I used to use the example of murdering my wife, until she joined this forum and noticed how often I used the example and asked if she should be concerned...
The mother-in-law might be a better target for that sort of rhetoric. But it still builds on the stereotype of the mother-in-law as an odious tyrant. Better to change the rhetoric to avoid crimes against persons. But crimes against chattels rarely engender enough indignance to operate the rhetoric effectively. If we change the charge to larceny, my neighbor can argue that I had the motive and opportunity to steal his car, did so, but then returned it to his driveway such that its absence was never observed. Death is a watershed event that offers an indisputable
corpus delicti. So our rhetoric is necessarily tasteless.
This is where most of my knowledge of spaceflight, history, engineering and Apollo has come from. And frankly, while it is always easier to educate oneself in a subject that one is interested in, it wasn't hard work to do so. Jr and others like him should have no difficulty in educating themselves to a similar standard.
Indeed it's becoming less excusable these days not to be at least minimally informed on subjects that come up in conversation. Even someone with no prior knowledge of space exploration should be able to answer in seconds questions like, "Who was the commander of Apollo 15?" To some extent we see Jr Knowing availing himself of this. When introduced to concepts like free-body dynamics, fluid dynamics, and radiant heat transfer, he Googles enough to be able to say belatedly, "Yes, I understand those things, as evidenced by a few buzzwords I'm going to regurgitate from Wikipedia." As you note below, the effort goes no further than to stave off proximate accusations of ignorance. Regardless of when he learned about the existence of those fields of knowledge, he doesn't try to reconcile it with his prior claims.
Self-education has its limits. The advantage of formal education or professional experience is that they incorporate a test of proficiency. One doesn't get a degree unless one demonstrates mastery of the material through proctored exams. Success in the marketplace is difficult without some demonstration of competence. Learning by just reading or viewing a discussion is too shallow for every purpose. But not every legitimate purpose needs depth. If I just want to understand some person's literary analysis of an author's work, I may need only a cursory understanding of the techniques those analysts employ. I used to photograph ballet students as a paying gig. I need to know a little bit about how dancers are trained in order to do that effectively. But I don't need to be a teacher myself, or an expert dancer. I don't need formal, adjudicated training. But neither would I pass myself off as having more than an interested layman's understanding of ballet.
For the past several years I've engaged more in the world of motion picture production design. I have a wealth of experience in theatrical stage design, but I don't do it for a living. But the people I'm working with have specialized in production design and construction for their entire careers. Naturally I defer to their expertise and wisdom, and to their recollections and interpretations of the history of that field. Similarly the regulars here who are prodigiously self-taught in space science and engineering engage with the professional practitioners here to hone their understanding. There are things that just can't be Googled for, read in books, or seen in videos.
These are all essentially defensible purposes and commensurate levels of knowledge. On the other hand, if you propose to dispute ongoing or historical practice in the field, to question the status quo or the conventional wisdom, or anything of that degree of controversy, I would recommend preparation beyond self-education. If I want to criticize someone's ballet pedagogy, I might need more than self-taught Ballet 101 to back that up. If I want to cry fraud over some Broadway set design, I might want to consider that my expertise doesn't include design and building in the specialized environment of New York. If I say that Bo Welch is a talentless hack, he would rightly say that my opinion lacks substance. Granted, disagreement
per se isn't invariably the province of
bona fide experts. But the amount of actual expertise you need, in my view, increases with the percentage of practicing experts you disagree with.
In a nutshell (pun intended), the number of credentialed aerospace engineers who dispute the authenticity of Apollo are so few we can almost name them individually. To credibly dispute something so widely depended on in the field requires more than skimming the Wikipedia article on fluid dynamics or radiant heat transfer. And most of us are reasonable people who know the limits of our understanding and remain safely within them. Conspiracy theorists, the kind who formulate them to play up their own imagined strengths, aren't as introspective.
Instead they demonstrate a near patholigical wish to avoid doing so, which (as far as I can see) leads only to the conclusion that they are not interested in the actual truth, only in perpetuating the conspiracy theory and their own self-created image as a shrewd, 'woke' individual not taken in my 'the man'.
I agree. They appear to work from the premise that they've already arrived. Often the argument is framed to emphasize "different thinking." It's not how much you know about the topic that matters, but what kind of knowledge it is. It's a roundabout argument in favor of intuitive belief over book learning. That argument is most sharply defined in the holistic medicine sphere. Often you hear practitioners say they have a natural gift of healing while licensed medicine requires trial-and-error science to approximate their success. In Apollo terms, the argument relies upon intuitive understanding of free-body dynamics, fluid mechanics, advanced manufacturing, etc. which is naturally superior. The rest of us have to rely on
ad hoc foibles to get there.
