Quote:
Originally Posted by clive milne
Graham... my grievance, well, that may be too strong a word,
so let's just say, the source of my 'irritation' if I was to be fair, is not specifically in respect to what is being discussed in this thread, it's just brought it to a head.
Before I go on, let me diffuse this a little by directing your attention to a couple of other threads (now locked) that won't illicit the same degree of emotive response, but will still make my point. If you do a search on this forum with the key words 'Moon hoax' or 'Moon landing conspiracy' or UFO (over Melbourne?)- I can't recall exactly... The nub of argument should be fairly obvious..
Take the moon landing hoax for example... My position on this is that I have yet to see any evidence that discredits NASA's account, so I assume it is more or less accurate.. That being said, the arguments (or more succinctly) the style of arguments used by 95% of the IIS members who participated in the discussions can only be described as logical fallacies. (and that's sugar coating it)
If a forum which is ostensibly for people with an appreciation for scientific endeavour, and, given a topic with such an incredible weight of proof, chooses to rely on, (almost to a man) invalid arguments to discredit opposition, then forgive me if I express frustration, even if I don't disagree with the conclusion in the first place. Science cannot be defended by the abdication of logic in order to score points in a debate.
Even if I have no dog in the race, when I see tactics like these used, it gets under my skin... probably more so because the majority of people are blind to it.
It is probably the reason why I now rarely participate in this forum.
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can't disagree that some the arguments may have been lacking, but maybe there is an underlying basis for the gut reactions - there never was any credible evidence of wrongdoing:
1.Peter's difficulty with the variation in star resolution and shape was explained perfectly well by Paul,
2. Ric's very aggressive contention that the FWHM were the same in both images was clearly not the case by simple inspection of the images in Peter's cleverly scaled overlay - in any case, it is not surprising that two images of the same object, by experienced practitioners, should look much the same (but they were certainly not identical, as Bert has just demonstrated very clearly),
3. Ric's contention that a diffraction spike had mistakenly been left in the copied image was troubling at face value, but was easily shown to be just plain wrong.
As far as I can see, that left absolutely no case to answer. The question then became whether Paul should release his valuable and hard won data to all and sundry for no reason at all. And for that matter should anyone else in such a position be expected to do so? I don't think that it is reasonable that we should necessarily respond to all such accusations and suspect that many of the posts were expressing similar sentiments. After all, it is very easy for a troll to make spurious accusations and then disappear without facing any consequences. Does that make sense? Regards Ray