If I, as a parent, evaluate a game (let's say it's hypothetically rated "M") and its content, then evaluate my children and their probable response to that content, and decide to get it for them anyway, am I still "A BAD PARENT"?
It depends. Was the decision you made a really stupid one? If so, I'd say yes. "Evaluating" something and coming to a decision isn't really a panacea. If I carefully evaluate crack use and decide that it's appropriate for my five year old to hit the pipe once a week, am I not a bad parent because I thought about it before I made a really dumb decision? I suppose I'm not a negligent parent, but I'm definitely not a good one either.
But of course, it's laziness working here. When reporting the facts (with *obvious* commentary) is all the comedy material you need, how could they not be both accurate and successful?
I like The Daily Show as much as the next guy, but it occurred to me a while ago that Jon Stewart has about the easiest job a comedian could possibly get (not to take anything away from him as he's also incredibly good at his job). Politicians are basically the perfect straight men to riff off of. Not only are they unfunny, and prone to saying outrageously stupid things, but they'll say those stupid things on cue. The talking points are so widely distributed and so repetitive that if you have a politician on your show, you know exactly (often word for word these days) what he's going to say when prompted. It's almost like having a scripted partner who is guaranteed say the dumbest shit imaginable when you hand them the setup line. Combining easy targets like that with a talent like Stewart is like getting a major league slugger to play tee ball.
No, not really, but I also don't believe that they're an invasion of privacy, which was the original point. The rest of your story is nice and all, but kind of tangential to the reason for mentioning it. It's just a technology measure that's there to verify that you're doing your job. Whether it works well or not is open to question, but it's hardly analogous to having a camera pointed at your desk while you work.
How is having a camera in your office at a desk job acceptable? If I get my work done at an acceptable quality on time, I shouldn't feel awkward should I need to pick my teeth or scratch my self somewhere silly.
What about having a camera somewhere where people are apt to steal office supplies? At any rate, this isn't a camera. It's GPS. I wouldn't object to having to clock in and out for an hourly job to verify that I was at work. Why should this be significantly different?
That's a very good solution. Alternately, if people insist on a technical solution, perhaps create one that makes people accountable for what they do rather than an easily defeated barrier. Maybe a password-protected cable modem that logs activity? Can't remove it or you lose access, can't just boot from a live CD. Clearing the password would be noticed when the parent logs into the web interface to check the log. Parents say, "Use your good judgment. I reserve the right to audit your history." Any technical solution can be broken, but filters are perhaps the dumbest of the dumb.
30% is still better than Congress right now. There's room to slide.
Congress as a whole frequently has a low approval rating. The key point is that most of them get re-elected because a given member of congress in his or her district generally has a reasonably high approval rating. "They're all bums except my congressman" is the order of the day.
Sorry that was rather sweeping. I could add in the word largely if you prefer.
Well, the real question is which parts are verified. The Iliad references a number of real places, but does it follow that the things that aren't verifiable are likely true? A lot of Stephen King novels are set in very real places during very real times, referencing events known to have happen. The key here is that there are parts of the novels that are decidedly not true, and the fact that they supposedly happened in real cities doesn't make them more believable. There's a very important distinction between claims like "There's a city called Jerusalem" and "The whole world flooded and almost everybody died." The fact that the first is verified doesn't really lend all that much credence to the second, IMO.
You missed the point of the 2001 principle entirely: My whole explanation about "Darwins founder effect", and the timing of the theory of evolution vs our stage of technical development not having reach nanotechnology was that it maps once we've developed self replicators, just like in 2001 we mapped our ability to create polished black slabs onto the one on the moon?
I'll admit that after reading the pile of words that explained the "founder effect" I was completely baffled. I tried to do it a few more times, but I was starting to go down that road where I had to decide whether I'm phenomenally stupid or just dealing with a crazy person. I'm starting to get that your point seems to be a similar version of the broken reasoning that most ID advocates use, but substitute "self-replicators" for "complexity":
1) Living organisms are self-replicating.
2) Only intelligent agents build self replicating systems.
3) Therefore life is intelligently designed.
Again, step 2 begs the question rather aggressively. The whole point in question is whether self-replicating (or complex, or whatever particular property of life we're talking about) systems can be produced by naturalistic means. Simply stating it to be so kind of leaves the whole debate in limbo.
Sorry but this time you've missed the point. You're looking for a 'particularistic' mapping to justify it as science, when science considers something scientific at a much lower threshold.
