Metatheory

[Ramsay]

There are many good theories that cover all the facts. You just need to use logic. 

[Ramsay]

i I think if you read more about what happened. And thinking about it in a certain way will make you agree with the theories

[GlennM]

Your point of view condenses into a "who do we trust" argument. This point of view contends we can not trust the message( facts) because we can not trust the messenger. The who's who of the DPI is well researched and published on the DyarlovPass.com and in numerous publication, notably Teddy's 1079..There are a lot of names associated with this event.

Of all the many,many contributors, testifiers, administrators etc. who among them (1) has access to the material evidence (2) has a reason to onfuscate the facts (3) the technological wherewithal to do so?

Note that even unrelated photos and useless spoiled camera exposures made it into the case files. They were not culled.

Nobody in the forum would claim that this wintertime tragedy was deftly handled, but it was expensively handled. It was openly and formally reviewed and documented. Adjustments were made from the findings that materially affected individuals.  The DPI was not swept under the carpet then nor now 60 years later.

If we start culling the false facts, who will be the judge of that? Are they going to be replaced with truth? Whose truth? Who among us will do the culling?   

Once again, it gets down to a conspiracy theory. They come in different flavors, but all have a common core of there is something to lose and something to gain. Many who post on the forum, swing their logical bats at the Pinata. They all miss. Maybe that is because it is not a conspiracy, we are not mind readers of dead men and women from long ago.

There are at least two consequences to this line of reasoning, they are that either we do not have all the facts or the facts are false. If you subscribe to the former, you participate in the forum as an investigator. If you subscribe to the other, the DPI is a waste of your heartbeats and you would be better served solving a puzzle that can actually be solved.

Who are we going to trust?

[bongyi]

tell me: what fact—if it were to appear—would make you admit the metatheory is wrong? If you don't have an answer to that, it remains... unfalsifiable!

What your question refers to has already been answered in post 11. Again, I would like to ask you to read more carefully!

Metatheory lends itself to refutation. If you can present a narrative that logically and without contradiction describes the events within the framework of known facts, then it can be refuted.  But you won't be able to present such a narrative. So the theory is suitable for refutation, but you cannot refute it.  It is in an ideal position.

[GlennM]

tell me: what fact—if it were to appear—would make you admit the metatheory is wrong? If you don't have an answer to that, it remains... unfalsifiable!

What your question refers to has already been answered in post 11. Again, I would like to ask you to read more carefully!

Metatheory lends itself to refutation. If you can present a narrative that logically and without contradiction describes the events within the framework of known facts, then it can be refuted.  But you won't be able to present such a narrative. So the theory is suitable for refutation, but you cannot refute it.  It is in an ideal position.

Am I to understand that an explanation which is consistent with the evidence, or more simply put, is the truth is a prime candidate to be proven false? OK. The sun rises in the East. How do I make this false?I cannot, so by trying to make the truth a lie, I have proven my explanation.  This is a long way of saying that what we hold to be true will remain so until a better answer of found. In the DPI, the argument is that the better answer does not even exist because the case is built on the evidence of lies assumed to be truthful facts. This is just a softboiled conspiracy theory. At some point you have to take a leap of faith and believe that not everyone is trying to deceive you. It reveals more about the skeptic than the issue.

[bongyi]

The Russian authorities did not properly handle the case either in 1959 or now.
The '59 investigation is closed with the famous “explanation” that an unknown compelling force took place.

This is completely absurd. The investigation into the deaths of nine people cannot be completed in this way. Unacceptable. Outrageous! This couldn't happen!
We have to see behind it!
Ivanov puts it this way because he is trying to let us know that he was stopped! From above or on the party line! And all he can do is close the investigation as expected. But he tries to send a message, covertly, subtly, by closing the case with an absurd explanation, and he just hopes that people will understand the underlying meaning of the words.

And the 2019 investigation is concluded with the avalanche theory. According to them, an avalanche took place on a slope in 1959 where not a single documented avalanche had occurred in the last 60 years. To support this idea, a year later, Swiss scientists with suspicious motivation come up with their idea of a slab-avalanche, which they try to spread in scientific circles, but it is actually a blunder, a fraud and can be called crowd manipulation rather than a scientific theory. But regardless, the avalanche theory is ruled out by several facts.

I already raised it in the 20th post about the camera photos, but you left it without an answer! The supposed last 2 pictures of the group, when digging up a tent site in a snowy spot, which inventoried film reel is it on? I know that none of them! How is it possible that photos are found that are not included in the film negatives included in the inventory? This is not okay! This couldn't happen! It cannot validly be said that everything is fine with the photos! Not at all! It's so wrong!

