Vox Popoli

I knew 98 of the 100. I missed mitosis and orthography; no doubt the former will amuse Mr. Hatfield. I thought my notion of moiety would be wrong, but it turned out to be correct.

How did you do?

I’ve decided to use Mike Shanahan’s as a template:

In 2001, Vox Day joined the exclusive club of writers to post weekly columns on WorldNetDaily, he finished his first year tied for fourth most-popular on this ultra-impressive list of columnists, seven of whom are nationally syndicated.

His stunning record as a syndicated columnist places him in the legendary class of H.L. Mencken, William F. Buckley, Chuck Norris, Patrick J. Buchanan and Ann Coulter as one of six writers with back-to-back national syndications.

However, whether measured by record or achievement, he does not rest on his laurels, nor allow his team to even though in the past six years his overall record of accomplishment has been unmatched. His accomplishments since taking command of his WorldNetDaily column are far greater than most writers have achieved in entire careers, yet Vox Day does not live in the past but puts all his ample talents and energy into success for the present.

Every successful news site has one key writer, and those organizations that have achieved the greatest success have an ultimate writer – an individual combining exceptional talent and literary skills with the dynamic ambition to inspire others to success. For WorldNetDaily, that individual is unquestionably Vox Day.

Despite the almost unparalleled level of success attained in the last six years, complacency and satisfaction are qualities completely foreign to Vox Day, a brilliant columnist and writer who is perpetually driven by the goal of convincing humanity of the essential truths required for its continued survival as a species.

I completely agree with this nameless veteran NFL figure:

“I have never been impressed with Michael Vick to begin with,” the club personnel man said. “Is he a dynamic player? Yes. But is he a championship-level quarterback, a leader of a team? He has never shown that. So what are you really getting once he comes back? What has Michael Vick done in this league other than be promoted by the league and by his marketing people and the companies that he has endorsed for? I can’t answer what he might be facing in two years, because I don’t know that I value what he is as a quarterback.”

Vick will likely prove to have been the most overrated player in the history of the game. I disliked him, I disliked his Pittsburgh predecessor and I will dislike the next stupid, strong-armed, speedy black quarterback who will inevitably be lionized as the potential revolution of the quarterback position in the process of leading his team to a playoff one-and-out.

(Nothing against black quarterbacks who are smart enough and disciplined enough to actually play the position. I’m still hoping Daunte can somehow return to form and that Vince Young will realize that Manning is the model to emulate, not Vick.)

Vick was a basketball player in the NFL. He is a gifted athletic freak and fun to watch, but football is a true team sport where athleticism is less important than performing your role. He was the epitome of most of what is wrong with the league before there was ever a peep about his interest in dog-fighting.

Speaking of football, VPFL coaches should email me so that I can send you the registration info.

Pintopolis asks something rather more up my alley:

Who do you think are the best and most innovative Game Designers working today. I was always a fan of Chris Crawford.

Chris Crawford is very well-regarded and will always have a place in my heart for starting the Computer Game Developers Conference, even if you won’t find me at the conventional convention that it’s grown into. I was actually thinking about this the other day, as I had the chance to chat with one of my old heroes, Richard Garriott, recently, and another old acquaintance who is also at NCSoft asked me who I’d most like to work with.

I think Lord British is still tops, as he’s doing some interesting work with tactical AI that borders on StratAI in Tabula Rasa. He’s been a pioneer several times over and continues to lead the way. Also, he’s got a savvy business sense that makes him that much more valuable as a designer.

I think very highly of Chris Taylor, who’s now at Gas-Powered Games. I’m still in touch with him; unlike most “strategy” game designers, he fully understands the difference between tactics and strategy, a difference that he exploited brilliantly in Supreme Commander.

I still harbor great appreciation for John Romero, who is a much more sophisticated thinker than most people realize. Yes, he had the benefit of being paired with the ultimate game technologist, John Carmack, and perhaps his ego may have gotten a little out of hand during his Ion Storm days, but even his post-id failures are failures of execution, not design. He’s pushing in the right directions, in my opinion, whether he can actually pull it off or not is unknown. People forget nowadays that he designed some very good Apple II games as well as the Commander Keen series. In case you’re interested in a little game trivia. he had some influence in my decision to return to the industry last year.

Marc Miller, who designed the Traveller RPG, is underappreciated and underutilized these days. He actually foresaw the connection between computers and role-playing; if you look at the Traveller system you can see how it could almost be plugged as is into a modern MMO and it would work. Julian LeFay is another great RPG designer; I’d very much like to know what he’s up to now.