I'm looking for something other than "I know it when I see it" as an objective basis for detecting design. For all the mathematical fury the ID advocates have whipped up over the year, I would think that they'd be a little closer to a solution than they appear to be.
You're whole argument is based on it being "replicating" which is ABSOLUTE GARBAGE. It was never the fact of the black slab being geometric, it was in the PARTICULAR COMBINATIONS of those molecules.
So I've gathered. Normally, the ID hobby horse is "complexity" which is what self-replicating systems address handily. It was unclear from your earlier word salad that it wasn't complexity that you're interested in but the origins of self-replicating systems to begin with. Evolutionary theory doesn't really address that problem as it assumes some independent origin of the first self-replicator, but I think that you're still generalizing rather hastily from the fact that some self-replicators are designed (or will be, once we get good enough at it) that it follows that all of them are designed. The only reliably self-replicating systems out there are life forms, and we don't know whether they're designed. Saying that they're designed because we have an inkling of how we may be able to design similar systems is also, to use your words absolute garbage. Sure, it could be true, but to say that there's meaningful objective evidence for it other than "Could have been magic. Sure looks like it to me" is a stretch.
Darwin got away with basically total rhetoric with no molecular evidence at all, just a gross anatomical inference (this looks looks like that). He had no fucking clue how complicated the shit he was looking at really was. The man understanding looks completely infantile by our standards. He would be fucking floored out of his mind if he was a modern opthamologist looking at the molecular mechanics of vision, he would be totally stumped and would have to repeal his theory because he would be overwhelmed with systems of enormous house-of-cards type dependence.
True, with Darwin's 19th century understanding of the systems involved, he had no idea of the complex ins and outs his theory would have to explain. He also didn't have the 150 years of molecular evidence that favored his theory, though. I find it interesting that you're assuming that evolutionary theory got an easy pass because of our lack of knowledge about t
In 2001 they find the monolithic geometric slab off earth (on the moon), and in this instance 2001 is an unbiased experiment for the audience: Everyone in the audience concludes the monolith is the first signs of intelligence other then ours in the universe, EVERYONE there is no questioning, or technical red herrings (like you like to pull up), because we know from our own scientific knowledge base that such objects are suspicious.
Again, we have analogies, but no concrete answer. We know that a giant smooth monolith is likely a product of intelligence because we make them and know of no other way for such a thing to come into being. The only such examples that we've seen are ones that we've made, so the conclusion is logical and obvious. We don't make organisms and we do have some inkling of how their complexity may have come about naturally, so the analogy doesn't hold. This isn't some mundane technical detail or a red herring. It's crucial to the core point. The problem is that people constantly use the following flawed reasoning:
1) Biological systems are machines.
2) Only intelligent agents make machines.
3) Therefore, biological systems are intelligently designed.
If we take biological systems to be machines, then the vast majority of the machines on this planet aren't made by human intelligence. Is it reasonable to immediately generalize and say that (3) follows from the first two points? In my opinion, that's totally crazy. Given the definition in (1), assumption (2) clearly begs the question. More fundamentally, rather than positively detecting design by any objective measurable properties, ID always seems to end up being the default assumption and "proving" it always ends up being a lame attempt to discredit evolution and declare ID the victor by default.
So a polished geometric black slab, is the threshold for design.
OK, let's take that to be the threshold. How does one map the properties of the polished black slab to the properties of organisms without assuming one's conclusion or projecting unverifiable properties like "forethought" onto biological systems? What is the biological equivalent of a polished geometric black slab? The problem is that there's no rigorous or even semi-rigorous way to do it at this point, so every ID argument, for all of its mathematical and logical handwaving, boils down to "I know it when I see it." Sure, you might, and it might be totally correct, but that's hardly an objective basis for a scientific pursuit. As it stands, "I know it when I see it" is simply a PR campaign that appeals to "common sense" rather than serious analysis of actual data. Dembski and others claim to have some sort of amazing framework by which to rigorously detect design, but they've failed to demonstrate it in every case and have always fallen back to the "It's obvious to me" defense. I won't say it can't be done, but it's pretty clear to me that it hasn't been done yet.
It would work as you think. If Bush put up a fight and counters some things instead of letting them go, he would be back on top in an instant.
And he absolutely would. I wouldn't put any money on Congress in a game of "Who will indifferently watch more of other people's kids die" chicken if it was played against him. Not that I think that Congress is all that much more morally connected to the well-being of the troops--they're just more immediately connected to the outrage of their families.
