MEMO COPY in re 100 million year transition from ape to man
Kent Paul Dolan
Garamond Lethe wrote:
> J. J. Lodder <nos...@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:
>> Garamond Lethe <cartogr...@gFNORDmail.com> wrote:
>>> Andre Lieven <andre...@yahoo.ca> wrote:
>>>> Metspitzer <kilow...@charter.net> wrote:
>>>>> This guy claims 100 million year transition
>>>>> from ape to man.
There having been no apes of any kind 100 million
years ago would make that the teensiest bit
implausible, yes?
or
http://preview.tinyurl.com/ygmag47
>>>> So ? Does he have any *evidence* ? Uh huh...
>>>> "What is asserted without evidence can be
>>>> dismissed without evidence."
>>>> Christopher Hitchens.
>>> Did Hitchens offer any evidence for that?
>> Why would any be needed?
>> It is a heuristic principle,
Right, a heuristic principle doesn't need evidence
to be merely stated, only the subsequent evidence of
high probability of success to be widely accepted.
As Hitchen put it, it was just advice; take it or
leave it. Most of us, having limited lifetimes and
confronted with unlimited garbage assertions meant
to baffle and befuddle us, to devour our time and
resources, would be well advised to take it.
> Ah, so Hitchen's meant to say "What is asserted
> without evidence and is not a heuristic principle
> can be dismissed without evidence"?
No, he meant to say what he said. Your use of a
strawman to diminish his argument is of course of
zero merit.`
> Probably not.
>> like Occam's razor,
> Ah, but Occam's razor was formulated by someone
> who both thought and wrote far more carefully than
> Hitchens.
That sounds a lot more like an opinion arising from
your (unknown/unexpressed) agenda than like known
fact.
> It is not that "externalities are not to be
> multiplied", but that they are not to be
> multiplied "unnecessarily", and 200 years of
> science can be fit underneath that
> "unnecessarily".
> Hitchens's writing (and perhaps his thinking)
> fails in two [to] place here. First, "can" is
> very, very weak. Contrast this with Occam:
> "entia non sunt", "entities *must* not"
> (wikipedia's translation).
Well, you're already on record as noting that Occam
put his weasel wording in as the word
"unnecessarily"; all the strong language in the
world won't help overcome that glaring weakness.
Hitchins just chose to put his weasel wording in the
verb rather than in the adverb. Both heuristics deny
their chance of being objectively applied.
> I expect Hitchens considered "should be dismissed"
> or even "must be dismissed", but backed away,
Again you argue with strawmen, and with "facts" of
your own devising.
> leaving the rhetorical flourish but empyting it of
> most of its meaning.
So you say.
As an aphorism it conveys more than sufficient
"meaning" -- don't feel yourself obligated to be
bluffed by evidence-free insistent assertions, no
matter at what volume they are shouted.
> The reason for this is the second failure: lack
> of evidence is insufficient to dismiss an
> assertion.
That rather depends on the "from what activity is it
being dismissed", I would expect.
Surely "X is true, so based on that assertion alone,
give me lots of your money to continue to lead my
current wastrel lifestyle" is a cubbyhole emitting
from which _any_ evidence free assertions may be
safely dismissed.
> There is very little evidence in science,
False. Some parts of science can produce evidence
counting in the trillions of examples and more, like
the evolutionary history of hard shelled marine
organisms. _On average_, science is rife with
evidence, either rife as already gathered or easily
gathered rife addenda to quantities of evidence
already gathered.
Observation of Earth by satellites routinely
produces "evidence" in the hundreds of petabytes.
> usually because nature hands it over grudgingly,
This isn't a contest between foes. Chaos doesn't
have the emotions you ascribe to it.
> but also because we can only think about handfuls
> of evidence at a time.
False.
Ever since the "we" doing the "thinking" began to
include bureaucracies, committees and computers,
this has been false.
Thus, it has been false for several thousand years
at a minimum.
One single mathematical proof, that of the four
color map conjecture, required consideration of a
handful of billions of special cases. With a
computer doing the task, the proof was effortful but
straightforward, and as each special case was
resolved, it became an entity of evidence for the
theorem as a whole.
Another single mathematical proof, that of Fermet's
last theorem, combined the life-works of many
mathematicians in disparate fields of math to
achieve that one proof sought for centuries.
> The meat of science --- and what is most difficult
> to teach --- lies in the processes of intuition,
> classification, abstraction, and reasoning.
"Management is the art of making good decisions on
the basis of inadequate evidence" I once read.
Science in your view sounds suspiciously iike
management, yet the success reputation of science
far outshines the success reputation of management.
> I've (correctly) recommended against publishing
> papers that had plenty of evidence and bad
> reasoning*, and some of the classic papers in my
> field contain no evidence whatsoever --- instead,
> they begin with a carefully defined set of
> assumptions that may or may not correspond to
> anything in the real world,
Ah, yes, like the grad student at UNC who built his
thesis by proving a wonderful set of things about
all members of a certain topological set. He never
bothered to check whether the set was non-empty, and
of course further checking by his thesis panel found
that the set indeed _was_ empty. Since one can prove
absolutely _anything_ about the members of an empty
set, his thesis committee members were singularly
unimpressed with his results.
> apply math and logic, and come to some unexpected
> conclusion that might have some bearing on
> reality.
Or not, which is rather Hitchins' point, I would
surmise.
Just how much _should_ we be willing to pay or risk
on evidence-free assertions? Should we sacrifice all
prudent management of the environment because some
sky pixie is asserted to be looking out for our
interests and asserted to be magically going to
clean up all the messes we make?
If we accept that kind of assertion, and we've been
gulled, the planet dies. Oops.
