Dammit!

[elaw]

Respectable aviation speakist claims we (and others) should stop parlour-talking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW4wfcdNX0M

Party pooper.

[Not_Karl]

FORMERLY respectable aviation speakist claims we (and others) should stop parlour-talking

FIXED and italicized where appropriate.
Also: I'm Not_sure if we know the cause of TADs!!!; what we sure as phug know is THE SOLUTION to them.

[Gabriel]

Respectable aviation speakist claims we should stop parlour-talking

I agree. You guys should stop.

[3WE]

I’m going to be rarely serious. There is a Wild West of places where everyone spews BS. Here and even there are much smaller venues where not_everyone, but a smaller group of active members spew BS.

PHBB discussion boards lack like buttons (ok, that’s not true). But, while we make too many proclamations and pontifications, there is a DISCUSSION.

Questions are asked, thoughts are solicited, agreements and disagreements are clarified.

Should Gabe shut up times? 3BS? (Yes.)

But we aren’t ALWAYS spewing proclamations but also asking some questions.

[Not_Karl]

Should ALL aeroplanies be banned? Are ALL pilots stupid? Should we Not_allow close lateral separations where there is inadequate vertical separation? (Yes.)

Fixed.

[Gabriel]

I’m going to be rarely serious. There is a Wild West of places where everyone spews BS. Here and even there are much smaller venues where not_everyone, but a smaller group of active members spew BS.

PHBB discussion boards lack like buttons (ok, that’s not true). But, while we make too many proclamations and pontifications, there is a DISCUSSION.

Questions are asked, thoughts are solicited, agreements and disagreements are clarified.

Should Gabe shut up times? 3BS? (Yes.)

But we aren’t ALWAYS spewing proclamations but also asking some questions.

And, with all our stupidity, ignorance and arrogance, we are in the 10%-most-educated (and least influential) fraction of the “media” when it comes to aviation.

[ocelot]

Meh. Going over the available data and trying to match it against various scenarios is the same thing the official investigation does. There's only one thing that they perhaps do that most of us parlour talkers don't, which is to specifically try to avoid forming any kind of theory at all until they have most of the data. This helps protect against the failure mode where someone forms a theory they like, prematurely, and then shifts to trying to defend that theory against additional data instead of looking for alternate explanations.

However, while that can be helpful sometimes it's hardly necessary. Another equally valid (and IMO more useful) approach is to look for all the scenarios consistent with the available data, and then try to disprove as many of them as possible. Discussing them with other people is particularly useful because this often leads to insights that no one person would come up with on their own.

Anyhow, anyone with any significant training in the experimental sciences (in principle, high school physics ought to be enough) knows how to do this, and at least notionally is also aware of the risk of adopting pet hypotheses.

The problem is that lots of people are not trained to think, and so they don't. They come up with one possibility, which usually isn't even consistent with half the known data, and proclaim it as not just the explanation but the only possible explanation. Or they latch on to some scenario they heard about recently in some other context and assume it must be that, never mind details. And they don't bother to pay attention to what anyone else is saying, either. You can find all this crap in the AVH comments for any high-profile accident.

For example, in the Jeju Air crash comments someone proposed that birds must have come through the cockpit windows and incapacitated the pilots. Never mind that someone had to be flying the plane in order for it to fly past the airport and then come back.