This is why you are hearing people say stuff like the war on terror is a bumper sticker and a campaign slogan. It is is a true war, then anyone who is a suspected terrorist or connected to one could be fair game under this construct. And it (battlefield inteligence) would be consistent with the constitution as well as most recognized human rights.
So I guess the question is, Are we at war as long as someone, somewhere, wants to kill Americans and may attempt to do so? Are we so easily duped into a perpetual state of war and war powers that we would consent to that situation?
Nixon was smart. Clinton was smart. GW Bush not so much so. All three of them were highly divisive and the country would have been better off without the animosity. Reagan wasn't very smart either, but the country stood behind him and he did get some important things done. Personally I couldn't stand Reagan, but you have to give credit where credit's due.
I'm not sure I'm seeing a "performance as president is independent of intelligence" pattern in your data. Even if there was, it would be surprising to find that being president is the one and only job involving complex decision making that one can be a total gump and still be good at.
A potential president's intellect isn't the main criterion for assessing his/her ability to run the country well.
I agree there. The main criterion for being able to run the country well is knowing how to surround yourself with very capable experts and listen to their opinions (and occasionally know when to discard those opinions). In my experience, that requires some amount of intelligence, and it's one particular skill that creationists (especially the young earth variety) often don't display particularly well. The common thread of "I'll believe any crap as long as it conforms to my world view, irrespective of the data" has become something of a concern to some of us, given the past few years. All else being equal, give me the smart guy who can critically evaluate bullshit when it's thrown at him.
Pardon me what?? We already have tools from seti and archeology to test for 'intelligent input' because we already know what it looks like, you're playing the weasel game... here let me tell you how it goes...
No, we don't. Full stop. We don't know what "intelligent input" looks like in the abstract. We know what intelligently designed RF signals created by organisms that behave like us look like because we make them and have a reach signal theory that describes them. We know what arrow heads look like because we still know how to make them. We don't know what an intelligently designed strand of DNA or protein looks like as opposed to one that came about due to natural selection. That's the problem. If you're trying to do classification, you need more detail than the ID crowd wants to provide.
In a more realistic scenario: One of our probes crashes into some foreign planet, and an advanced species comes across it, but it has nothing about human beings or their nature or form or structure on it, except for vague language like markings. They will sure as shit know it was designed.
If we had no concept of written language, would we be so sure? That's the problem. You're taking something that we obviously know something about (language) and assuming that we can use the same heuristics to classify a set of classes whose parameters are totally uncharacterized. It doesn't work that way. The fact that whenever we ask ID supporters how they'd go about detecting design in life, they go back to examples like "language" or "mechanical devices" and work by analogy makes it abundantly clear that they have no solution for the problem.
You really need to read the 2001princple.net and just ignore the authors religious bias (forget he is) and simply weigh the argument and what is written.
Hmmm... nothing came up for that site. Why am I not surprised, though, that an ID supporter has a religious bias? It's not like that's true practically 100% of the time or anything.
But you want to know the biggest soundest argument? We will be designing our own new beings soon and they are going to do the real analysis on us without the bullshit or bias. After all if they were the product of millions of dollars and thousands of years of scientific resource and engineering discipline, they're going to have a hard time buying the story that WE KNOW that we aren't, because of our lower cognitive status.
I'm not saying that it's not possible that we're the product of some sort of advanced bioengineering. What I'm saying is, the ID folks have no way of investigating that fact as they've framed the problem. For all the detail they've fleshed out, they might as well be appealing to magic. Now, if an ID proponent suggested a mechanism by which we were engineered or something about the methodology or objectives of the designers (something that would leave testable evidence in our design), then we'd be cooking. Until then, it's just philosophical wanking disguised as science in order to trick school boards. The fact that they haven't done something so simple as posit something testable is a strong indicator to me that for all their sound and noise about wanting good science, actually doing science is the last thing on their minds.
We don't call SETI or archeology non-science, and there's no damn rational scientific reason why the same tools cannot be applied to biological structures (which are really no different from any other structure).
Let me tell you how this actually works. By way of background, I'm in the biometrics business. Essentially, I take signals and classify them as "genuine" or "impostor" based on statistical data. It's similar in many ways to what SETI and a bunch of other classification systems do. When you try to classify a pile of data into two sets (genuine/impostor, natural/intelligent design, fair dice/loa
That doesn't make sense to me. The issue is whether something is a valid hypothesis, not whether good research is being done.
