didymos
Posts: 1828
Joined: Mar. 2008
|
Eigenstate rakes GilDo over the coals:
| Quote | I think it’s peculiar to have the evidence waved off as “obfuscation” and “misdirection”, but the more I think about it, that’s actually a fairly straightforward response, I think. When one is deferring to one’s intuition, evidence can indeed be problematic. And more evidence, even overwhelming evidence, isn’t helpful or persuasive, if one is committed in some fundamental sense to the verdict of one’s intuition.
And that’s the problem here. The “Fox News Speak” of “common sense” as a euphemism for intuition über alles, invincible in the face of even overwhelming evidence, never mind just a “strong consilience” of evidence, ultimately rejects scientific epistemology, and more — the scientific disposition.
Science is a kind of check, a “cross examiner” of one’s intuition. In many cases, science confirms just what our intuition tells us. But in many other cases, science is a scourge on the intuition, a method for upending and ridiculing our common sense as foolish, mistaken, erroneous. Our intution is quite strong that the earth is “fixed” (as I believe is mentioned at points in the Bible, depending on how one interprets the text). But science provides a strong evidentially-supported model for a physics that has us careening around a solar orbit at extreme velocities, and that just a more local reference frame — we are moving at astonishing speeds relative to more remote reference frames.
Science is just a challenge: will you believe your intuition or your own lyin’ eyes, when the suggest different explanations?
A really good alarm that someone is “invincibly intuitionist”, incorrigible as a result of their commits to their inner intuitions and superstitions, is language like you are using at the end there — that the answer is “obvious”, and increasingly not even a matter for scrutiny or adjudication. If we take natural knowledge and performative models seriously, that’s not the kind of language that gets invoked. Very little is “obvious”, and the more one learns about the natural world in terms of science, the more self-indicting that kind of attitude appears.
Intuition over evidential critique and rigorous models is your prerogative, just as it is mine. No one can make you put your intuitions and superstitions on the stand and have the tested by objective and empirical models, to see if they hold up or are found wanting. There’s little point in arguing in that direction, I’ve found, with one who is viscerally and fundamentally committed to their intuitions, over and against all else.
Know that the basis of science is the eschewing of that disposition, the putting away of that whole mindset, though, and the subjecting of one’s intuitions and superstitions — even and especially the most deeply held one — to a method that in many cases will shred them and discredit them. That is the nature of science, the ethos of the scientific mind.
That’s just not your mindset. Nor the mindset of the pro-ID folks here, generally. That’s your choice, and you are welcome to it. But think about what you have trivialized here as “obvious” — such hubris!: one of the most intractable, remote, inscrutable, forensically obscure questions we can identify anywhere. Right or wrong on the question of some Divine Designer, the one thing we should all be able to agree on, if we are at all serious about science, is that “it’s obvious” is one position we can reasonably discredit as soon as we gain just an elementary grasp of the issues involved.
On the subject of “screwing up” information processing systems, “screwing up” is to a good extent in the eye of the beholder, or more precisely, contingent on the kinds of outcomes sought. I ‘screw up’ virtual offspring in genetic algorithm contexts, and to profitable effect and outcome. I don’t do anything more than inject the return value of rand() in some places; it’s as perfectly random and scrambled as I can make it, and that is the point, the source of the system’s creativity (where it is creative). You have told me you are well acquainted with all that, but every time you talk about information systems, it just works against the idea that you’ve dealt with stochastic processes as creative engines at all in software.
I understand “lay persons” persistently getting this wrong, but for software developers, especially ones ostensibly conversant in GA and EA processing, it’s really a cognitive dissonance. If I had a developer apply to work on my team and both claim experience with GA development, AND make claims like you regularly do, I’d have to decide this person was just posing, and trying to BS me in the long tradition of puffing up one’s credentials and resumé-padding, etc.
|
TLDR version: "Gil, you're completely full of shit."
--------------
I wouldn't be bothered reading about the selfish gene because it has never been identified. -- Denyse O'Leary, professional moron
Again "how much". I don't think that's a good way to be quantitative.-- gpuccio
|
