Nonreducible complexity is a concept put forward by the Intellegent Design advocates. So far, all the examples of irreducible complexity (the exact term they use) aren't really irreducible.
If you have a specific example of irreducible complexity, I'll give it a shot. The famous example given is the eye, which has been shown to be a) useful in all intermediate stages and b) existant in nature in all intermediate stages.
But your analogy to a lottery winner is silly.
The analogy is a tool meant to illustrate, not to argue. When one takes the metaphor too far, it breaks. Specifically, when I used the lottery metaphor, I was making the point that it would not be logical to assume that the lottery maker intended Bob XXX to win when he designed the lottery. There was no further implications of my lottery example, and none should be drawn. I am aware that the lottery is indeed an intelligently designed thing, but to say that my example supports intelligent design is to stretch the metaphor past the breaking point.
I repeat, the analogy was only to illustrate my point. The argument is not the same thing as the analogy.
Let me rephrase the argument without the lottery in it:
We are here 12 billion years after the event at the start of the universe. There are many things that have happened in that time, and all of them have so far led to us on this little planet. The probability of this exact chain occurring is very small. So small, that some of us think that it wasn't an accident. Some of us think that an intelligent being MUST have started the universe in such a way that it resulted in people on this little planet.
This particular outcome is a result of a chain of unlikely events, and each of those events is just as likely as any other. When we look back, it's not proper to say that there's a 99.99% chance that we weren't here, but a 0.01% chance that we are here. You have to remember that the liklihood of all the small events is exactly the same, and that one of those events must happen.
(Here I interject the analogy again, in a different form. Note that it's not an argument, just an example of the argument given in the paragraph above. I do not argue by analogy, therefore it is not logical to make suppositions about my analogy to disprove my argument. This is why you can't point out the fact that a lottery need not occur and expect that it refutes my argument. It does not.)
When I roll the percentage dice in D&D (if you never played, it's two 10 sided dice, read off and interpreted as a two digit percentile number), and I get a '37', the odds of that happening are very remote. Only 1 in 100. What are the chances of that happening? Is it logical to assume that an intelligence ordained that the '37' should be rolled? No, because we realise that all numbers are equally likely to be rolled, and that no matter how unlikely, once the dice are rolled a percentage must come up.
(end of the analogy, used for illustration only)
Finally, if some other sequence of events resulted in a lifeless universe, then we wouldn't be around to ask about the intelligent designer. Nevertheless, the universe would still be here.
If that's the kind of things that happened at computer companies in the 1980's, I can totally understand why all the engineers were trying so hard to build smaller computers.
This shouldn't have been modded down to -1 Flamebait.
I disagree with Intelliegent Design, but this person brought up something that he considers interesting, and I think the discussion about it is also interesting.
Slashdot has no moderation for ideas that are wrong, or those that you don't agree with. And this certainly wasn't a flamebait.
Will someone please mod this UP with the interesting mod? It may be wrong, but IMHO, it should be at about a +3 Interesting.
It's not possible to derive a meaning from a single species in the universe that's strong enough to deserve the words "definitely put here for a reason". It would be more likely that development of life is very improbable. Please see my other post in this thread for why improbable things don't indicate an intelligent designer.
Intelligent design should be 3 or 4 cuckoos, because for every argument that exists in favor of ID, there's a better argument that shows why that argument is a fallacy.
For example, the argument you gave about the extremely unlikely odds that we would be here is trivial to refute. ANY event that happens is dependent on an extremely unlikely chain of events. Any little shift in that chain, and poof, the entire thing is completely different. For example, a big lotto win for Bob XXX in Des Moines is an extremely unlikely event. The odds against it are unimaginable, and any little change would have made Bob XXX lose the lottery. Even a little molecular sized disturbance in the airflow propelling those little balls would have done it. Nevertheless, people win the lottery almost every week. They beat the unimaginable odds.
After Bob XXX won the lottery, would Bob be justified in thinking that he won the lottery due to intelligent design? No, because if he didn't win the lottery, either someone else would have won, or nobody would have won. When he looks back at his lottery win, it's hard for him to see that *all* the possibilities were equally unlikely to happen, but one of those possibilities *must* happen.
When you add up the probabilities of every extremely unlikely event, you always come out to exactly 1.
Please, present more arguments, and I will present the superior counter-argument. Intelligent design is very interesting to think about, and studying it can be an instructive act in itself.
"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. Ah, fuck it. How about we just increase profits by 3% next quarter?" -- Pres. Kennedy, May 25, 1961
I hope the Chinese people take control back soon, so China can regain some of its former glory.
This one sentence is the root of so much misery and bloodshed in history. It's called nationalism.
