Post: #173

(01-03-2017 07:10 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  

(01-03-2017 06:15 AM)Mercenary Wrote:  ...
I would be sceptical of any person on any subject, that had not at least seen and/or visited in person, the things and places he claims to know something about.

How does this work exactly?

Considering the question in play here, how does stepping into Auschwitz allow you to better intuit whether 1.5 million people died there or 4.5? How does it allow you to better understand whether they were gassed with Zyklon or by tank exhaust? How does it better allow you to know how many died of starvation or disease or exposure or gunfire versus how many died in the chambers?

I've got nothing against you personally, Mercenary, but this is the cheapest kind of end-run on an argument. "You're not qualified to talk about it because (arbitrary mystical exclusionary principle)."

It sits there with "you're not qualified to speak on race relations if you're white".
"You're not qualified to talk about women's spirituality if you're a man".

This is a good example of separating emotion from reason or mathematics. Let me provide another example in history where people assumed that because they 'saw' something and had an emotional reaction they were experts.

Some of you may remember the 1990s pearl clutching over clearcutting. The environmentalists would show these pictures of logged over areas and claim that the forests of north america were being wiped out etc. The visual representation of a clearcut looks ugly.

omg the devastation.


visiting a clearcut also gives you a sense of their size, and they can get quite large, especially in northern Canada. Standing in the middle of one, where you see the moonscape of tree stumps almost to the horizon gives people this feeling of "we are cutting down the entire forest"

here is the problem though, clearcuts are large, but the actual amount of standing forests are even larger. Canada's deforestation over the span of something like 30 years was like a third, of a third of a percent, and America's forests actually increased in coverage over the same time period.

People can't grasp scale and large numbers intuitively. Looking at a beach of sand, a person can't guess if there are 10 billion or 20 billion grains, they just know there are 'a lot'

Thats why its probably better for someone to do holocaust math without ever seeing a death camp, or concentration camp. Sure, a lot of big crematoriums may give the impression that nazis could burn a lot of bodies in a day, but does it mean they could burn thousands? millions? in a short matter of years?

Personally, I think historians, site visitors and other subjective 'experts' are not needed to answer the question of 'how many bodies were burned in crematoriums' or 'how many people died in gas chambers'. Its simply an engineering discussion.

I wouldn't ask a historian to tell me how many production lines I'd need to produce 1 million cars per year at my factory so I don't think I'd ask one to tell me the feasibility of a mass crematory operation either.

Isn't it easy math? What was the production capacity of 1 creamatorium (which weambulance was trying to estimate)? How many crematoriums were there per camp? How many years did they operate for? X= the maximum crematory output. Same thing for the gas chambers.

The emotional input doesn't help.

The "consensus of experts" doesn't help either. Just ask Hillary Clinton and CNN how a consensus of experts helped her lose.