic history and technology. Much subsequent science in these fields has been predicated on it, not simply idly accepting it but delving deeply into it.
Now in any scientific endeavor -- any exercise involving people, for that matter -- you will always have isolated incidents of mismanagement, misappropriate, misfeasance, concealment, even outright fraud. Professional and academic science considers accusations of scientific malfeasance to be extraordinary, and to require extraordinary proof. This is because it happens so infrequently, as opposed to innocent errors, normal scientific uncertainty, and so forth. My point is that science is far from perfect or infallible, but accusations of outright fraud are still considered extraordinary enough to impose a prodigious burden of proof on the accuser.
The degree of malfeasance you're proposing is colossal. You're accusing the major practitioners of several giant industries -- including principals such as Max Faget, with long and illustrious prior accomplishments -- of wholesale fraud, in connection with public officials, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars and immense impact on the scientific and engineering communities. And you're accusing the follow-on sciences either of being complicit in the fraud, or of failing in due diligence.
How can that possibly
not constitute an extraordinary claim in the eyes of the people you're trying to convince?
In the past I would have, but not now.
What would you give as the reason for having relaxed your standard?