> If one wanted to apologize for Hitchens, one might
> suggest that "evidence" was meant to include
> reasoning about data, perhaps pointing out that we
> have no other evidence of mathematical assertions
> than their proofs, and so these proofs should be
> admitted into evidence.
You've badly confounded "reasoning about data" with
"proving mathematical claims", which is a far less
general process, then tried to apply conclusions
only appropriate to the narrow case, instead to the
more general case.
Of course, mathematicians _want_ no additional
evidence once a correct proof is in hand, though we
will compete for the glory of producing a terser, a
clearer, a more beautiful, or a more expository
proof, even after the result has been proven once.
> This reading weakens the text still further.
No, because you've muddle-minded your argument down
a rat hole.
> Every idea, good and bad, comes wrapped in a chain
> of reasoning.
An evidence free assertion by you that no _single_
exception exists, yet the ideas contained in the
babbling of the village idiot can safely be
suspected of having no "chain of reasoning" wrapper.
> This is especially true for ideas about the
> existence of God,
I have never, and I've read as many as any
mildly interested party, seen a chain of reasoning
attempting to "prove" the existence of some deities
or other, that wasn't riddled with illogic, usually
"false antecedents", and only convincing to the
already mindwashed.
Moreover, any such arguments seem to apply equally
to all deities alike, so that they provide nothing
particularly useful about the existence of any one
deity in competition with the existence of any
other, supposedly mutually exclusive, deity.
All you have in the end, when you look at the
package of deity existence proofs as a whole, is the
contentious screaming of the rabble. We don't have
to read great philosophers to obtain that result,
just go out in the street where any two sects are
battling for attention.
> and these are exactly the ideas that Hitchens is
> looking for an excuse to discard.
In your opinion.
In my opinion, those are the bullying hot air
assertions from which he seeks protection by
providing marginally intelligent people with a way
perhaps to avoid being infected with muddled
thinking.
> In this case, Hitchens is writing slogans,
In your opinion.
I don't find his aphorism in any way similar to
"fifty-four fourty or fight", so I'm unwilling to
allow you to dismiss it by twisting it into
something semantically freighted to be deliberately
misconstrued as a "slogan".
That's roughly as honest as backspace's word salad
argumentations here are.
> and that's a fine and honorable profession.
"And so are they all, all honorable men" -- who's
sloganeering, one more time?
> After the most cursory
How about if we say "biased and agenda driven"
rather than "cursory"? Your argument is as full of
holes as a five year old dishrag.
> of examinations, this particular slogan turns out
> to be weak,
No weaker than Occam's razor, just the same weakness
differently expressed.
> wrong,
In your opinion, an opinion you have failed to
support adequately.
> and open to the snarky reply
Somehow, being subject to snarky replies isn't
terribly meaningful as a gauge of merit, or
responses like mine would crush arguments like
yours with a zero failure rate.
_Everything_ communicated is susceptible to snarky
replies.
That which is true of everything is significant of
nothing.
> of "Got any evidence for that?".
Which, of course, was not a meaningful inquiry nor a
serious challenge, but was instead a usual attempt
at humor here in talk.origins when a thread has
already derailed itself and become painful to
behold, while the baggage spills onto the trackside.
> It's not his best work.
It isn't perfect, but it's an awfully good start at
creating some form of wisdom to use against the
ravening forces of irrationality.
> I could make it more accurate
Well, no.
> by cutting it down to
But that's an approach you take only because you
hope to make it disappear with each additional round
of whittling you apply to it.
That "diminish it until it goes away" approach is an
agenda driven exercise, not a functionality
improving oriented exercise.
That kind of behavior in my rather brutal
neighborhood gets people shot dead on the street for
the sin of "disrespecting" (where no respect has been
earned in the first place), whatever in hell
"disrespecting" is supposed to mean.
> "Bad reasoning ou[gh]t to be dismissed out of hand",
> but that's not much of a slogan.
How about "agenda laden twaddle should be dropped
in the bit bucket" as long as we're cobbling
together insulting slogans?
> *I have vivid memories of trying to talk my
> co-author into running more experiments for a
> paper a few years ago. He explained that if
> people believe your story, piles of experiments
> won't help, and if they don't believe your story,
> piles of experiments won't help.
One doesn't run gobs of experiments for the other
fellow, one runs them for ones own peace of mind.
Once you suspect you've proved something in science,
your next immediate objective is to prove yourself
wrong.
Only when all your efforts cannot accomplish that
should you be willing to share your suspicions.
> I didn't believe him at the time --- running
> experiments is fun, I'm good at it, and it's a
> hell of a lot easier than thinking about the
> results. But over time I've (finally) come to
> accept his point of view as correct. It's the
> model that's important.
Certainly a better approach than gutting
Hutchinson's heuristic because you don't like him,
or you don't like his intentions in creating it,
would be to improve it until it can do the task for
which he intended it.
I'm not all that crafty with words, but I think
simply rewording it slightly does that much:
"Extraordinary assertions made without evidence can
be dismissed without evidence."
Which of course merely piggybacks on the
accepted existing heuristic "extraordinary
claims require extraordinry evidence".
That way, ordinary "gut feel" or "neutral observers
think should be true" "assertions without evidence",
that don't raise immediate red flags for anyone,
could be given a tentative status until evidence
gathering has occurred, or, in your example, until
mathematical proof has been achieved.
Thus the Riemann hypothesis concerning zeros of
his "zeta" function in the complex plane,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis
on which much of higher mathematics depends, has
been given tentative status as "accepted wisdom"
simply because incredible amounts of searching by a
wealth of techniques has failed to produce a single
counter-example, even though the hypothesis has also
resisted all attempts so far by very smart
mathematicians to prove it.
Ditto Goldbach's (strong) conjecture,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldbach%27s_conjecture
and probably several (hundred) more of which I am
unaware.
xanthian.