False positives and the design inference

Paul Nelson lies, Dembski contradicts himself again...SSDD.

Note that Dembski's contradictions have long been known. Since 1) ID activists seem to be largely unfamiliar with these contradictions and weaknesses of ID and 2) these contradictions have yet to be resolved by ID, I find it useful to remind our readers.

"On the other hand, if things end up in the net that are not designed, the criterion will be useless."

— Dembski

This reminds me of Steve Reuland's great collection of wacky and contradictory ID assertions.

Uhhh... This is too mind-numbing to read any further. I need to keep what little logical organization my mind still possesses...

The Alligator->Caution track on the Grateful Dead's 'Anthem of the Sun' LP is so fantastic and wonderful that God must have designed it.

By the way, have you looked at your hand?

I mean, really looked at it?

Wow.

The Isaac Newton of information theory.

Isaac Newton? I thought he was the Fig Newton on account of the general fruitiness of this stuff.

I argue that we are justified asserting specified complexity (and therefore design) once we have eliminated all known material mechanisms. It means that some unknown mechanism might eventually pop up and overturn a given design inference.

For example, bacteria with their "fantastic" flagella might not have been designed by a mysterious alien being.

They may have been sneezed or even pooped out by a mysterious alien being.

Hey, this is fun. I can see why Dembski likens the promotion of "intelligent design" to "street theatre." You don't need a big brain or any training. You just need to be shameless and modestly creative.

It's too bad the fundies suck at the latter. Otherwise we might actually have to work a little bot to demonstrate how vacuous and vapid their ID garbage really is.

I argue that we are justified asserting specified complexity (and therefore design) once we have eliminated all known material mechanisms. It means that some unknown mechanism might eventually pop up and overturn a given design inference.

Contrary to Wilkins and Elsberry, the risk of further knowledge upsetting a design inference has nothing to do with the filter's reliability. The filter's reliability refers to its accuracy in detecting design provided we have accurately assessed the probabilities in question (see chapter 12). Wilkins and Elsberry purport to criticize the filter's reliability but are in fact criticizing its applicability (see chapter 14). They're like someone who dismisses a calculator as unreliable after a friend, seeking to know what "9 times 9" is, gets the wrong answer by accidentally punching "6 times 6." If that person were dead-set on dismissing the calculator's usefulness but were pressed to admit that the friend had made the error, then the calculator hater might insist that nobody can be trusted to use the calculator accurately. That's essentially what Wilkins and Elsberry have done with the Explanatory Filter.

Only things that are designed had better end up in the net. If this is the case, we can have confidence that whatever the complexity-specification criterion attributes to design is indeed designed.

Thus whenever this criterion attributes design, it does so correctly

When mathematicians arrive at a valid proof, history sugggests that the other mathematicians will eventually go along even if the result is very distasteful to them. Godel's initial work, for example, was hardly welcome to the Vienna positivists with whom he hung at the time; but they ended up accepting it because they couldn't find any holes in the logic.

If Dembski's vaporings were valid, the math world would have long sense lionized him. They haven't. Dembski apparently understands that he hasn't succeeded as a mathematicians. Presumably that's why he's now set up shop as a theologian.

The irony, I find in all of this, is that coming up with a framework for a "design inference" in principle is fairly interesting. It appears that the "design inference" of the kind we are familiar with is simple pattern matching with things that we expect a human to generate. But, in principle, a human need not generate such patterns, an alien could do the same, and we would still make the inference.

These issues could be more formally worked out by Dembski himself. I am waiting for someone else to take these ideas up, do it correctly, and get a something out of it.

Sadly, one can barely even discuss these things on his blog.

On another note, in:

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C12 [Erik]: I have not checked all the relevant publications, but to the best of my knowledge at most one person has been able to apply Dembski's concepts and methods to a real example, namely Dembski himself.
---

too much credit is given to Dembski here. He doesn't even apply the EF correctly for the flagellum because he doesn't calculate the probability of the flagellum conditioning on things that we know. He does this weird P(orig), P(local), P(config) calculation that, in no way whatsoever, comes close to the proper probability calculation.

So, C12 should be corrected. No one has ever been able to apply the concepts and methods.