Your statement about the operation of the authorities is incorrect. It is clear that the authorities were not guided in '59 or now by the resolution of the case, but only by being able to close it in some way. And they didn't provide any explanation at all for what happened to the hikers.
If your child died in such circumstances and you experienced such behavior on the part of the authorities, would you still be accepting of their work? Unpleasant question, right? You will have to die never knowing what happened to your child, the authorities won't tell you, even though they probably know what happened and you agree to their work? I don't think you would!

----

3. post

Fortunately, we don't have to try to determine which facts are true and false.

9. post

 We are not in the business of establishing exactly which facts are false and why. This is not necessary!

14. post

 It doesn't matter which fact we think is false or true.

29. post

In the metatheory, we will not answer what happened. We will not dwell on which facts are false, and how are they false.

After that, you wrote:

If we start culling the false facts, who will be the judge of that? Are they going to be replaced with truth? Whose truth? Who among us will do the culling?   

No. We do not starting culling the false facts!
I have described several times before that from the point of view of metatheory, it does not matter which is false and which is real fact.
Only you talk about culling. I don't. You say that and then you criticize what you said. I have nothing to do with this. It's a straw man argument! Why are you doing this?

-----

Once again, it gets down to a conspiracy theory.

Again, no, this is not a conspiracy theory.
On the one hand, you still haven't been able to understand the metatheory, and on the other hand, you're confusing things.
The premise of metatheory is that there are false facts. The question of how or why false facts were created is information worthless from the point of view of theory. The assumption that there are false facts because a conspiracy is likely, according to which the facts were manipulated and constructed, cannot be evaluated in the strict context of metatheory, irrelevant.
The metatheory meets the criterion of falsifiability, and this objectively precludes you from classifying it as a conspiracy theory, I already described this earlier in posts 11 and 20, after which you come up with this again!

Conspiracies exist. The world and history are full of conspiracies. Assuming a conspiracy is completely rational under the circumstances.  This has nothing to do with the concept of conspiracy theory, which exists within the logical framework of cognition, which is a criticism of the form of the theory, but it does not affect the content of the theory to any extent, which can be real, true, correct. But further explanation of this would be off-topic!

-------

1) Inadequate classification of the work of the Russian authorities
2) straw man argument
3) conspiracy theory accusation

You present these.
I consider these to be frivolous and cannot at all evaluate them as a substantive criticism of metatheory.

[Ziljoe]

Bongyi, I completely understand the frustration. I am not even going to pretend to understand this metatheory concept because I don't, I'm not sure if it's the correct model or formula.It can be incredibly exhausting looking at this case because, after more than 60 years of intense scrutiny by some of the smartest people in the world, the pieces still don't perfectly match every bit of the evidence. We all carry that same desire to find an answer to the puzzle.

As Glennm says , we have to take a leap of faith at some point to create a narrative or at least try and join the dots , one of these leaps of faith is to assume or speculate that the case files have been forged , faked or withheld , by the authorities, or even by the gate keepers that received the files .

Real-world wilderness tragedies are inherently chaotic. When you combine an extreme environment, human panic, and a 1959 Soviet investigation, you are naturally going to find contradictions, sloppy notes, and missing information at the edges. For many of us, those gaps aren't a sign of an engineered government deception; they are just the inevitable, messy footprint of real life.

I’ve found it stabilising to research other historical cases of accidents in similar environments globally. In the Soviet Union, there were many deaths handled in unusual ways. Some were accidents involving mass groups dying from drinking liquids that weren't alcohol, fires, suicides with bombs, rafting fatalities, and several group avalanche deaths. There was even a case of people taking a helicopter just to go fishing and crashing it, and a plane crash where the pilot tried to prove he could land using only his instruments. You name it, it has happened.

Many of these deaths ended up in secret files, but the term "secret" was not used because there was something to hide—it was just how they structurally stored files. It is the same today; the public generally cannot get access to active investigations and the processes behind the scenes. I understand that there was only one way to label the original case file because there is only one mechanism after the death of multiple people, and that label is a criminal investigation. "Unknown compelling force" was actually used simply because they didn't know the exact mechanism or cause of death at the time.

You’ve given the forum food for thought about how we structure our arguments and look at these files, even if we don't completely agree on the framework. It's a tough puzzle to crack, but the debate is what keeps the investigation alive. Perhaps the metatheory could be best used to explore the psychology of why people like us choose a theory and then try to bash the evidence to fit it.

