A regular here jumped on the grenade for everyone who, like myself, lacked the fortitude to sit through three-and-a-half hours of two people discussing a book that neither of them had bothered to read, and thereby gleaned the following information from the recent video by Dr. Erika and Dr. Hanson.
- Erika: “Will doesn’t include in his presentation how d is actually calculated, but I suspected it was probably in Vox’s book. So I just texted one of my several friends who are reading through the book right now and sort of yucking it up with me via text messages over it, and I was like, ‘Hey, does anybody have the definition for his selection coefficient d?’ And my friend said that on page 153, in the chapter titled ‘The Overlapping Generations Problem,’ d is defined as the fraction of the population replaced per time unit…”
- Dr. Hanson: “So because of all of that, I don’t foresee any population geneticist, one, even knowing who Vox is, or two, being like bothering with ever reading a book that’s probably mostly written by AI.”
- Erika: “That’s just based off of what Will presented to us. Of course, Vox has a book floating around out there. I wonder—I wonder if maybe I should read it and then, like, make fun of it with some of my friends? Like, go through some of the more in-depth claims, or I should say extraneous claims, that exist in that book. That might be fun…”
- Erika: “There’s no doubt in my mind that Vox is going to respond to this video, and he’s probably going to say something to the tune of, ‘You didn’t answer all of the points that I made in my book. All you did was address Will Duffy’s points.’ And it’s like, yes, that was the priority of this video.”
- Erika: “It’s also worth noting that in some places he has complained that people who criticize him actually haven’t read his book… So all of those things together put an evil little idea in my head. I was talking to Zach and a couple other of my friends who have relevant formal training in areas in and surrounding this exact topic, and we kind of just thought to ourselves, ‘Man, what if we just did read the book? What if we read it and then got together and critiqued the book as a whole, and we can each bring our favorite parts of the book to this round table together and we can sort of atomize it?’ …You can expect that to come within a couple of weeks, a week maybe, of this video. We’re just going to actually go through Probability Zero, and it’s probably going to take a long time.”
Interesting. I was pretty confident that Erika hadn’t read the book, but I was under the impression that Dr. Hanson had read the 2nd edition, specifically, on the basis of some of his comments. Believe it or not, I have no problem whatsoever with evolutionists attempting to critique Probability Zero or The Frozen Gene without bothering to read them first. It’s their credibility and their careers on the line, not mine. And they certainly make my job as the author significantly easier, because I have neither the reason nor the responsibility to respond to any critique by anyone who hasn’t read the book he is purporting to critique and isn’t even addressing the relevant details.
So that’s my initial response to their 210 minutes of not discussing my book: they didn’t read it and they didn’t discuss it, they simply discussed what they imagined it must be. Although perhaps someone should warn Erika what happened to the last female critic who thought that reading through one of my books and critiquing it would be fun.
But talking about the book without reading it is absolutely fine, so long as that’s made clear, which both of them obviously did. I have never paid attention to their videos before and they have yet to give me any reason to start doing so. I might as reasonably respond by talking about The Refutation of Kant and providing proof of the amphiboly in das Ding an sich, as that’s another of my books they also haven’t read. Or, for that matter, the Amorran formations in A Throne of Bones.
This isn’t to say that their video is worthless. To the contrary, it gives us a very clear picture of the current state of the field’s mainstream understanding of itself as well as how it is unprepared to defend this particular front. Now, perhaps this evolutionary round table Erika is assembling will do better. It certainly should do better on the basis of actually having a target at which to shoot. And when I respond, I will respond in detail to every material criticism of my mathematical disproof of evolution by any, all, and every mechanism, including natural selection, raised in both of the videos. While I am aware that Erika and Dr. Hanson spent some time discussing me on a personal level, I didn’t even bother reading that part of the transcript.
I’ve been getting attacked personally for 25 years now. I don’t care. I’m a former Wax Trax! recording artist and my own fans and Vile Faceless Minions refer to me as Supreme Dark Lord. So I think the mainstream narrative of me being a Very Bad Man has been sufficiently established that we can all just take it as given and get on with the substantive discussion. I mean, what part of “downright evil” is hard to understand?
I mean, we’re not talking “hanging out with Jeffery Epstein evil” like Richard Dawkins, Stephen Gould, Steven Pinker, Ed Boyden, Marc Hauser, Martin Nowak, David Sloan Wilson, George Church, and other major evolutionists, but still, downright evil.
- “Vox Day is one sick puppy.” —Dr. P.Z. Myers, PhD
- “Vox Day is a fascist mega-dickbag and less a human being than one long sequence of junk DNA.” —Dr. Phil Sandifer, PhD
- “I consider Vox Day one step, either direction, from certifiable.” —Mike Resnick, science fiction author, 38-time Hugo Award nominee
- “I think I have made my disgust with Vox Day and his Rabid Puppies clear.” —George R. R. Martin, fantasy author, 19-time Hugo Award nominee
- “Vox Day rises all the way to ‘downright evil’. ” —Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Manager of Science Fiction, Tor Books, 15-time Hugo Award nominee
- “Vox Day is a real bigoted shithole of a human being.” —John Scalzi, three-time SFWA President and science fiction author, 9-time Hugo nominee
- “Vox Day and his followers made it impossible for me to remain silent, keep calm, and carry on.” —Connie Willis, science fiction author, 24-time Hugo Award nominee
- “The real burning question is, ‘what will Vox Day attack next?’” —Charles Stross, science fiction author, 15-time Hugo Award nominee
Well, at least we have the answer to Charles Stross’s question. And now St. Darwin is truly dead.
I don’t need their attention. I haven’t sent out a single press release. You can even see from my publication history that I almost entirely stopped paying attention to evolution from February to September. So whether they engage or not makes very little difference to me. If and when they do, I’ll address the critiques and any mistakes they identify. If they don’t, then the work stands as it is until someone can come along and actually show that it doesn’t.