If Dembski's vaporings were valid, the math world would have long sense lionized him. They haven't.

Isaac Newton of information theory? - more like the Isaac Newton of the bleeding obvious.

The Information Theory world would have, too[Lionized the Kevin Federline of disInfromation anti-science Theory]. They haven't. Go to the IEEE Information Theory Society website. Search for Dembski. You get nothing.

So now the argument is that IFF the probabilities have been correctly applied and IFF all known and unknown probabilities have been taken in consideration, the conclusion of 'design' is free from false positives.

— PvM

The only person capable of getting everything right in such a calculation would be an omnipotnent Intelligent Designer. IOW, Dembski has provided a tool whose only use is for God to prove that (s)he exists.

— Bob O'H

"Thus whenever this criterion attributes design, it does so correctly"
Arrrgggh! As a geneticist it simply baffles me how someone can think that they've cleverly and properly designed a screening procedure when they've never tested it to SHOW that it is reliable and/or robust. If I walked into Monsanto or something and told them, look, I've got this great screen that is going to catch you many varieties of crops that will be worth a lot of $$$ for you, so you should hire me, they would ask how I know that it works. References? Tests? Show how you came up with the procedure? What is the probability of false negatives, false positives? Without any or all of these, they would chuck a tomato at me and tell me to get lost, no matter how many differential equations I piled up.

Look! As long as I think I've put it together correctly and as long as none of my untested assumptions are incorrect, I DON'T NEED TO DO SCIENCE! GIVE ME MONEY!

Show that it is reliable, Bill, don't just wave your hand and say that it is.

I am waiting for someone else to take these ideas up, do it correctly, and get a something out of it.

I spoke with an information theorist/mathematician friend of mine who made the following counterargument to Dembski:

All known information describing physical phenomena are encoded in physical matter. As a corollary, no known code exists independently of a substratum to encode the information. Even our notion of "intelligent" beings depend on a mind that operates on a physical substrate that holds such information. Suppose we grant Dembski's assertion that any amount of information can only be generated by a source that has more information (i.e. his conservation theorem). Then, it follows that there is necessarily a physical substrate greater than the known universe that contains the information content for this universe. This is Dembski's argument turned inductively to argue for naturalism contra theism.

[The Isaac Newton of information theory.]

The real Issac Newton must be spinning in his grave, thinking about what mistakes he must have made to be compared to someone as dumb as D_mbski.

It seems one can add the vacous nature of EF to the list of vacuous ideas of ID and CSI. As for the other two ideas it looks like it becomes vacuous by the usual intended failure to provide mechanisms.

The idea of 'ID done right' in the essay is nice. It seems the vacous nature of CSI is replaced with real specifications in SAI. And real results, but they aren't the ones Dembski is looking for.

Apart from Elsberry's and Shallit's SAI one can also, at least naively, ponder the methods of criminology and archeology in the world of intentional actions.

I think criminology looks for "motive, means, opportunity" when analysing intentional actions. Applied to ID it seems they have some problems.

The ID designer lacks motive - ID doesn't supply one. The ID designer lack means - ID doesn't supply mechanisms. The ID designer lacks opportunity - evolution has no alibi and was around right after abiogenesis, so it seems it is the closest suspect. But how can this be, ID claims their methods are supported by criminological and archeological methods?! :-)

"Isaac Newton? I thought he was the Fig Newton on account of the general fruitiness of this stuff."

He is the Moriarty of desinformation theory.

Sherlock Holmes noted "... when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." The anti-Sherlock says "... when you have eliminated the improbably, whatever remains, however impossible, must be the truth." But it is really impossible, so the 'improbable' is the truth.

Sherlock Holmes also said "They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains. It's a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work." It seems it also applies to the detective works of PvM et al when uncovering the path of ID on its Trail of Tears.

You're missing the point. This is a wonderfully rigorous scientific proof of the well known fact (unless you're an imbecile) that if something looks designed then it IS designed ... if something LOOKS designed, then you apply the criterion and it always turns out to BE designed. always. so no false negatives. And only a MORON (or troublemaker) would apply the criterion to something which DOESN'T look designed, so when used PROPERLY there are no false positives either. sheesh.

