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Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

There are several half-formed complaints from people who did not read the article in this comment thread. I'm guessing that the commenters are having a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that there are a lot of conspiracy theorists out there who think that the US government did 9/11 etc.

This article is not about that. It revisits a disaster (the collapse of WTC7) which appears to have happened under very unique circumstances. If the accepted explanation is correct, WTC7 is the only high rise to ever have collapsed from fire, and the collapse resulted from a long string of coincidences. The article is a critique of this analysis.

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>...and the collapse resulted from a long string of coincidences.

-Most, if not all spectacular, unexpected events are the result of a long string of coincidences. Otherwise, they'd be common occurrences.

That would work with one building. A long string of coincidences (failures upon failures…), such as the ones that causes some big server outage, or blackout, or plane crash, could have been a good explanation for the fall of one building.

Here however the "string of coincidences" hypothesis would have to apply pretty much simultaneously to three buildings, one of which wasn't even hit by a plane.

No. freaking. way. That's just too damn improbable.

You're ignoring correlation. The twin towers are, for almost all purposes, virtually identical, and experienced largely identical scenarios. For them to behave differently under such circumstances would be less extraordinary than for them to behave similarly.

To my knowledge, the twin towers are the only buildings in history to have been hit with a four-engine plane full of fuel (El Al Flight 1862 apparently had only two engines left when it struck the apartment building. Note that the building fully collapsed at point of impact). Again, to my knowledge, with WTC 7, they were the only high-rises to have experienced serious, out of control multi-floor fires for hours after receiving major structural damage--Deutsche Bank received serious damage but no fires so far as I can tell.

If 100% of similar structures in similar circumstances have failed in a similar manner, is that improbable?

Then we're veering off the "multiple coincidences" hypothesis, to a much more probable theory.

These coincidents can usually be explained by a latter analysis. That's the main point of the article: til now there is no logically sound string of events that explains the observed events, demolition, fire or otherwise. These events might indeed be of low probability but currently even the events are not known.

> This article is not about that. It revisits a disaster (the collapse of WTC7) which appears to have happened under very unique circumstances. If the accepted explanation is correct, WTC7 is the only high rise to ever have collapsed from fire, and the collapse resulted from a long string of coincidences. The article is a critique of this analysis.

A critique that suffers from the same flaw it's criticizing. The authors say (pg. 4, there, I'm showing I actually read the article) that the official study preconcluded the cause of collapse even though it can't make the evidence fit, but the authors of this article themselves are equally guilty of such preconclusion (it was controlled demolition!).

Some of the citations are extremely problematic--the evidence for nano-thermite in particular, which is not a claim that can be independently backed up, and whose properties are never clearly specified (because, so far as I can discover, the known properties really fail to explain any aspect of 9/11).

People are calling this a truther article. It's not surprising when it's written by people like this:

    Ted Walter is the director of strategy
    and development for Architects & Engineers
    for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth),
    a nonprofit organization that today
    represents more than 2,500 architects
    and engineers. In 2015, he authored AE-
    911Truth’s Beyond Misinformation: What Science Says
    About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1,
    2, and 7. He holds a Master of Public Policy degree from
    the University of California, Berkeley.

The article is full of truther bullshit. You've said, twice, that this article is about WT7. The article is full of detail on the twin towers as well as WT7.

Unless you state what is wrong and what is correct. This has no meaning.

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