Obviously, there’s Miyamoto and the guy who did Tetris, but those sort of games neither interest me nor have any influence on the kind of games that do. I’m more impressed with Charles Moylan and Steve Grammont, who came up with a unique and elegant way to solve the 3D combat/tactical problem (one that worked much better than my decision to use emergent AI) and showed that it’s still possible to exist as an independent development/publishing house. I’m frankly surprised that the Combat Mission approach hasn’t been used by anyone else yet, even if the forthcoming version has received underwhelming reviews.

I think Chris Roberts might be my biggest disappointment. He did such great work with Times of Lore and the first Wing Commander, but then the movie bug bit him; I wish he’d return to doing games. Actually, I’m more disappointed in my own track record, but I am in the process of rectifying that situation.

Ron Paul beats Giuliani and McCain:

Final results of Thursday’s Illinois straw poll:

1. Mitt Romney – 40.35%

2. Fred Thompson – 19.96%

3. Ron Paul – 18.87%

4. Rudy Giuliani – 11.61%

5. John McCain – 4.12%

I’ll have my starship detailed black on black. With lasers:

Two German physicists from the University of Koblenz claim to have broken the speed of light…. They say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons – energetic packets of light – travelled “instantaneously” between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to three feet apart.

That sound you heard yesterday was the science fiction writing community’s ears collectively perking up….

I fought back the urge to shed a tear for those poor, derided atheists of the past, as Pintopolis writes:

I’ve yet to hear a christian exhibit concern for the centuries of derision that many among them have pointed at atheists and non believers. When that bad habit can be acknowledged by those criticizing New Atheists then I’ll take the criticism of New Atheists seriously.

Why should they when the distrust on which their predecessors based that “derision” was completely justified by subsequent events? John Locke’s stunningly prescient recommendation in 1690 that atheists be individually tolerated, but not permitted a position of dominance over others may be the most accurate long-term political prediction in the history of Man.

I have no objection whatsoever to the hostile tone in which Dawkins and Harris have framed the debate. (They’re saying very little today that Meslier didn’t write in 1729.) I love that bright lines are being drawn. What the New Atheists don’t understand is that the derision they experienced before will be as nothing compared to what is coming. They will not be able to take the heat that is going to come at them from a thousand different directions, not with all their easily demonstrated logical errors and verifiable factual inaccuracies.

UPDATE – I suppose post-facto reconciliation isn’t all that bad, especially when it’s funny:

THE descendants of Papua New Guinea cannibals who killed and ate four Fijian missionaries in 1878 have apologised.

On second thought, don’t laugh. If PETA ever takes over, your descendents are going to be tearfully apologizing to cows, pigs and chickens.

I have to say, I’m increasingly underwhelmed by the case for evolution being made thus far. In fact, I would say that I have never been less convinced of the verity of evolutionary theory than I am now, especially in light of the difficulty most of the true believers have demonstrated in understanding the nature of my questions.

I found myself wondering if Scott might be a bit distracted with the coming school year in light of his response to question (5):

Is it correct to say that “we just don’t see clear evidence of speciation in the fossil record”? This appears to contradict what I have been taught about evolution since elementary school.

I can’t really answer that, Vox, unless I know the context of the quote. We can certainly infer speciation in the fossil record, and there really are transitional forms.

Inferring is not “clear evidence”, of course, more importantly, I was quoting Scott himself from a comment made on this blog made 8.16.07 – 12:35 am. But it seems the answer is, no, evolutionists do not have clear evidence of speciation in the fossil record.

Scott punted on (3) regarding “margin of error”, which I respect as an honest response, although the question is a legitimate one. If you’ll excuse a digression, let me explain its significance with an analogy. One of the reasons I reject Keynesian macroeconomic theory is that its demonstrable margin of error is too great for it to utilized for the purposes to which it is put. As I showed in this 2002 column, the margin of error exceeds the amount of the information upon which vital decisions are being made. (Note- I was wrong in 2002, the SPX only got down to 800; it made it to 1555 before its recent tanking.) From what I’ve seen of evolutionary projections, its margin of errors are even greater than those seen in macroeconomics. Since this level of inaccuracy causes me to dismiss macroeconomics as a science, it leads me to similarly dismiss evolution. Obviously, if it can be shown that the macroevolutionary margin of error is smaller than that of macroeconomics, I’d be happy to reconsider. In any case, we’re probably fortunate that macroevolutionists have far less policy influence than macroeconomists.