Or that they are only interested in yanking the chains of those who are educated in some attempt to make themselves feel relevant.
We don't really talk about this much. How much of these individual interactions are just nerd-baiting? In the 21st century, STEM types are not as stigmatized and marginal as they were a generation ago. So nerd-baiting isn't as credible a motivation as it may have once been. There is also the dynamic of the failed STEM student/practitioner getting back at those who succeeded. I guess if we're surveying the personality types and behavioral patterns, we should at least list everything. Bill Kaysing spilled the beans. He let it slip in a radio interview that he wrote his book in order to embarrass the U.S. government over its treatment of veterans. Not really an attack on the educated, of course, but still a clear signal of an ulterior motive.
And another thing we've seen from JR and his ilk is them triumphantly slapping down some piece of 'evidence' while also making it blatantly obvious they have not understood it or even read it. Witness JR's memo about LM stability, presented as 'evidence' because it mentions LM instability....
That tactic almost always comes across as cargo-cult reasoning. The worst examples of it come from the anti-science religionists. They are coached to present certain canned responses or canned references in response to scientific allegations, but without any inherent understanding of what they mean. It may be sensationalist garbage like "Scientific Misconduct Among Evolutionary Biologists," but those ploys work more than they should. The maxim, "If you're explaining, you're losing," applies. The claimant is mostly following advice of the form, "When a scientists says this, you respond with this -- just trust me." But it isn't always so head-in-the-sand. The claimant may accept full well that he doesn't understand what he's quoting. He proceeds anyway from one of three premises: (1) his critics are as untutored as he, (2) the critic is on the hook to explain it regardless, or (3) the science is a farce.
The memo Jr produced alludes to the math that describes free-body dynamics -- how things move and rotate when unconstrained and unattached to anything. But in keeping with the "different thinking" hypothesis, he might say that mathematics is a crutch. To someone who thinks he understands intuitively how freely rotating objects behave, any accelerated spacecraft might obviously be unstable. He's not conversant with the math because he doesn't need to be in order to "know" the truth. But it's not as if some pompous bloke raised a finger pontifically and declared, "Behold my mathematics; thus shall free bodies hereafter behave." It's not prescriptive; it's descriptive. We created the math to quantify how we observe freely rotating bodies to behave. Similarly Newton didn't invent calculus to torment STEM students. He invented it because he needed it in order to accurately describe how the quantifiable properties of the world were observed to behave.. It's attractive to believe that mathematical notation is a world all its own, detached from reality. In fact, when used in practical science, it's merely the descriptive language. It takes some effort to understand it. But it's not some esoteric nonsense that can be safely ignored.
Some people do have an intuitive understanding of free-body dynamics. We call them such things as pilots and acrobats. And we reward them with praise and money for their demonstrated skill. Intuition is not unreliable if it is adjudicated intuition. Untested intuition is what we reject, especially when it contradicts the formal description of the observations. A pilot struggling to recover an errant craft is not solving Euler angles in his head. But that math is operative in what he's doing. Successful intuition must closely parallel the effects of the formalism.
Evidence only works if examined dispassionately. Looking for evidence to support a predetermined conclusion is the usual tactic of the conspiracy theorist.
The dynamics of debate make it seem like we're doing that too. Someone says, "This indicates that this photo was staged." The answer, "But this is how that would be expected on the Moon." opens the door to the proposition that we too are just emphasizing the evidence that supports a predetermined conclusion that Apollo was real, to the exclusion of other possibilities and other evidence. It's not always clear in our rebuttals that we're taking all claims into consideration and all evidence, and arriving at what we think is the best reasoned, most parsimonious answer.
Consider the claim that some photos show a ridge in the near background that marks a sharp boundary with the distant background. They point out that there's a theatrical set design technique that uses this principle to create the illusion of depth. This, they say, supports the idea that it was shot on a stage with limited space available. The predictable rebuttal leaps to mind: the stage illusion works because that's how nature works. Hence the observation is also consistent with the proposition that it was really shot on the Moon. It behooves us to take the extra step to say we're not just playing turnabout. We're evaluating all the claims and evidence and showing why one explanation is considerably more parsimonious than the other.