If I may:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/upload/2006/05/ef20.gif

Explanitory Filter 2.0

It's been done. It is called the "universal distribution". Jeff Shallit and I applied it to the idea of detecting a simple computational process as a causal factor in an appendix to this essay. It is my contention that everything useful that is claimed as a property of Dembski's "design inference" is actually delievered by "specified anti-information" (SAI). SAI is easy to apply to problems, it is objective, and it is not based on any probability estimates.

— Wesley Elsberry

If I walked into Monsanto or something and told them, look, I've got this great screen that is going to catch you many varieties of crops that will be worth a lot of $$$ for you, so you should hire me, they would ask how I know that it works. References? Tests? Show how you came up with the procedure? What is the probability of false negatives, false positives? Without any or all of these, they would chuck a tomato at me and tell me to get lost, no matter how many differential equations I piled up.

There now exists a rigorous criterion---complexity-specification---for distinguishing intelligently caused objects from unintelligently caused ones.

— Dembski

The Isaac Newton of information theory.

That's right; as an information theorist, he's a pretty good alchemist.

Does all this mean that Dembski is Dumbski? He can't be - he's Dembski. Did the bumski steal your whiskey? Wish I had that surname. Whoever he is, bless him, he must be onto something. Someone might tell us sometime what all this is about?

Re "metaphysical categories --- chance, necessity, and design"

I can't figure why he seems to think that deliberately engineered is mutually exclusive to change and/or necessity.

Not to mention the same point that somebody else made recently (iirc) - that chance and necessity aren't exclusive of each other; they describe regions along a sliding scale (necessity would be at or near the 100% end of that scale, the rest of it would be "chance", but the boundary between them is fuzzy).

Henry

Please allow two honest questions from a novice that no one has answered to my satisfaction. 1)What criterion do SETI researchers propose to use to determine if there is other intelligent life in space? 2)How is this fundamentally different from what ID proponents propose?

Please allow two honest questions from a novice that no one has answered to my satisfaction. 1)What criterion do SETI researchers propose to use to determine if there is other intelligent life in space? 2)How is this fundamentally different from what ID proponents propose?

In fact, the signals actually sought by today's SETI searches are not complex, as the ID advocates assume. We're not looking for intricately coded messages, mathematical series, or even the aliens' version of "I Love Lucy." Our instruments are largely insensitive to the modulation---or message---that might be conveyed by an extraterrestrial broadcast. A SETI radio signal of the type we could actually find would be a persistent, narrow-band whistle. Such a simple phenomenon appears to lack just about any degree of structure, although if it originates on a planet, we should see periodic Doppler effects as the world bearing the transmitter rotates and orbits. And yet we still advertise that, were we to find such a signal, we could reasonably conclude that there was intelligence behind it. It sounds as if this strengthens the argument made by the ID proponents. Our sought-after signal is hardly complex, and yet we're still going to say that we've found extraterrestrials. If we can get away with that, why can't they? Well, it's because the credibility of the evidence is not predicated on its complexity. If SETI were to announce that we're not alone because it had detected a signal, it would be on the basis of artificiality. An endless, sinusoidal signal --- a dead simple tone --- is not complex; it's artificial. Such a tone just doesn't seem to be generated by natural astrophysical processes. In addition, and unlike other radio emissions produced by the cosmos, such a signal is devoid of the appendages and inefficiencies nature always seems to add --- for example, DNA's junk and redundancy.

Please allow two honest questions from a novice that no one has answered to my satisfaction. 1)What criterion do SETI researchers propose to use to determine if there is other intelligent life in space? 2)How is this fundamentally different from what ID proponents propose?

In fact, the signals actually sought by today's SETI searches are not complex, as the ID advocates assume. We're not looking for intricately coded messages, mathematical series, or even the aliens' version of "I Love Lucy." Our instruments are largely insensitive to the modulation---or message---that might be conveyed by an extraterrestrial broadcast. A SETI radio signal of the type we could actually find would be a persistent, narrow-band whistle. Such a simple phenomenon appears to lack just about any degree of structure, although if it originates on a planet, we should see periodic Doppler effects as the world bearing the transmitter rotates and orbit

How is this fundamentally different from what ID proponents propose