Monday, December 19, 2005

The Probabilistic Age

Chris Anderson has an excellent entry on The Probabilistic Age: the emergence of market-driven intelligence. I'm not 100 percent convinced in the inherent goodness of probabilistic systems, but they are frighteningly efficient.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oooh, Kwawk's nailed you, Last! Why don't you shitcan that pre-med degree from Johns Hopkins right this instant?

After all--and let's all follow Kwawk's thinking here--you work for The Weekly Standard; The Weekly Standard is, broadly speaking, conservative; some conservatives question the validity of the theory of natural selection. Consequently, there is no liberal media bias!

Kwawk, your comment was so stupid it would take a mathemagician to model it. But, hey, it works for you, so whatever.

Anonymous said...

Kwawk, you crack me up. Look, even if what you meant to say is what BJ said, you didn't actually say that. Instead, we got an earful of sarcasm about "liberal media bias."

Tell you what. Google the words "Charles Krauthammer intelligent design." Then "John Derbyshire intelligent design." Then "George Will intelligent design." Go poke around the First Things website--theocon central--and you'll find more contra than pro.

Get the idea? Mainstream conservatism--to say nothing of Jonathan V. Last, who could freakin' teach evolutionary biology--already rejects I.D.

(As for your conspiracy theory, permit me to tell you--now mind you, I break bread daily with Scaife, Limbaugh, Dobson, and an agent from Mossad--that it's more than a bit silly.)

Anonymous said...

COMPLETELY UNEXPECTED. A real monkey wrench is about to hit both sides in the ID vs Evolution debate and particularly religion is in for difficult times. For a wholly new interpretation of the teachings of Christ, contained within the first ever religious claim and proof that meets all the criteria of the most rigorous, evidential, testable scientific method, is published and circulating on the web. It is titled The Final Freedoms. An intellectual, religious and political bombshell!

It is described as a single Law and moral principle, offering its own proof, one in which the reality of God confirms and responds to an act of perfect faith, by a direct intervention into the natural world, providing a correction to human nature including a change in natural law [biology], consciousness and human ethical perception [proof of the soul], providing new, primary insight and understanding of the human condition!

So while proponents of ID may have got the God part right, if this development demonstrates itself to be what it claims, and the means exist to do so, all religious teaching, tradition and understanding of ID are wholly in error, while the proponents of evolution who have rightly used that conception to beat down the credibility of religious tradition, but who have also used it to deny the potential for God, are in for a very rude shock.

However improbable, the impossible now looks all too possible. No joke, no hoax and not spam.

Pre publication review copies of the manuscript, The Final Freedoms, are a free pdf download at www.energon.uklinux.net and http://thefinalfreedoms.bulldoghome.com