Well, I was trying to be cute more than making a meaningful point. The issue at hand is that ID is widely considered to be crap because if you take the best of the best of ID "researchers" you essentially get a bunch of kooks who do no actual research and act more as a political / religious movement than anything else. I agree that certain cases of ID can be valid hypotheses, but nobody in the ID "mainstream" has really posited one. For example, if somebody said, "The Designer has X property and works through X methods" and then formulated a test for that, things could get interesting. Of course, they don't want to do that because ID is mostly a religious movement in disguise, so the "designer" has to remain completely anonymous, formless, and without any measurable nature. Sadly, in doing that, they make it a completely vacuous hypothesis as it can't be tested in any meaningful way, and it certainly can't be used as any sort of a useful model.
The real problem is trying to get an ID proponent pinned down on some sort of specific claim. Until that can be done, ID is essentially just a clever way of rejecting evolution on religious grounds while making it seem scientifically sound to do so.
Whether or not I.D. is science, I think it makes sense to at least mention the possibility in the same class that discusses evolution. Whether it's science or not and whether you like it or not, the topics are related and it makes sense that they be presented together.
Can you make a case for doing this that doesn't also introduce the Flying Spaghetti Monster as a potential discussion point?
We just don't know to within an accuracy of a day?
So we could know which week it will happen?
An interesting thought. Although, if you know within a week and it doesn't happen within the first six days of that week, wouldn't you then know within a day? Of course, that just means that it has to happen in the first six days, so if it doesn't happen in the first five days... crap!
Then, in reply, I can say- how can you distinguish between COMMON DESCENT and COMMON DESIGN?
Simply put, you can't. You can't distinguish between any explanation of an observed phenomenon and that observed phenomenon due to magic (which is essentially what a designer is until somebody posits a mechanism by which the designer acts). That's why "common design" is an uninteresting hypothesis until somebody adds some information about the nature of the designer and its mechanisms.
That the flagellum, the spitting image of technical engineering we do on a daily basis, one could even make the hypothesis that life is technology, and if technology then one must ask the next question: We know technology only comes from people who have reached a certain cognitive threshold to be able to understand nature and science as well to do the engineering necessary.
Your sample size is rather small to make that assumption. If we define biological "molecular machines" as technology, then biological technologies far outnumber our technologies. Basically, we have a huge pile of technology, some small subset of which we know we created, and you're trying to say that it follows that there's some rule that technology "only" comes from intelligence. It seems to me that you're assuming your conclusion.
And that there is no alternative to such an explanation because science is rigged against any alternative, not because of evidence but because of philosophical blinders, we have scientific tools to test for alternatives to eevolution from seti and archeology, people are just scared to apply those same scientific tools to life. Not out of reason or evidence, but out of cultural prejudice.
Let me suggest this: Come up with a meaningful way to "test" a life form for intelligent input, and we'll start there. It's not as if somebody is proposing a test and being silenced. There are just a bunch of people saying that somewhere, somehow, something is wrong with evolution and thus an intelligent agent must exist. SETI and archeology do very specific things that are not really cleanly analogous to ID. In both cases, we're looking for an intelligent agent that makes things (tools/signals/etc.) that have a definable profile: They make stuff like we make stuff. They're solving a classification problem, and in a classification problem, you have to have some idea of what both of your classes look like. ID has no such luck. They have "nature" and "not nature" and they're trying to take a chunk of what appears to be nature and define it as "not nature" by simply taking all the complex stuff out of nature and defining it as designed.
I'm not quite sure I understand your point. The fact is that almost every event mentioned in the Bible has been historically verified. Aren't you aware that the Bible is historically accurate to a large degree? The wikipedia article includes the peer reviewed references as well.
It's not the basic historical events that are in question. It's things like "the whole world flooded" that raise eyebrows. Pieces of the Iliad are historically verified as well. It doesn't follow that the rest of it is 100% true.
At this point, I don't care what your beliefs on evolution/creation, gay marriage or climate change are. I want to know will you raise my taxes? Under what circumstances will you bring our military home from Iraq? How do you plan to slow the tide of legal and illegal immigration?
Another question might be, "Are you a total imbecile?" but they won't answer that one honestly. This is a surrogate question to get closer to that answer.
Why not ask Democrats the same question? Why wait to ask the republicans?
Because this is a primary and the questions are usually relevant to the particular constituency the primary is for. The Democrats have their own set of kooks, but the "earth is 6000 years old and the theory of unicorns should be taught in science class" kook crowd is very much a Republican constituency. Add to that the fact that 3 of the Republican candidates have publicly come out against evolution and you have yourself a pretty good reason.