As for (2) Talk Origins, consensus seems to be that it’s reliable enough, so given my straightforward use of the data presented there, I’m still wondering how I am supposed to have misused or misrepresented it. Scott did not understand the significance of (1), as it does not involve whether evolution is an origins science or an operational science, but rather if it was capable of doing more than what financial analysts call backtesting. The answer, based on what Scott and others have said, is not really. Evolutionists don’t seem to understand that most of what they call successful “predictions” of past events are not empirically testable predictions, they are merely the confirmation of inferences. This gap-filling is good, but it’s still backtesting. Moreover, evolution’s track record is absolutely terrible in this regard, with far more misses than hits. There’s a good discussion of the underlying issue in Scott’s comments here. I actually tend to like the evolutionist’s comparison of evolution to meteorology; although he meant it as a defense, of course, I have little regard for the current state of either. It reminds me of the Talk Origins defense, which is that if evolution isn’t a science, well, then archeology isn’t either. Okay, fine, they’re both not sciences… are we all agreed? Can we throw in psychology while we’re at it?

Scott answered the detailed aspects of (4) but neglected to provide an answer to the most important part, namely, what is a “mendel”? What is the average rate of genetic speciation? If it happens, then it happens at various rates, of which there must be an average. Moreover, this average must be in line with the fossil record and the various geological datings, not merely “allow for it” as Talk Origins presently describes the variance in morphological rates. Too fast is as inaccurate as too slow. Now, “we don’t know yet” is an acceptable answer, but then, the correct thing to do is shut up, go away and figure it out before expecting anyone to accept it on faith. For Darwin’s sake, it’s been 250 years and we’re still having problems getting people to understand that lowering price increases demand – see the health care debate for details – and evolutionists expect us to accept on faith something that they themselves can’t answer, let alone quantify?

Regarding (6), Scott again has a reasonable reply although I’m not quite sure what the reminder that populations evolve is supposed to accomplish. Even if populations evolve, the DNA mutations which demonstrate this evolution can only be found in individuals.

Individuals don’t evolve, populations do, and attempting to predict when and how one population achieves sufficient genomic reorganization that it can no longer produce fertile hybrids with other populations—that’s a tall order. So Pintopolis is incorrect if he assumes that someone is cataloging all these new species that Vox thinks we would be seeing appear regularly if evolution is true.

On the other hand, Vox, I don’t know how you arrived at that figure but my intuition it’s almost certainly too low. There are probably more than that number of speciation events every month. But we are unlikely to detect them, for the following reasons:

a) most of these new species are short-lived

b) most of these new species are bacteria or other organisms whose numbers are vast, but whose lives are largely unmonitored by the likes of us

c) speciation doesn’t mean a dramatic, obvious phenoyptic change in most cases—it’s merely a state of genetic incompatibility with other populations. Two organisms could look astonishingly similar, and yet be members of different species—-thus we are unlikely to be able to do anything more than infer the approximate moment when such a population crossed the evolutionary Rubicon

I agree with Scott on the predicted number being low; it was based on conservative assumptions. And the task is certainly a tall order, but one based on a perfectly reasonable expectation. We can’t expect to find every new species as it appears due to the problems that Scott mentions, but if one is popping up nearly every other day, we should have no problem finding one or two and demonstrating that they are a new species that did not previously exist, assuming that this is, in fact, happening.

It’s also interesting that despite defining his case on genetic evolution, Scott is quick to retreat to the very fossil record that the modern synthesis to which he subscribes has [largely, somewhat, completely?] disavowed. This is the very aspect of the strange nebulousness of the discipline that caused me to become skeptical of it in the first place.

Scott hasn’t even begun to pose his positive case for evolution, but on the basis of his answers so far, I am convinced that when it comes to the current theory of evolution, scientists are writing checks that they simply are not capable of cashing. While I don’t deny that it’s a tall order to expect the same sort of precision and results out of evolution that we get out of chemistry, physics, and yes, even economics – and no, my dear evolutionist, supply-side economics is absolutely NOT Austrian – that’s neither my responsibility nor my concern.

But I hope this continues to be an interesting discussion and I commend Scott, Pintopolis and other defenders of the discipline commenting here for the civil manner with which they have comported themselves.

In which I answer Ms Wade’s question:

The point is not that abortion (or adoption) would have made for better comedy. (Although, if one wanted to make a gross-out comedy, why not make it about abortion?) The point is the insidious pro-life message of the film: Even dope-smoking, misogynist morons (the antithesis of the pro-life contingent) “know” that abortion is wrong. Where does that place those of us who support abortion rights? Or choose to have one? Or (gasp) think that abortion, in some cases, might be good?

I’d say just above Pol Pot and Mao, but below Hitler, Choibalsan and Bierut.