Not the OP but I’m not reading 109 pages of analysis from 9-11 truthers in order to work out whether their conclusions are correct. That’s not the genetic fallacy either, I’d love someone else who I trust to do it and get back to me with what they find.
All of this to say, there are plenty of engineers that may have signed on to the original pledge that may have read the report and changed their minds. I never signed it, but I don't recommend buying into their claims. We have reasonable answers now.
The idea that someone snuck in hundreds of explosives and attached them to the building without any of the thousands of people who work in it noticing as a backup to an already elaborate air hijacking plan makes no sense.
I'm all for exposing corruption and I think there is enough to keep any anti government person occupied, but why do we get people inventing conspiracies in the most improbable of places? 9/11, Covid19 etc.
People also want the world to make more sense than it actually does. There being a secret group running things is at least _an_ explanation for the weird shit that happens, even if it doesn't really hold together.
There's a bunch of profit motives and politics involved as well usually.
Conspiracy theories are great because they're so efficient. Once started they are self reinforcing.
They must really believe that what they're saying is true.
Just want to point out that the document that OP linked claims in the conclusion that the NIST report is invalid, but I have no ability to judge that claim. I have no structural engineering knowledge and have never heard of either of these reports until now.
This was published March 2020 though, and I'd be curious if the analysis was cogent enough to warrant NIST's response in a few years
Is your comment exclusively for the two main towers, or tower 7? I have spoken with engineers who have reluctantly expressed confusion over tower 7. I'd appreciate a reply if you can bear it.
To others: I know to even touch the subject will have many sharpening their axes. Please save them for something other than honest curiosity, if you can.
The Alaska conclusions are correct as per their model. But their model is making assumptions about the spread of the fire and the damage that we lack concrete information to confirm or deny. It's easy to forget that on the day WTC 7 fell, we don't know how much of that building was on fire. A significant percentage of New York first responders had just died... There wasn't enough fire management on scene at WTC 7 to gather reasonable amounts of information, much less fight the fire.
It might have fallen due to thermal expansion of the main structural elements. It might have fallen due to controlled demolition. It might have fallen due to a sudden upsurge of the mole people from Hollow Earth. Too few people had eyes on for us to ever really know.
(Personal opinion: I don't know that we have any good models of what happens to a building close to but under 50 stories when two of the tallest buildings on the planet collapse immediately next to it. What earthquake-magnitude-equivalent force did the foundation of WTC 7 experience, and what effect would that have? The mole people model might be more accurate than I want it to be. ;) ).
* The NIST report made some assumptions that are not justified by actual evidence. The critical complaints are about the modelling of the exterior wall as a unit (?) that made it unreasonably stiff, and insufficient modelling of the actual joints between structural members. [I can't speak as to this accuracy, this is well beyond my understanding.]
* They did their own model of how the structure would behave due to heat and cannot confirm the NIST results.
* They also modelled the collapse on their own. I'm not 100% certain how the model works, but it looks like they basically deleted key structural members and observed how the structure would collapse when they did so.
* In order to match the recorded evidence, they had to delete key structural members very high up (higher than any floors known to have been on fire) to mirror the observed "penthouse kink", and they had to delete all the columns on an entire floor to mirror the fall. (And of course, no plausible mechanisms for either to occur other than controlled demolition).
If I'm following the report correctly--which is a big if--then they have two separate models which aren't used in conjunction with one another, and the first one "overturns" the analysis on how the fire could have caused a key structural member to fail, and the other one "concludes" that the key structural member failing couldn't have caused the collapse. In the latter model, as I understand it, there's no attempt to account for the deteriorated state of the building prior to the final collapse, for example the large gash in the building known to have occurred as a result of falling debris, or any putative (but not confirmed) damage that might have been caused by the long-running fire.
Overall, I didn't come away feeling impressed by their analysis.
It’s impossible to avoid bias, however whether the bias is bad or not depends on the bias and the situation. My go tos are people whose biases I think are either actively helpful (e.g. experts in a field who I’ve previously vetted), irrelevant to the topic (e.g. an NYT journalist talking about cheesecake in pre-war Cambodia), or who have a history of self-deprecating humility to the naked truth regardless of where it leads them but also not incredulous but humble to their intellectual limitations (very rare but occasionally stumbled upon).