Febble
Posts: 310
Joined: Jan. 2007
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| Quote (Doc Bill @ April 01 2012,18:03) | Dembski is a fascinating character to me, in a train wreck sort of way. Here's a guy who paid his dues in Chicago to earn a PhD in math and another one in philosophy, and those of use who have traveled this road know that you have to do certain things to reach the end, so congrats to Dr. Dr. for that work.
And then he threw it all away which is the fascinating, on-going train wreck. Why? He could have picked up a tenure track job in math or philosophy or both at a small or large university and settled into a nice, long, steady, anonymous career and that would have been that.
But, no. He appears to have bought into a cult that fed his very large ego and he went downhill from there. He had a brief chance at normalcy when offered the director's position at Baylor, but he managed to fuck that up, too, but not from academic ineptitude, rather from his penchant of taking Jackassedness to an art form. And that seems to be his m.o. to this day.
Perhaps one of our trained psychologists can weigh in on the self-destructive personality type exhibited by Dembski, at least, that's my personal, untrained observation. |
Well, as I understand it, his thesis for his philosophy PhD was "The Design Inference".
Which is clever, but fallacious.
So he had the choice of sticking with a fallacious argument and not getting very far, or following the light and using his considerable analytical skill.
But it's hard to give up a good argument, especially if you got it published and lots of people liked it.
And very tempting to keep trying to rescue it, which, as I see it, he continues to try to do, and to tell yourself the flaws are fixable.
I think it's quite sad. I'm actually enjoying No Free Lunch. It's a good effort. It just doesn't work.
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