Tad Eareckson certainly knows a lot about hang gliding. He particularly knows a lot about towing. He often characterizes his knowledge as being as straight forward as 2 + 2 = 4. In many cases he's right.
But Tad has a blind spot, and in hang gliding a blind spot can get people injured ... or killed.
Tad's blind spot is his absolute certainty that he's always right. That blinds him from seeing any possibilities where he might be wrong. Those possibilities don't exist for Tad, and that's exactly why he is unable to see the truth whenever it happens to be ... in his blind spot. Let's take a look at a recent example...
On November 19th, of 2014, I sent an email message to the US Hawks user registered as "Nobody" with a copy to Tad (Tad has asserted that "Nobody" is Steve, so I'll call him Steve since the use of "Nobody" is confusing). In my email message of November 19th, I was asking to have a telephone conversation with Steve as a prerequisite to restoring some of his posting privileges on the US Hawks. As part of that email message I wrote this:
Bob wrote:I've seen too many forums where "puppet" users are created to make it appear that there are lots of people with a particular view, when the reality was that they were just a bunch of aliases for one person. In fact, I was personally told this by someone doing that exact thing on the hanggliding.org forum.
Today (February 14th, 2015) I found that Tad had quoted that same passage on his forum followed by this "logical" analysis:
Tad Eareckson wrote:So aside from the single instance in which you were, in fact, were personally told this by someone doing that exact thing on the hanggliding.org forum, how have you been or become aware of the sockpuppet problem on so many forums?
I'm only seeing three other possibilities:
- It was fu**in' obvious to everybody that an individual member was running sockpuppets.
- A moderator was able to determine that an individual member was running sockpuppets.
- You were the individual member running sockpuppets.
And in the first two scenarios the sockpuppet strategy blows up in the face of its perpetrator - destroys his credibility and damages whatever position he was taking or supporting.
So the only way any of the sock puppet ops of which you know could have been damaging to the forums and principles you espouse would've been if you were running and getting away with them.
In other words, Tad used his "infallible 2+2=4 logic" to deduce that I must have been "running sockpuppets" myself. The only problem is that I have never been "running sockpuppets" on any forum ... ever. Let's see where Tad went wrong.
Tad asked the question: "So aside from the single instance in which you were, in fact, were personally told this by someone doing that exact thing on the hanggliding.org forum, how have you been or become aware of the sockpuppet problem on so many forums?"
Then Tad went on to list what he thought were the only three possibilities:
- It was fu**in' obvious to everybody that an individual member was running sockpuppets.
- A moderator was able to determine that an individual member was running sockpuppets.
- You were the individual member running sockpuppets.
He then used his "logic" to eliminate the first two leaving him with the third as the only possibility. But Tad forgot to list one possibility. In fact, he forgot to list the one possibility that was ... true:
- Multiple people had personally told me that they were using "sockpuppets" on other forums.
Ooops.
Tad appears to have taken my statement that "In fact, I was personally told this by someone doing that exact thing on the hanggliding.org forum" to mean that was the only time ("single instance") that anyone had ever told me they were using "sockpuppets" on other forums. It was not. Tad failed to see that important possibility and he "convicted" me based on that blind spot in his own thinking.
My point is that the conclusions Tad draws from his famous "2 + 2 = 4" logic are faulty when they're based on his faulty assumptions. Unfortunately, Tad is blind to this problem because he will not allow himself to see any possibilities that would undermine the point he wants to make. So while I believe that Tad has a lot to offer to new pilots, I must also caution them that Tad has many blind spots of his own making. He can be very insistent and convincing that he's right ... when he's really dead wrong.
