Hey, the old wannabe Fifth Horseman of the New Atheism is back! They’re mostly dead now and he’s been irrelevant for at least a decade, but apparently if there is one thing that is going to wake him up and get that weary old ticker thumping again, it’s the unholy marriage of William Dembski and myself. Which is really a terribly dramatic way to describe an interview, but whatever.
Vox has an undergraduate degree in economics and East Asian studies from Bucknell University, a small private liberal arts college. He does not have a science degree, and by his own admission he did not exactly apply himself to his studies….Any student who tells me that their achievement was developing an intuitive grasp of a subject is bullshitting me. Then he confirms it: Vox Day was a slacker who learned nothing in college.
He wishes he dropped out after his first semester, he seldom went to class, and didn’t bother reading the textbook — and he probably thinks that means he must have been a genius, rather than a lazy goof. It doesn’t speak well of Bucknell or his professors that they decided to get rid of him by putting him in a program of independent studies, rather than flunking him. I sorta sympathize with them. You get attached to your students and want to help them succeed, so you coach them through and design a limited curriculum that matches their abilities to allow them to finish the program. I guess we’re doing the students no favor if that just means their ego is stoked.
So if he has no background in or comprehension of biology, how did he write MITTENS? He explains it all: Apparently the proper way to use AI is to hammer its outputs through multiple iterations until it tells you the answer you want to hear.
He really does think he has disproven all of evolution all by himself, with a paper that contains all of 11 citations (a number I’d find unacceptable in an undergrad student paper that was much more narrow in its scope). Even worse, 7 of those citations are to the LTEE, and contradict his conclusions, and 2 are to ape genome sequencing papers whose authors would be surprised to learn how their work is being distorted. At least he has 2 that reinforce his argument, sorta, but they’re both also written by Vox Day.
So this is an argument made by an unqualified buffoon who churned it out of a battery of AIs, written with negligible knowledge of the scientific literature, and rubber-stamped by a couple of biased dorks from the Discovery Institute.
I’m definitely archiving this, because I very much want to have PZ on the record stating that I did everything by myself, with only a battery of AIs and an unacceptable number citations in an undergrad student paper. It’s going to be really fun to know that he is struggling to accept the reality that the man he has sincerely believed to be “an unqualified buffoon” has always been a world-class genius of historic levels, far more significant in the course of human intellectual development than sweet St. Darwin himself, who somehow managed to cripple Man’s correct understanding of his own origins for 167 years and counting.
Science was born free and everywhere it is in chains. I can’t do much about physics or sociology, but at least I can set the geneticists and biologists free.
The thing that I am finding so terribly amusing about all of this is that these scientific charlatans are so uncurious and so prone to posturing and resting on their credentials that it literally never occurs to them that I am nothing like them. It never occurs to them that maybe my professors weren’t stroking my ego, or making sure a lazy goof got his degree, but rather, catering to a student they regarded as “a brilliant fuckup”. Which is a direct quote from my favorite professor, by the way.
It never occurs to them to wonder why I wish I had dropped out of college. Jensen Huang knows. More than anyone, he’s the primary beneficiary of my return to university. But if you don’t understand why, that’s another story for another day.
And most of all, it never occurs to them that anyone might use AI creatively in a productive manner, one that observably augments human intelligence and makes things possible that were not previously possible. I’m not, of course, referring to the disproof of evolution by natural selection, since that was a piece of cake so obvious that I cannot believe anyone with half a brain capable of performing long division is still seriously trying to defend it. I never needed any AI assistance or augmentation for that.
Being the first man in history to solve the Agrippan Trilemma and other little puzzles like the Hard Problem of Consciousness, to say nothing of refuting Kant’s critique of pure reason, on the other hand, definitely required a bit of an artificial boost.
Anyhow, I just want PZ to remember every little thing he ever said about me in this regard as the horror gradually dawns in him as more and more people start actually doing the relevant math and confirming it for themselves. Because I won’t. I don’t think about him at all. I genuinely thought Pharyngula shut down years ago.
And here’s the more important thing for him to contemplate. If he was wrong about me, well, that’s going to sting a little. But it’s not really that big a deal in the cosmic scheme of things. But if he was wrong about Jesus Christ, on the other hand, that’s a much more serious problem. So if the former turns out to be true, however unlikely, maybe take another, closer, look at the latter.