But you lose your argument to a libertarian as soon as you equate it to an insurance scheme - at which point the obvious question is why can't a private sector company operate fundamental research exactly like an insurance firm?
And, in fact, why not let insurance firms insure private research programs to mitigate the risk of a complete loss, in the same way individual farmers invest in crop insurance...
Well, off the top of my head, there's the fact that the system works "in reverse" in that the payout for failed research is the norm and not the exception. On top of that, the insurer would then have to reap the benefits of the occasional success to remain solvent. I suppose the simplest answer is, how do you propose such a private venture should work? On top of that, my guess is that any such venture would be such a large scheme that there's no way the private sector would be able to get it off the ground without (gasp!) public money.
Basically, I seriously doubt that any insurance scheme where the payout is the norm could be made to work. It works with the government because the government is the people of the USA, and the people of the USA reap all of the rewards that come from the occasional success, so it's a net win overall. I doubt that we could work out a system in which private corporations pay for insurance that almost always pays out for bad research and steals all of the profits from good research.
How do you falsify neodarwinism's assertion that genetic mutation is random?
Depends on what you mean by random. If you mean "random" as opposed to "magic" I suppose you can't. Otherwise, my suggestion would be to come up with a mechanism by which it happens non-randomly and test it. That would be a great start. In fact, I would guess that if you could come up with a way of modeling what we now see as random mutation and making it predictable, you'd probably go down in history as one of the great contributors to modern biology and chemistry.
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That's a very good solution. Alternately, if people insist on a technical solution, perhaps create one that makes people accountable for what they do rather than an easily defeated barrier. Maybe a password-protected cable modem that logs activity? Can't remove it or you lose access, can't just boot from a live CD. Clearing the password would be noticed when the parent logs into the web interface to check the log. Parents say, "Use your good judgment. I reserve the right to audit your history." Any technical solution can be broken, but filters are perhaps the dumbest of the dumb.
I'll admit that after reading the pile of words that explained the "founder effect" I was completely baffled. I tried to do it a few more times, but I was starting to go down that road where I had to decide whether I'm phenomenally stupid or just dealing with a crazy person. I'm starting to get that your point seems to be a similar version of the broken reasoning that most ID advocates use, but substitute "self-replicators" for "complexity":
1) Living organisms are self-replicating.
2) Only intelligent agents build self replicating systems.
3) Therefore life is intelligently designed.
Again, step 2 begs the question rather aggressively. The whole point in question is whether self-replicating (or complex, or whatever particular property of life we're talking about) systems can be produced by naturalistic means. Simply stating it to be so kind of leaves the whole debate in limbo.
I'm looking for something other than "I know it when I see it" as an objective basis for detecting design. For all the mathematical fury the ID advocates have whipped up over the year, I would think that they'd be a little closer to a solution than they appear to be.
So I've gathered. Normally, the ID hobby horse is "complexity" which is what self-replicating systems address handily. It was unclear from your earlier word salad that it wasn't complexity that you're interested in but the origins of self-replicating systems to begin with. Evolutionary theory doesn't really address that problem as it assumes some independent origin of the first self-replicator, but I think that you're still generalizing rather hastily from the fact that some self-replicators are designed (or will be, once we get good enough at it) that it follows that all of them are designed. The only reliably self-replicating systems out there are life forms, and we don't know whether they're designed. Saying that they're designed because we have an inkling of how we may be able to design similar systems is also, to use your words absolute garbage. Sure, it could be true, but to say that there's meaningful objective evidence for it other than "Could have been magic. Sure looks like it to me" is a stretch.
True, with Darwin's 19th century understanding of the systems involved, he had no idea of the complex ins and outs his theory would have to explain. He also didn't have the 150 years of molecular evidence that favored his theory, though. I find it interesting that you're assuming that evolutionary theory got an easy pass because of our lack of knowledge about t
1) Biological systems are machines.
2) Only intelligent agents make machines.
3) Therefore, biological systems are intelligently designed.
If we take biological systems to be machines, then the vast majority of the machines on this planet aren't made by human intelligence. Is it reasonable to immediately generalize and say that (3) follows from the first two points? In my opinion, that's totally crazy. Given the definition in (1), assumption (2) clearly begs the question. More fundamentally, rather than positively detecting design by any objective measurable properties, ID always seems to end up being the default assumption and "proving" it always ends up being a lame attempt to discredit evolution and declare ID the victor by default.
