PART THREE

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Complications in Debunking

In 2017 Charlie Sheen starred in a movie called 9/11. Sheen had previously been associated with 9/11 Trutherism and was asked about this by the Hollywood Reporter. He responded:

“Simple Physics” is an oxymoron. There is no simple physics. If it seems simple that means you are reducing something that is complex. The great physicist Richard Feynman was once asked by an interviewer about magnets: How do they work? His answer was basically, “I could tell you, but you wouldn’t understand.” He then tried to explain why the interviewer would not understand:

Feynman here is asking you to trust him. He’s telling you that’s really your only option, because to understand the real physics behind magnetism you’d at least need to take a few undergraduate courses, and quite possibly more than a few. There is a more complicated answer, but it’s not currently accessible to you without a lot of work.

But some people demand an immediate explanation without doing that work. Why indeed did the World Trade Center towers collapse the way they did? They may cite Newton’s laws of motion and tell you that the collapses violated them unless explosives had been used. They ask you to explain that, but unfortunately, like many perfectly reasonable and intelligent people, they find themselves incapable of easily understanding the answer. You tell them that Newton’s laws only apply to abstract point masses, and they will tell you that’s bullshit. You try to tell them about point masses versus rigid bodies versus articulated bodies, elastic versus inelastic collisions, conservation of momentum versus conservation of energy, potential energy in the building versus chemical energy from explosives, static force versus dynamic force, vertical support cross-sections, and the square-cube scaling law. They tell you that’s all a bunch of hand-waving because they think “every action has an equal and opposite reaction” proves the building could not have simply collapsed as they did.

Conversations like these are a challenge. The challenge is not a reflection on the intellect or education of your friend. Professor Feynman was not insulting the interviewer when he explained why the interviewer would not understand the full explanation, he was simply noting that it’s more complicated than they thought, and you need a certain amount of education to understand it—or at least you need to put in a certain amount of time and effort.

The challenge is magnified if, like most people, you don’t really understand it yourself. I’m a reasonably technical person when it comes to basic principles and calculations in physics, but like everyone I have my limits. I’ve forgotten most of the advanced math I learned at school, retaining only the strong practical subset that I used daily for years in my work programming 3D physics for video games. At some point when helping a friend understand something we are forced to accept the limits of our own understanding of why something does a certain thing, except to tell them that it does.

Charlie Sheen thinks there are questions raised by “simple physics,” and yet he simultaneously defers to “those a lot smarter and a lot more experienced than himself” in order to ask those questions on his behalf. But if the questions are so simple, then why are there no simple answers? Sheen has just chosen to trust one small set of “smarter” people who argue that these “simple” questions are best answered by explosives, and ignore the other (much larger) set who recognize the question is somewhat more complicated, and that gravity, fire, mechanics, the physics of materials, and a rather complex sequence of events are required to provide the answer.

Show, Don’t Tell

The best way of explaining something your friend does not really understand is to sidestep the entire explanation stage, and instead demonstrate that thing. For example, people who think the Earth is stationary might argue that if it were in motion, then when we jumped up in the air we would come down in a different place. Now you don’t need to get into any great scientific detail here to debunk this. Discussing gravity, velocity vectors, inertia, and suchlike is not going to help. All you need to do is note that if you jump up and down on a train you’ll land in the same spot. Tell them to try it out.

The “jumping and landing” problem is certainly not something that is intuitively obvious. Back when I was in the games industry a friend told me about his time working on a PlayStation game called Blasto, where at some point the player’s character would ride around on little floating platforms. One of the game designers wanted it programmed so that when the player jumped straight up when on a moving platform, they would not land back on it.

That in itself would not be unreasonable, as video games have all kinds of weird physics, but the designer wanted it because he thought it made the game more realistic. My friend argued with him, and eventually settled on a bet. He would stand in the bed of a truck driven along the alleyway at a steady fifteen miles per hour, and then jump straight up. If he landed back in the truck in the same spot, then that is how they would program the game. If the truck moved away from underneath him and he fell to the ground, then they would program it that way.

Since he was moving at the same speed as the truck he landed back in it just as you would expect. The best way of getting the point across was a practical (albeit dangerous) demonstration.

Practical demonstrations are something that I often find myself doing and are one of the more enjoyable aspects of debunking. It’s quite easy to simply keep on typing, trying to explain some mistake to someone. But if you can actually show it to them then that generally works a lot better. Stop trying to explain some aspect of physics with words, and instead spend that time concocting a good demonstration.