What law of nature says that everything that was glorious in the past must be glorious in the future? None. It's the ambition of people that says that China must be great because China was great.
Unfortunately, there's not enough space for every country to fill out to the maximum extent of historical borders. But that doesn't stop people from trying. Or dying.
You're here willingly. You can remove yourself from taxation by leaving. Unlike un-free countries, Americans are free to leave the country without special permission.
Since you're here, you are consenting to live by the laws of the land.
If you want to go to a place that doesn't have such opressive taxation, there are places in Pakistan where no tax-man has set foot in 50 years. It's a veritable Libertarian paradise!
And it's impossible for Bush to have been in Iraq. The sand would not support the weight of his aircraft, and would have disappeared under the surface of the desert.
Seems like a lot of things make caffeine. How does the level in the middle of the ocean compare? How about areas away from human habitation? The researchers think the caffeine comes from humans, but I don't see enough information in the article to know anything about the source.
Such term does not include telecommunications serv
on
Who Is An ISP?
·
· Score: 1
"Such term does not include telecommunications services."
That's all of it, since moving bits around on the Internet is a telecommunications service. No wonder spammers love this bill. Everyone who would give a rat about it can't sue them.
So do what I will do: run 2.4.x until 2.6.x gets into maintenance and the issues are ironed out. Remember how 2.4.x went? Some of the early versions would trash your hard disk. Now those problems are gone.
Have you run dual in Linux? I've been thinking about doing that. I have used dual monitors in Windows and besides the cramping of my style, I thought it was a huge improvement.
A long time ago I have a pentium-133 that would not boot from a CD-ROM. I bought a Mr. Bios upgrade and that fixed the problem. It looks like they are in the same business, and you can still buy new BIOS chips for your computer. The brand then and now is "Unicore".
BTW, the Mr. Bios had about 3 times as many configuration options as the old AMI bios that I replaced. And the manual it came with explained them quite well. For $70 I thought it was a good product, and it extended my use of my motherboard for 3 years.
Slashdot Mirror
the nonreducible complexity problem
Nonreducible complexity is a concept put forward by the Intellegent Design advocates. So far, all the examples of irreducible complexity (the exact term they use) aren't really irreducible.
If you have a specific example of irreducible complexity, I'll give it a shot. The famous example given is the eye, which has been shown to be a) useful in all intermediate stages and b) existant in nature in all intermediate stages.
But your analogy to a lottery winner is silly.
The analogy is a tool meant to illustrate, not to argue. When one takes the metaphor too far, it breaks. Specifically, when I used the lottery metaphor, I was making the point that it would not be logical to assume that the lottery maker intended Bob XXX to win when he designed the lottery. There was no further implications of my lottery example, and none should be drawn. I am aware that the lottery is indeed an intelligently designed thing, but to say that my example supports intelligent design is to stretch the metaphor past the breaking point.
I repeat, the analogy was only to illustrate my point. The argument is not the same thing as the analogy.
Let me rephrase the argument without the lottery in it:
We are here 12 billion years after the event at the start of the universe. There are many things that have happened in that time, and all of them have so far led to us on this little planet. The probability of this exact chain occurring is very small. So small, that some of us think that it wasn't an accident. Some of us think that an intelligent being MUST have started the universe in such a way that it resulted in people on this little planet.
This particular outcome is a result of a chain of unlikely events, and each of those events is just as likely as any other. When we look back, it's not proper to say that there's a 99.99% chance that we weren't here, but a 0.01% chance that we are here. You have to remember that the liklihood of all the small events is exactly the same, and that one of those events must happen.
(Here I interject the analogy again, in a different form. Note that it's not an argument, just an example of the argument given in the paragraph above. I do not argue by analogy, therefore it is not logical to make suppositions about my analogy to disprove my argument. This is why you can't point out the fact that a lottery need not occur and expect that it refutes my argument. It does not.)
When I roll the percentage dice in D&D (if you never played, it's two 10 sided dice, read off and interpreted as a two digit percentile number), and I get a '37', the odds of that happening are very remote. Only 1 in 100. What are the chances of that happening? Is it logical to assume that an intelligence ordained that the '37' should be rolled? No, because we realise that all numbers are equally likely to be rolled, and that no matter how unlikely, once the dice are rolled a percentage must come up.
(end of the analogy, used for illustration only)
Finally, if some other sequence of events resulted in a lifeless universe, then we wouldn't be around to ask about the intelligent designer. Nevertheless, the universe would still be here.
If that's the kind of things that happened at computer companies in the 1980's, I can totally understand why all the engineers were trying so hard to build smaller computers.
This shouldn't have been modded down to -1 Flamebait.
I disagree with Intelliegent Design, but this person brought up something that he considers interesting, and I think the discussion about it is also interesting.
