Denyse O'Leary is a local Roman Catholic pro-intelligent-design, anti-evolution "journalist" whose writing is typically at the grade six level -- perfect for her audience. Based on what I've seen, she seems impervious to actual argument, preferring instead to slam what she delightfully calls "Darwinbots". In her writing, she rarely interviews people who disagree with her, and she elevates people who agree with her to the status of authorities. For example, she routinely refers to creationist David Tyler as a "physicist"; I guess that sounds better than admitting that he is a professor of "clothing design and technology".
But today she has sunk to a new low, by attempting to blame the recent murder at the Holocaust museum on Darwin's theory of evolution. Nearly all the commenters point out how insane this is, but, as usual, O'Leary is completely impervious to their reasoning.
If O'Leary were consistent, she'd also be blaming the crash of Air France 447 on Newton's theory of gravity.
Update: no surprise here - O'Leary's claimed "breaking story" isn't original with her; it comes from the odious David Klinghoffer.
Showing posts with label O'Leary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label O'Leary. Show all posts
Friday, June 12, 2009
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Denyse O'Leary Will Teach You The Craft of Writing
Oh, boy, I really can't wait for this workshop, where I can pay $359 to hear Denyse O'Leary, dean of Canadian journalism, instruct me on how to construct sentences --- like this one:
Phyllis Schlafly, the nemesis of radical feminists who is just SO not invited to Hill Clinton's inagural (which may never happen anyway, the way things are going) puts in her two cents worth on the Expelled movie about the trials of being an intelligence design theorist in an ivy league of Darwin cultists:
It really takes an exceptional talent to combine this much fatuousness, name-calling, misspelling, and an inability to provide the correct name of her own movement, all in a single sentence.
Phyllis Schlafly, the nemesis of radical feminists who is just SO not invited to Hill Clinton's inagural (which may never happen anyway, the way things are going) puts in her two cents worth on the Expelled movie about the trials of being an intelligence design theorist in an ivy league of Darwin cultists:
It really takes an exceptional talent to combine this much fatuousness, name-calling, misspelling, and an inability to provide the correct name of her own movement, all in a single sentence.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
The Comical Misunderstandings of O'Leary and Marks
I rarely read Denyse O'Leary's blog because it is so unreadable: she is, without a doubt, one of the worst writers in Canada. But today I noted this post praising a recent talk by Robert Marks, the Baylor engineering professor and intelligent design advocate, on the subject of algorithmic information theory, and the work of Turing, Gödel, and Chaitin.
I wasn't at all surprised to see that O'Leary doesn't really understand what's going on. After all, she has no training in science and mathematics, and her books demonstrate her lack of understanding. In her post's most comical moment, she gives Alan Turing's first name as "Alvin", apparently confusing computer science's most famous theoretician with a chipmunk.
But Marks is not stupid, so I was surprised to see several significant misunderstandings in his powerpoint presentation.
Mistake 1: The title is wrong. He says, "Things Gödel Proves a Computer Will Never Do". But it was Turing, not Gödel, who proved that there are problems that a Turing machine cannot solve.
Mistake 2: Marks calls the idea that "There exist things that are true that cannot be derived from fundamental principles" a "new startling mathematical idea from algorithmic information theory". But it isn't. It's an old idea from Gödel, dating from 1931.
Mistake 3: Marks says "we can't write a computer program to determine anything another arbitrary computer program will do. (This is called Rice’s theorem.)". This is false (and I have just finished teaching a course about the subject). Rice's theorem is about the languages accepted by Turing machines, not the machines themselves. For example, the problem "given a computer program, does it run for more than 100 steps on empty input?" is certainly solvable, simply by simulating the program in question. Less trivially, the problem of deciding whether a given Turing machine ever makes a left move on a given input is also solvable. I sometimes give this problem as a homework problem in my course. Marks, apparently, would get it wrong.
Mistake 4: Marks says that "Gödel’s Proof (1931) showed, from any set of assumptions, there are truths that cannot be proven." Again, not true. Presburger arithmetic, for example, is complete, consistent, and decidable.
Mistake 5: This objection may be more contentious. Marks thinks the work of Gödel and Turing has important implications for physics. I don't, and the reason is that we don't prove our theories in physics the same way we prove our theorems in mathematics. Physical theories represent our current understanding of an approximation to the natural world, not diktats on how it must behave.
If anything, it at least possible that novel physical theories overturn our understanding of the importance of, say, the halting problem. As Robert Geroch recently remarked at the Perimeter Institute, the existence of Hogarth-Malament spacetime might imply that the halting problem is solvable (it provides an infinite timelike curve entirely in the history of another point, so we could set up the computation "back then" and see if it ever terminated "later").
Marks clearly derives his understanding of Gödel and Turing from reading popular works, not textbooks on the subject. I'd recommend he read Torkel Franzen's Gödel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse.
As for O'Leary's claim that Gödel's and Turing's work somehow puts a "nail in the coffin of materialism", the kindest thing I can say is that she has not proved her case. Indeed, she hasn't even presented a case.
I wasn't at all surprised to see that O'Leary doesn't really understand what's going on. After all, she has no training in science and mathematics, and her books demonstrate her lack of understanding. In her post's most comical moment, she gives Alan Turing's first name as "Alvin", apparently confusing computer science's most famous theoretician with a chipmunk.
But Marks is not stupid, so I was surprised to see several significant misunderstandings in his powerpoint presentation.
Mistake 1: The title is wrong. He says, "Things Gödel Proves a Computer Will Never Do". But it was Turing, not Gödel, who proved that there are problems that a Turing machine cannot solve.
Mistake 2: Marks calls the idea that "There exist things that are true that cannot be derived from fundamental principles" a "new startling mathematical idea from algorithmic information theory". But it isn't. It's an old idea from Gödel, dating from 1931.
Mistake 3: Marks says "we can't write a computer program to determine anything another arbitrary computer program will do. (This is called Rice’s theorem.)". This is false (and I have just finished teaching a course about the subject). Rice's theorem is about the languages accepted by Turing machines, not the machines themselves. For example, the problem "given a computer program, does it run for more than 100 steps on empty input?" is certainly solvable, simply by simulating the program in question. Less trivially, the problem of deciding whether a given Turing machine ever makes a left move on a given input is also solvable. I sometimes give this problem as a homework problem in my course. Marks, apparently, would get it wrong.
Mistake 4: Marks says that "Gödel’s Proof (1931) showed, from any set of assumptions, there are truths that cannot be proven." Again, not true. Presburger arithmetic, for example, is complete, consistent, and decidable.
Mistake 5: This objection may be more contentious. Marks thinks the work of Gödel and Turing has important implications for physics. I don't, and the reason is that we don't prove our theories in physics the same way we prove our theorems in mathematics. Physical theories represent our current understanding of an approximation to the natural world, not diktats on how it must behave.
If anything, it at least possible that novel physical theories overturn our understanding of the importance of, say, the halting problem. As Robert Geroch recently remarked at the Perimeter Institute, the existence of Hogarth-Malament spacetime might imply that the halting problem is solvable (it provides an infinite timelike curve entirely in the history of another point, so we could set up the computation "back then" and see if it ever terminated "later").
Marks clearly derives his understanding of Gödel and Turing from reading popular works, not textbooks on the subject. I'd recommend he read Torkel Franzen's Gödel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse.
As for O'Leary's claim that Gödel's and Turing's work somehow puts a "nail in the coffin of materialism", the kindest thing I can say is that she has not proved her case. Indeed, she hasn't even presented a case.
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