Irreducible complication

You know, I was going to type up a lengthy reply again, but then I realized that I really shouldn't bother. There's nothing to be gained by trying to educate you since you're apparently incapable or unwilling to examine your sources for ideological biases and errors in methodology; your claim that you're all about methodological cleanness is becoming ever more flimsy with every piece of faulty science you post.

The E wrote:You know, I was going to type up a lengthy reply again, but then I realized that I really shouldn't bother. There's nothing to be gained by trying to educate you since you're apparently incapable or unwilling to examine your sources for ideological biases and errors in methodology; your claim that you're all about methodological cleanness is becoming ever more flimsy with every piece of faulty science you post.

I know the source of my bias toward better methodology. A few decades back I was considering the implications of worshiping one who claims to be the truth instead of worshiping cosmic dust and impersonal laws, and asked myself what my course of action would be if I found solid evidence against God. The conclusion was that in such a case, continuing to believe in God would be both hypocritical and insulting, just as much so as refusing to believe in God without high probability evidence for the chaos and time idea. A later deduction was that concentrating on methods was the only thing that made sense. One conclusion is certainties are probably wrong somewhere. A theory without good testing is low confidence. If they have high confidence evidence, why do they avoid it when they write?

My investing experience is parallel. At first, I relied on authorities and their newsletters, with poor results. Now I rely on eliminating low probability choices. I use probability methods both for evaluating newsletters and individual stocks, with much better results. For stocks, I keep my watch list on spreadsheets, using a + or - when numerical calculations can't be made. The newsletter suggestions are now used only with rules of thumb, such as "pays a dividend?" "Probable continued dividend?" "Highly probable growth?" "Does this fit my preferred investment method?" to decide what is on the watch list. This keeps watch list sizes down: 29 stocks on the watch list, 13 possible longs, 14 possible shorts, 2 others.

One thing I carefully examine when looking at sources is the percentage of wrong predictions by those sources.

Research is needed: the mtDNA sample size is small, tho slowly increasing. I no longer can calculate standard deviation and sigma limits without carefully consulting my reference books, so cannot state how large the sample would need to be for high confidence evidence. If someone here is still using their probability math, they might let us know the results.
Please

DDHv wrote:A theory without good testing is low confidence. If they have high confidence evidence, why do they avoid it when they write?

So what does the indisputable fact that the theories you subscribe to are untested and actually untestable tell you?

Why is the theory of evolution, which has experimental evidence and offers a theoretical framework to generate new experiments, less valid than creationism, which offers neither?

Throughout this thread, you have oscillated between common sense statements (like "True science is testable", "Science requires empirical evidence") and utter nonsense ("Irreducible complexity exists", "Devolution is a valid concept"). Help me understand this, because I can't figure out why someone as dedicated to critical examination of evidence and theories as you apparently are is completely incapable of applying that same critical eye towards some theories but not others.

Even the main topic of this thread, "Irreducible complexity", falls apart under very simple examination. As a theory, its explanatory power is nil; There is no proposed mechanism for it and no experiment that could be devised to test it. And yet, despite that, you hold it up as a critical piece where the Theory of Evolution fails, citing as evidence nothing but your incredulity that among uncounted trillions of dice rolls, some may show an unlikely result.

DDHv, it seems to me that you are fundamentally incapable of being a good scientist, or even a good lay examiner of science. In your signature, you describe yourself as a "retired technical nerd", which suggests to me that you are trained as an engineer of some sort. The mindset that goes with that training, and which you seem to have absorbed completely, is not well suited to research. Your belief that there is a design to nature, that a designer must exist because it's inconceivable that something as beautiful and complex as nature came about at random, blinds you to reality. There is no designer. There isn't even that much complexity: There's just interactions and chain reactions and cascade effects and chaos everywhere. You're looking at the output of a random number generator that happened to output pi to the first 10 decimal places, and are concluding that there can't be any randomness involved.