Slashdot has no moderation for ideas that are wrong, or those that you don't agree with. And this certainly wasn't a flamebait.
Will someone please mod this UP with the interesting mod? It may be wrong, but IMHO, it should be at about a +3 Interesting.
It's not possible to derive a meaning from a single species in the universe that's strong enough to deserve the words "definitely put here for a reason". It would be more likely that development of life is very improbable. Please see my other post in this thread for why improbable things don't indicate an intelligent designer.
Intelligent design should be 3 or 4 cuckoos, because for every argument that exists in favor of ID, there's a better argument that shows why that argument is a fallacy.
For example, the argument you gave about the extremely unlikely odds that we would be here is trivial to refute. ANY event that happens is dependent on an extremely unlikely chain of events. Any little shift in that chain, and poof, the entire thing is completely different. For example, a big lotto win for Bob XXX in Des Moines is an extremely unlikely event. The odds against it are unimaginable, and any little change would have made Bob XXX lose the lottery. Even a little molecular sized disturbance in the airflow propelling those little balls would have done it. Nevertheless, people win the lottery almost every week. They beat the unimaginable odds.
After Bob XXX won the lottery, would Bob be justified in thinking that he won the lottery due to intelligent design? No, because if he didn't win the lottery, either someone else would have won, or nobody would have won. When he looks back at his lottery win, it's hard for him to see that *all* the possibilities were equally unlikely to happen, but one of those possibilities *must* happen.
When you add up the probabilities of every extremely unlikely event, you always come out to exactly 1.
Please, present more arguments, and I will present the superior counter-argument. Intelligent design is very interesting to think about, and studying it can be an instructive act in itself.
Slashdot: nearly 700,000 cuckoos.
"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. Ah, fuck it. How about we just increase profits by 3% next quarter?"
-- Pres. Kennedy, May 25, 1961
Forgive me for saying this, but why did you get a TiVo then?
I thought that everyone was like me and bought the TiVo specifically so they could avoid the advertisements.
If I never see another BOWFLEX commercial it would be too soon.
I hope the Chinese people take control back soon, so China can regain some of its former glory.
This one sentence is the root of so much misery and bloodshed in history. It's called nationalism.
What law of nature says that everything that was glorious in the past must be glorious in the future? None. It's the ambition of people that says that China must be great because China was great.
Unfortunately, there's not enough space for every country to fill out to the maximum extent of historical borders. But that doesn't stop people from trying. Or dying.
Then stop calling taxation illegitimate. We've defined it as legitimate here, and to say that it's not is to argue against definition.
You're here willingly. You can remove yourself from taxation by leaving. Unlike un-free countries, Americans are free to leave the country without special permission.
Since you're here, you are consenting to live by the laws of the land.
If you want to go to a place that doesn't have such opressive taxation, there are places in Pakistan where no tax-man has set foot in 50 years. It's a veritable Libertarian paradise!
You have obviously been brainwashed by the liberals who are too blind to see that the answer to all our problems is more guns.
The angle of the STUDIO LIGHTS you mean.
And it's impossible for Bush to have been in Iraq. The sand would not support the weight of his aircraft, and would have disappeared under the surface of the desert.
Seems like a lot of things make caffeine. How does the level in the middle of the ocean compare? How about areas away from human habitation? The researchers think the caffeine comes from humans, but I don't see enough information in the article to know anything about the source.
"Such term does not include telecommunications services."
That's all of it, since moving bits around on the Internet is a telecommunications service. No wonder spammers love this bill. Everyone who would give a rat about it can't sue them.
Forget estimation, I'll give an exact answer.
I'm prettier than her anyway.
Come on, give me the good stuff. Obviously, I'm staying here, and you're not going to need it, right?
What other states might be getting vouchers in the future? I could use some new equipment.
In case of rapture, can I have your computers?
So do what I will do: run 2.4.x until 2.6.x gets into maintenance and the issues are ironed out. Remember how 2.4.x went? Some of the early versions would trash your hard disk. Now those problems are gone.
Have you run dual in Linux? I've been thinking about doing that. I have used dual monitors in Windows and besides the cramping of my style, I thought it was a huge improvement.
don't go for the atmosphere. go for the food.
Schandenfreude
Stop it with the intellectual bukkake.
A long time ago I have a pentium-133 that would not boot from a CD-ROM. I bought a Mr. Bios upgrade and that fixed the problem. It looks like they are in the same business, and you can still buy new BIOS chips for your computer. The brand then and now is "Unicore".
BTW, the Mr. Bios had about 3 times as many configuration options as the old AMI bios that I replaced. And the manual it came with explained them quite well. For $70 I thought it was a good product, and it extended my use of my motherboard for 3 years.