There is also the possibility that what we have been given by the authorities is actually the truth, and the real puzzle is simply to continue from where they left off when they couldn't formulate a definitive reason for the incident. There is a ton of examples and real reports of other hikers who tackled the exact same problems that the Dyatlov group did.

Welcome aboard the forum.

[bongyi]

Am I to understand that an explanation which is consistent with the evidence, or more simply put, is the truth is a prime candidate to be proven false? OK. The sun rises in the East. How do I make this false?I cannot, so by trying to make the truth a lie, I have proven my explanation.  This is a long way of saying that what we hold to be true will remain so until a better answer of found. In the DPI, the argument is that the better answer does not even exist because the case is built on the evidence of lies assumed to be truthful facts. This is just a softboiled conspiracy theory. At some point you have to take a leap of faith and believe that not everyone is trying to deceive you. It reveals more about the skeptic than the issue.

I don't understand clearly what you mean!

I consider a 'possible theory' to be one that can tell what is happend without contradiction, in accordance with known facts, and is likely.
Several such possible theories may fit the known facts.
One possible theory will correspond to the truth, to what actually happened. The other possible theories, despite fitting the facts, are not about the truth.

Metatheory can be disproved in the way that a possible theory must be able to be presented. In the case of the Gyatlov incident, no possible theories have emerged in the last 60 years.

[GlennM]

Metatheory invites us to build a house of cards with true and untrue cards called facts. Once built, flick it and see if it holds up.. We have been doing this for ages. The difference is that many of us are more careful of the cards we use and the way we lean them against each other. Much of our exchanges in the forum have to do with whether the card is true and whether the association of cards holds up.  There have been many house of cards about the DPI,  some get published. Why not one definitive house of cards? How is easier to explain than why.

[Ramsay]

So let's go then, apply your method, choose a theory. it can be my theory, the 2019 theory, or any other. What do you do? You already give a conclusion to the case, which can lead you to pick the facts that support your conclusion. I challenge you. The pieces are there, play this game. The investigation was closed in that way in 1959 because it showed how incompetent the authorities' search operations were; a reconstruction of the case wasn’t accurate at the time, and close to the date of the 21st Congress, it was decided to close the case as quickly as possible. "Irresistible force of nature," no more words, no guilty parties, forget the case and let’s move on. Even though I disagree with the 2019 version (precisely for not doing an accurate and adequate reconstruction of the events), the Russian Federation gains absolutely nothing from this case, except for hundreds of curious tourists traveling to that area every year. So apply your method to a theory, choose the cards you're going to play. What are the inconsistencies, what's the criterion for something to be considered false? If everything has the potential to be false, then we can't assert anything. It's either real or it's not. So let's get to the bigger question: why should your method apply to the theory that the main premise about the theory itself is impossible?

[GlennM]

I will try to answer, but I am already sensing that you are suggesting that there was a cover up, which is a conspiracy for the benefit of the reputation of the governing Soviet system at that time.

I mentioned previously that answering the " why" is harder than answering the" how". On the last day of their hike, January 1. 1959, they made less  progress to Ortoten than I would expect. I have no problem with understanding how they could pitch a tent, I have a big problem with why they stopped so short of the way to their goal. So, I question if it was weather, a favorable place to level their tent, injury,illness, conflict or equipment failure that explains the" why" question.

To deduce why they stopped where they did I have to sift through subsequent facts, such as real injuries, the antibiotics on hand, the ruined condition of the tent, the depth of prints in the snow, and so forth. If I elect to choose inclement weather and a patch of ground sufficiently deep to level the tent , then I've excluded the fact that they had antibiotics, they set their tent on ground which had at least a 25 degree slope,, that the footprints leading from the rent did not demonstrate excess weight bearing, foot dragging or the presence of more than 9,sets of foot prints.

As you can see, there are dozens and dozens of facts leading to hundreds of possibilities. This is why I and many others can not get  a solution based only on facts. There must be a glue which cements one fact to another absolutely. The glue or logical reason, depends on subsequent facts aligning with the previous facts. In the forum, the most common glue is also the poorest glue. It is called " speculation" or an educated guess. I can give you an example of very strong glue. Every hiker died for one reason, lack of oxygen.that is the " how" of it, not the " why" of it.

I have no solution for you, I write no book. I have hope that if I can glue two facts together with a strong glue, then the third fact may also glue tightly to the previous one. Until I know more, I am forced to use the weakest glue and see how well it sticks.