The E wrote:You know, I was going to type up a lengthy reply again, but then I realized that I really shouldn't bother. There's nothing to be gained by trying to educate you since you're apparently incapable or unwilling to examine your sources for ideological biases and errors in methodology; your claim that you're all about methodological cleanness is becoming ever more flimsy with every piece of faulty science you post.

I just made the same decision.

DDHv wrote:

The E wrote:"Creationism postulates that currently existing organisms cannot have come into existence through the combination of mutation and selection pressures commonly referred to as Evolution. It instead postulates the existence of a creator entity, which through undefined means has caused currently existing organisms to exist."

Change "cannot have com" to "is wildly improbable to have come" and I can agree with you

Then you have conceded this entire argument.

"It instead postulates the existence of a creator entity, which through undefined means has caused currently existing organisms to exist."

You just agreed with that.

That bit there sinks creationism as being even in the running for consideration as a theory of human origins. One post after you made this one, you wrote this:


"A theory without good testing is low confidence"

And you're right (kind of), it is. But if your entire "theory" is simply built around an undefined process (aka, God waving his magic wand and doing stuff... somehow), then it has NO testing. And NO confidence. It isn't a theory at all, it's just a... claim. A totally unsupported, substance-less, random assertion.


Even if we accepted your assertion that evolution is a low confidence theory (and to be clear it is not accepted, it is the exact opposite, the statistical odds evolution is incorrect are astronomically low**, we have extremely high evidence based confidence in evolution)... but even if we DID accept your claim that evolution is low confidence...

Low > None.

Evolution wins.

So are you going to be consistent with your repeated claim in this thread that you respect the data and the evidence and the scientific method? Or are you going to stick with the ZERO confidence claim over the non-zero confidence Theory for no reasons other than your personal ideological biases?






**Just one among the thousands and thousands and thousands of tests that establish the extremely HIGH confidence in evolution... I wrote this many years ago but it appears it's still up (although unfortunately, some of the links have broken) :

http://duelingdogma.blogspot.com/2010/0 ... netic.html

Feel free to read the other 6 posts on the series if you want to give them a browse, but we'll focus on this one here since you're been throwing around statements about statistical analysis. The high point here is that this was a test of the mathematical algorithms used to reconstruct the evolutionary "tree of life" by analyzing the genetic codes of current species and plotting them back. The same methods we use to perform a paternity test are, essentially, what also tell us humans and chimps evolved from common ancestry as well, and so on, and so on.


The algorithms performed as close to flawlessly as you can get, reconstructing the trees perfectly using nothing but the final genetic sequences to not only identify the original common ancestor but all the branchings and mutations that happened between that ancestor and the final populations.


The odds of generating the correct tree by chance was pretty close to the odds of winning the Powerball with a single ticket. Twice in a row.



So you tell me. What are the odds those algorithms are WRONG? And they just *fluked* into the right answer when tested? Would you like to keep talking about the "low probability" of evolution?

All these 'intelligent design' arguments are like solving a murder by picking a suspect and trying to prove he did it, while ignoring the massive evidence that points to somebody else.

Imaginos1892 wrote:All these 'intelligent design' arguments are like solving a murder by picking a suspect and trying to prove he did it, while ignoring the massive evidence that points to somebody else.

Quite. Ignoring the complicated and interdependent aspects of the real universe is needed if intelligent design is to be discarded. The reliance is on great gobs of time and space to overcome the improbabilities.

This failure comes because evolution, intelligent design, and creation, are all interpretive frameworks, not just theories, as phlogiston once was, and conservation of energy is now. There is a strong tendency to only look at the authorities of the accepted framework, and not examine evidence that contradicts it. This is particularly true when it is turned up by a worker that accepts a different framework. To get a historical look at this, read "The structure of scienfic revolutions." by Thomas S. Kuhn.

To see a current example of how this can mess things up, read "The Road to Ruin," by James Rickards, who contends that it is about seventy years since there was a basic improvement in economic theory. The currently accepted economic models make little or no use of complexity analysis, behavioral psychology, or causal inference, all of which have been developed since.


Snowflake warning: If you prefer "safe spaces" skip the rest of this.