While they are fun and often effective, practical demonstrations need some caution. There are, after all, numerous videos online that claim to provide evidence for false conspiracy theories. This is especially true in the area of 9/11 controlled demolition. In one video, Richard Gage (head of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth) drops one cardboard box on top of another, and then claims this demonstrates why the collapses of the World Trade Center Towers were so suspicious.3 Many people were convinced by this, and have even repeated versions of the “experiment” themselves. So you need to make sure that the principles and assumptions underlying your demonstration are correct. It’s a good idea to check with an expert before putting it out there.

Family Debunking

A few years ago, a relative emailed me about something that I immediately knew was a scam. She first told me that she was going to take advantage of her retirement to go into business for herself. What’s more, she had already taken the first steps. It was a great new opportunity to get in on the ground floor selling natural products to her friends and family.

My relative, who I’ll call Betty, had recently befriended a nice couple at some local event. After seeing Betty a few times they asked if she’d be interested in a way of making a bit of extra money. Politely Betty said yes, and they invited her round for dinner so they could discuss it. After dinner they brought out a case that was full of sample bottles of products like skin lotion, toothpaste, and shampoo. They told her that most of the products on the market had dangerous chemicals like sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS). They got a tube of Colgate toothpaste out and had her read the list of ingredients (which included SLS and other chemicals). They then showed her documents from the CDC that proved SLS was poison.

This was a bit concerning to Betty, who was generally in favor of natural things and opposed to poison. What could she do? Well the answer, they told her, was to use these natural products instead. They showed her the list of SLS-free ingredients. All at very reasonable prices. And what was more, she was in luck! It just so happened that they were selling more than they could handle and were looking for people who could sell the products for them, and look at this graph of how much money you can make, and even more if you could sign up other people to sell for you! They left her with the case of products to think it over.

This was just an old scam—multi-level marketing (MLM). MLM is a kind of pyramid scheme where the selling of a simple product is not the real money maker—the real money is actually in signing up people to sell products. The company and top salespeople make money selling these sample kits and getting signing fees, and hardly anyone else actually makes any money. Those who do make money often end up alienating those around them with persistent requests to sign up. It’s an old scam, and it sucks people in.

I looked up the company, and sure enough there was a litany of complaints about it being an MLM scam. As always with these things there were a number of true believers who actually thought MLM was a good way of making a living. Statistics don’t lie though, and according to the FTC over 95 percent of participants in MLM schemes end up losing money.4

What was I to do with Betty, someone who I was very fond of? I knew she was also an intelligent woman, but perhaps a bit more into “natural” remedies (like aromatherapy) than I was. I knew she liked this couple and did not want to offend them, and I did not want her to feel like I was criticizing her choice of business. I knew she respected me, and would probably listen to me, but I also knew that I had a limited opportunity to make my case and avoid her getting sucked in.

I took a very slow approach, starting by looking at the claims they had made about SLS being a poison. Indeed, it was, and there was a Material Safety Data Sheet explaining just how toxic it was. Then why was it in toothpaste? Like with all chemicals, it’s the amount that makes something toxic, not the substance itself. Table salt, for example, is highly toxic—a tablespoon can kill a small child. But we still sprinkle it on our food.

This could be a bit of a tricky thing to get across to Betty, so I also had a look at the “natural” ingredients in the products she was planning to sell. Funnily enough those ingredients also had Material Safety Data Sheets explaining how toxic they were. Most usefully, some of the ingredients were actually listed as being more toxic than the supposedly dangerous SLS. I relayed all this to Betty the next day, without any judgment, just pointing out the facts. After it sank in, she said she’d return the sample case. “I’ll tell them Mick made me do it,” she said. We laughed.

She returned the sample case to the couple and they tried to talk her out of it. “What does this Mick know?” they asked. “He probably just read some disinformation on the internet. Just try it for a week.” But ultimately Betty recognized that what I’d told her was probably correct, so she declined, and unfortunately their friendship was over.

Telling someone that they are wrong can be difficult on many levels. It can be even more difficult when you love that person and you know that your rejection of their belief might hurt your relationship, or their relationship with others. In such a situation the normal advice still holds: foster effective communication, supply them with useful information, and give it time. But the personal factor brings some complications.

First off, is it really worth it? Consider the pros and cons. Is their belief in conspiracy theories actually at a level where it’s a problem—to themselves or others? Many people believe in strange and irrational things like the supernatural without it affecting them negatively. Do you want to risk creating conflict for something that’s really not that important? In Betty’s case the conspiracy was low level (“Big Pharma” supposedly covering up toxic ingredients), but the financial consequences of her believing it were very real and very negative.