You might think 9/11 was so long ago that nobody is still obsessing over it. You would be in error. You would be in so much error, in fact, that I had to do a 2021 episode of Skeptoid called “9/11 Truthers, 20 Years Later” which found that the conspiracy theories are still going as strong as ever.
Almost as if to illustrate my point, the following tweet appeared this week:
In case you don’t recognize that guy, he is better known as “Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth,” and maintains a registry of 9/11 conspiracy theorists who self-identify as architects, engineers, students, or members of the general public, in the hope that having a large mailing list will make all their wishful thinking come true. Now it’s obviously well-known why scientists don’t (or shouldn’t) ever “debate” pseudoscientists. You do more harm than good, suggesting to the general public that there is some unsettled science here, when there isn’t. In fact, my friend Craig replied to him:
So I obviously never had any remote intention of debating him, or Flat Earthers, or Creationists, or anyone else (oh, I suppose everything has its price; some fat cash would go a long way toward financing Skeptoid Media’s next film). And our friend Michael Shermer is certainly too wise to respond to this, so he didn’t.
And that’s when I made the #1 mistake that you should never make on Twitter.