From: Jasper
Date: Sunday, July 22, 2007
Time: 08:13:27 PM -0400
Jean, … Thank you. This is not the kind of thread that gets many responses. People look at it, instantly decide that I’m only trying to push MY THEORY and keep stepping. It wasn’t MY theory. It was A theory, one of many that I tested before it evolved with the help of others to the point where I could give it a name. ..…… The few people who have read Iago know how much I didn’t know when I started or when and where the missing pieces came from. It’s a thick book so it’s no surprise that so few people who come here have read it or ever will. I doubt if many people even have a realistic concept of what my professional background is and therefore how it does or doesn’t apply to my work. And that’s a problem. It shortchanges the work of others and consistently gets in the way of a clear and honest exchange of ideas on OUR work. ……….Most people don’t know that my work on the O.J. case was primarily theoretical and mechanical. Finding most of what was necessary to know what I had came from other people with similar ideas or entirely different ideas that led all of us to new discoveries. That’s why the Iago Discussion Board was put in place as an extension of the book over a year before I published it when I saw that some mistakes were inevitable. ..……..The thing you understood that I have the hardest time getting others to see is the necessity of challenging everything you have once you THINK you’ve got it right. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you don’t. You can’t know unless you test it against the facts, which rarely come neatly packaged in the first shot at getting them. That’s the messy part of what we do that people who haven’t followed the processes as far as we could take it mistake for the fruitless debates you get on other boards. ……….The reality of what we do when we’re cranking the way we should is no different than what competent sculptors do when they try to turn a lump of clay into a statue of John Wayne. If they do it correctly, they get a faithful facsimile of John Wayne. They don’t get Martin Luther King of Princess Dianna. To know how close it is to being correct you have to follow the steps the sculptor should have taken. You collect as many pictures as you can of John Wayne at a given age from as many angles as possible. You then check and recheck the pictures against the sculpture. You LOOK FOR ERRORS. If you have them YOU WANT TO KNOW you have them. You want to know exactly what they are. You have to know what they are to fix them. ………….If this process turns into a debate, you’re screwed. But chances are you won’t even get that far except with people with an agenda to discredit everything you did. …………The Cassandra Syndrome isn’t about disagreements, which are good when honestly expressed and can also be tested against the facts (when you can nail them down). It’s about the inability of large majorities to follow the evidence that proves OR disproves a line of thought. Either answer is good. Where the vector of that line of thought has been set in stone before the information that confirms it becomes available, it should be easy. The Cassandra Syndrome stops that analysis before it starts. –Jasper