Wednesday, September 1, 2010

What is wrong with public debate?

R. Marks just informed me of his policy not to engage in correspondence with anyone publicly critical of him or his work and that independent of the validity or invalidity of the details of the exchange, these things are best discussed thoroughly before any public pronouncements.

Indeed, I wrote to R. Marks about my concerns regarding the Horizontal No Free Lunch theorem. And I sent the links to my blog entries. And these blog entries are critical of his work. But what is the problem?
  1. my blogging could be totally unsubstantiated. In this case he really should ignore it - for any valid theory, you'll find thousands of idiots blogging about imagined problems.
  2. my entries could be well-thought through, but ridiculously wrong. In this case, I made a fool out of myself in public- and he could criticize me for doing so.
  3. there maybe something true in my blog entries: if these grains of truth aren't buried in filthy language, insults, etc., why should they be ignored?


I just don't get it.

1 comment:

  1. Marks has caught on to the fact that you're a really sharp guy. His response to you is a fancy rendition of W. C. Fields' "Go away, kid, you bug me."

    Some journals routinely open threads online for discussion of articles they publish. I think this should be universal practice. You and I would be posting in such threads for the articles of Dembski and Marks if they existed. They don't, and we post where we can.

    As you previously pointed out, Dembski did not allow comments even in the censorial Uncommon Descent environment. Perhaps the "Isaac Newton of Information Theory," intellectual leader of the Forces of God in the cultural war, cannot possibly admit to his acolytes that he's made yet another elementary error in his mathematics.

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