I was 15 years old, and restless, only going to church because the family wanted it, as I was getting nothing from it. A Hungarian lady was to speak Wednesday night, and Mon nagged, ah, that is emphatically encouraged, me to go. The lady spoke from Romans 3:23 (I already knew I was a sinner, as I didn't live up to my own standards) and Romans 6:23, then gave a challenge: "If you want to have eternal life and know it, come down here, and we will show you from the Bible how your sins can be forgiven." I went home rejoicing, but almost immediately found that bad habits are hard to change. The decision was that since I'd accepted eternal life as a gift, I wasn't giving it back: I'd never deserved it in the first place.

Four years later, our new minister challenged us to read the Bible thru in 1962, and I decided to do it just so I could say I had. Also, someone sent me a gift subscription to the Full Gospel Businessmen's magazine, "Voice." I planned that summer to take a hitch hiking tour ot the west, starting by attending the national FGBMFI meeting in Seattle. While waiting for a meeting to begin, a man in the row behind me tapped my on the shoulder, and said, "Brother, I don't know what you are going to think of this, but God told me to buy you a bus ticket back home." When home, I found that the youngster hired to take my place on the ranch had quit. That time at home was the beginning of victory over bad habits.

Given this background and many later events, it will take solid evidence to move me away from Biblical creation as my interpretive framework. Only the consideration that if such evidence exists it is my duty to follow it make it possible.

DDHv wrote:

Imaginos1892 wrote:All these 'intelligent design' arguments are like solving a murder by picking a suspect and trying to prove he did it, while ignoring the massive evidence that points to somebody else.

Quite. Ignoring the complicated and interdependent aspects of the real universe is needed if intelligent design is to be discarded.

Wow, did you ever not understand the point of that statement you responded to....

The reliance is on great gobs of time and space to overcome the improbabilities.

Great gobs of time and space that we know for a fact exist.

So we have evolution, with mechanisms which definitely and demonstrably exist.

We have intelligent design, with mechanisms that can't even be explained let alone demonstrated or tested.


Only one of these is a theory. The other is a fable.

Apologies for the red herring, side comment, but: "Snowflake warning: If you prefer "safe spaces" skip the rest of this."
As RFC's good guy in one of his books, and Steve Stirling's in the Emberverse said "Why do people like you believe you are tougher than people like me?" to a baddie. Equating lack of compassion or tolerance to toughness is just silly.
Nothing scary about your beliefs and memories, certainly not going to a "safe place" whatever that is.
Here in Australia the alt right bang on about how the left are snowflakes needing safe places; yet they are the ones upset about everything from PC, to hate speech legislation, to Muslims and gays, or non existent Marxism.

DDHv wrote:There is a strong tendency to only look at the authorities of the accepted framework, and not examine evidence that contradicts it. This is particularly true when it is turned up by a worker that accepts a different framework. To get a historical look at this, read "The structure of scienfic revolutions." by Thomas S. Kuhn.

Thank you for providing a really good example of this by doing exactly that for the entirety of this thread. You are only looking at sources that agree with you and are not examining evidence that does not.

To see a current example of how this can mess things up, read "The Road to Ruin," by James Rickards, who contends that it is about seventy years since there was a basic improvement in economic theory. The currently accepted economic models make little or no use of complexity analysis, behavioral psychology, or causal inference, all of which have been developed since.

And yet, you were earlier telling us how great Austrian economics was.

Do you realize how often you do self-contradictory stuff?

Snowflake warning: If you prefer "safe spaces" skip the rest of this.

Fun thing you may not be aware of: Anyone who uses "snowflake warning" is very likely to be a very special snowflake themselves.

Given this background and many later events, it will take solid evidence to move me away from Biblical creation as my interpretive framework. Only the consideration that if such evidence exists it is my duty to follow it make it possible.

There is very solid evidence that biblical creation is completely wrong in every detail, and yet you are here having this debate because you choose to disregard the evidence because it disagrees with you.

So, from here on out: If you ever post again about how irrational other people are when they disregard things that they don't agree with, I'll be reminding you of this very post where you explicitly told us that that's what you're doing.