From: Glenn Morton (glenn.morton@btinternet.com)
Date: Thu Nov 21 2002 - 01:14:04 EST
Iain wrote:
>Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 9:38 PM
>To: asa@calvin.edu; Glenn Morton
>
>
>Glenn wrote:
[snip]
> His methodology didn't detect
>the design,
>I TOLD HIM IT WAS DESIGNED!!! What kind of methodology is it that needs me
>to tell him it is designedn in order for his methodology to work?????
>
>My reply:
>
>Just stop right there and take a look at that last couple of
>sentences that you wrote.
>Let me make it plain that I'm not in the business of being some
>sort of a Dembski cheer-leader, dumbly saying yes to his every
>pronouncement. I have unresolved issues with Dembski's use of the
>No Free Lunch theorems that I hope he will address in due course.
>But neither am I prepared to give you the opportunity to rubbish
>him in immoderate language of that kind, complete with upper case
>letters (generally netiquette considers this bad manners, and the
>equivalent of shouting) and multiple question marks. If your use
>of this kind of language is to try and implicate that either
>Dembski or I or both of us are too stupid to listen to reasoned
>argument and you have to shout, then I'm not interested in
>continuing this conversation.
Sorry, Iain, I don't accept this criticism. I didn't call Dembski any name,
I wasn't immorderate. The emphasis was directed at emphaisizing the fact
that in the case I cite, I was the one who told Dembski that the sequence
was designed. That is a factual and quite proper criticism of his
methodology. If you can't handle watching proper criticism, then that is
your problem not mine.
All three of us are committed
>Christians and we should be able to continue a discourse in a
>brotherly manner. I challenged your original email purely on
>scientific grounds because I thought your point was not relevant
>and could not be used as a challenge to Dembski's methodology, and
>I still do. I was interested to see if we could continue the
>discourse and enhance our mutual understanding of the subject. If
>that's what you want to do, fine, let's continue, but if all you
>really want to do is to discredit Dembski at whatever cost, then
>count me out.
Since I don't think I have done anything improper here, you will have to
make up your mind if you wish to continue.
>
>Next point. What you refer to as "Dembski's methodology" in this
>example is not even down to Dembski. It is simply an elaboration
>of the "Minimum Description Length Principle". It is a
>well-established bit of theory that no-one would seriously
>question. A good web resource on MDL is at
>
>http://www.mdl-research.org/
>
>I quote from the homepage of this website:
>
>-------------
>The purpose of statistical modeling is to discover regularities in
>observed data. The success in finding such regularities can be
>measured by the length with which the data can be described. This
>is the rationale behind the Minimum Description Length (MDL)
>Principle introduced by Jorma Rissanen (Rissanen, 1978).
>
>`` The MDL Principle is a relatively recent method for inductive
>inference. The fundamental idea behind the MDL Principle is that
>any regularity in a given set of data can be used to compress the
>data, i.e. to describe it using fewer symbols than needed to
>describe the data literally. '' (Gr|nwald, 1998)
Iain, [sigh], this has nothing to do with my criticism of Dembski and shows
that you still don't understand. Basically Dembski has created a 'Clever
Hans' methodology of detecting design. Clever Hans was a horse who could
apparently do great mathematical calculations. Hans what is 8 x 4? He would
stamp his feet 32 times. Critics finally figured out that the handler was
giving Hans subtle clues as to when to cease stamping his feet. In other
words, the trainer was telling Hans the answer. In the case I have been
discussing, We hand Dembski a sequence which appears random. He will
declare it to be undesigned UNLESS I give him knowledge that there is a
cipher which turns it into a meaningful piece of penmanship (i.e. tell him
the answer just like Clever Hans).
Compressibility has nothing to do with this discussion.
>------------
>
>Where Dembski uses the term "Design", here the term "regularities
>in observed data" is used instead. However, this is only part of
>the Dembski's methodology for detecting design.
Lack of those regularities don't ensure lack of design as a Vigenere cipher
shows. In a Vigenere cipher the regularities are removed for the most part
in long texts.
>
>If you look up Rissanen on Citeseer, you will find 301 citations
>to his original paper:
>
>J.Rissanen, Modeling by shortest data description. Automatica,
>vol. 14 (1978), pp. 465-471.
>
>So this is peer-reviewed standard stuff, not the offbeat ideas of
>some crackpot. In my own field of academic research, the MDL
>principle can be used to assist in model-order selection for data
>fitting by neural networks.
Fine, but it has nothing to do with my criticism of Dembski's methodology.
It is irrelevant.
>
>
[snip]
>That is why you suspect some "design" or "non-randomness" when you
>get 500 heads in a row, not because of the intrinsic probability
>of the sequence itself, but because it is staggeringly unlikely
>that you can describe the sequence in such a small amount of information.
And I reply that a designed Vigenere cipher removes those regularities from
a designed sequence and thus lack of them doesn't indicate non-design.
>
>
>Glenn wrote:
>You miss the point again because my point is not that a random sequence of
>letters can produce a Shakespearean Sonnet, but that Dembski's methodology
>simply doesn't detect design without being told that something is designed.
>
>
>My reply:
>
>Now as far as whether Dembski says you have to tell him that it's
>designed, I think perhaps he phrased it badly in the book when he
>says that someone tells him it's a Caesar cypher.
Now you are cheer leading for him. You are fixing his book. He has written
the same thing elsewhere so I don't think he is phrasing it badly. He
believes it.
But someone
>telling him that is not necessary to deduce design, and I can't
>think that he meant it literally. What happens if someone you get
>a sequence of letters like that in a letter, or if you saw them
>engraved on a stone? Do you dismiss it as random junk, or do you
>wonder if it's a code? If you think it might be a code, then you
>start looking for means to break the code. You start at the
>simplest idea of all (a Caesar cipher, for example), and see if
>that works. If it doesn't, you try something more complex, e.g. a
>fixed letter substitution code, etc. You wouldn't start by trying
>a Vignere cipher the length of the text because you know you can
>produce any text you want that way.
I am glad you agree with my criticism of Dembski's methodology. If
Dembski's method can't tell determine that some sequence is not designed,
then all sequences have the possibility of being designed. That means that
he can't discriminate between designed and non-designed sequences, which is
my point entirely. His method can't and doesn't work. But it has fooled
and misled a bunch of people into believing that Dembski has a method of
detecting God's design in the world. Put simply, he hasn't. Your last
sentence encapsulates my entire criticism.
You might try Vignere ciphers
>of repeating keys of length 2, then 3, then 4, however (and of
>course the search gets exponentially harder the further you take this.).
Short Vigenere keywords give cryptanalysts ways to crack the code. They
aren't quite as good as one keyword as long as the sequence.
>So here's the conclusion. If a simple description of the data
>exists it will be easy to find, and a "design", or "non-random"
>conclusion can be made with confidence. If you need a complex
>model then no design detection can be made unless you tell me the design.
The problem here is that you are trying to have it both ways. You
criticised my original post for using short sequences in my caesar ciphers.
Now you want to allow the use of small short sequences to detect design. You
can't have it both ways.
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