OK, let's take that to be the threshold. How does one map the properties of the polished black slab to the properties of organisms without assuming one's conclusion or projecting unverifiable properties like "forethought" onto biological systems? What is the biological equivalent of a polished geometric black slab? The problem is that there's no rigorous or even semi-rigorous way to do it at this point, so every ID argument, for all of its mathematical and logical handwaving, boils down to "I know it when I see it." Sure, you might, and it might be totally correct, but that's hardly an objective basis for a scientific pursuit. As it stands, "I know it when I see it" is simply a PR campaign that appeals to "common sense" rather than serious analysis of actual data. Dembski and others claim to have some sort of amazing framework by which to rigorously detect design, but they've failed to demonstrate it in every case and have always fallen back to the "It's obvious to me" defense. I won't say it can't be done, but it's pretty clear to me that it hasn't been done yet.
I'm not sure I'm seeing a "performance as president is independent of intelligence" pattern in your data. Even if there was, it would be surprising to find that being president is the one and only job involving complex decision making that one can be a total gump and still be good at.
I agree there. The main criterion for being able to run the country well is knowing how to surround yourself with very capable experts and listen to their opinions (and occasionally know when to discard those opinions). In my experience, that requires some amount of intelligence, and it's one particular skill that creationists (especially the young earth variety) often don't display particularly well. The common thread of "I'll believe any crap as long as it conforms to my world view, irrespective of the data" has become something of a concern to some of us, given the past few years. All else being equal, give me the smart guy who can critically evaluate bullshit when it's thrown at him.
No, we don't. Full stop. We don't know what "intelligent input" looks like in the abstract. We know what intelligently designed RF signals created by organisms that behave like us look like because we make them and have a reach signal theory that describes them. We know what arrow heads look like because we still know how to make them. We don't know what an intelligently designed strand of DNA or protein looks like as opposed to one that came about due to natural selection. That's the problem. If you're trying to do classification, you need more detail than the ID crowd wants to provide.
If we had no concept of written language, would we be so sure? That's the problem. You're taking something that we obviously know something about (language) and assuming that we can use the same heuristics to classify a set of classes whose parameters are totally uncharacterized. It doesn't work that way. The fact that whenever we ask ID supporters how they'd go about detecting design in life, they go back to examples like "language" or "mechanical devices" and work by analogy makes it abundantly clear that they have no solution for the problem.
Hmmm... nothing came up for that site. Why am I not surprised, though, that an ID supporter has a religious bias? It's not like that's true practically 100% of the time or anything.
I'm not saying that it's not possible that we're the product of some sort of advanced bioengineering. What I'm saying is, the ID folks have no way of investigating that fact as they've framed the problem. For all the detail they've fleshed out, they might as well be appealing to magic. Now, if an ID proponent suggested a mechanism by which we were engineered or something about the methodology or objectives of the designers (something that would leave testable evidence in our design), then we'd be cooking. Until then, it's just philosophical wanking disguised as science in order to trick school boards. The fact that they haven't done something so simple as posit something testable is a strong indicator to me that for all their sound and noise about wanting good science, actually doing science is the last thing on their minds.
Let me tell you how this actually works. By way of background, I'm in the biometrics business. Essentially, I take signals and classify them as "genuine" or "impostor" based on statistical data. It's similar in many ways to what SETI and a bunch of other classification systems do. When you try to classify a pile of data into two sets (genuine/impostor, natural/intelligent design, fair dice/loa
The real problem is trying to get an ID proponent pinned down on some sort of specific claim. Until that can be done, ID is essentially just a clever way of rejecting evolution on religious grounds while making it seem scientifically sound to do so.
Let me suggest this: Come up with a meaningful way to "test" a life form for intelligent input, and we'll start there. It's not as if somebody is proposing a test and being silenced. There are just a bunch of people saying that somewhere, somehow, something is wrong with evolution and thus an intelligent agent must exist. SETI and archeology do very specific things that are not really cleanly analogous to ID. In both cases, we're looking for an intelligent agent that makes things (tools/signals/etc.) that have a definable profile: They make stuff like we make stuff. They're solving a classification problem, and in a classification problem, you have to have some idea of what both of your classes look like. ID has no such luck. They have "nature" and "not nature" and they're trying to take a chunk of what appears to be nature and define it as "not nature" by simply taking all the complex stuff out of nature and defining it as designed.
Basically, I seriously doubt that any insurance scheme where the payout is the norm could be made to work. It works with the government because the government is the people of the USA, and the people of the USA reap all of the rewards that come from the occasional success, so it's a net win overall. I doubt that we could work out a system in which private corporations pay for insurance that almost always pays out for bad research and steals all of the profits from good research.