Re: Your Communication Problems

On 2005-08-08, Stephen Montgomery-Smith <stephen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I am now going to admit that I honestly don't know if you ToE guys are
> right or not, and I will go back and look at the evidence (which may
> well take me a lot of time.)
>
> In the meantime, permit me to make a few observations as to why you
> guys are doing quite so badly in the public eye. You really want to
> listen to this - not get defensive - but use me as resource. I do have
> a reasonably keen sense of science, but I also have a good feeling for
> the fundamentalist mindset.

I find these two declarations to be inherently in conflict, but continue...

> I really think that I can help you. So instead of your usual snotty
> remarks that some of you make, why don't you ask me honest probing
> questions?
>
> Let me start with a story that I think will illustrate my point.
>
> About a year ago there appeared in my local paper "The Columbia
> Tribune" an article written by university professors called
> "Intelligent Design is Not Science." (Looking back I can now see that
> the article failed to make a clear distinction between the I.D.
> paradigm, which might or might not have merit, and the I.D. movement,
> which I can agree with you that at least some of its members are
> charletons.)
>
> Now this article had a web site where I could find a list of profs who
> had signed on to this article. One of these was a good friend of mine,
> so I went to visit him and asked if he could explain the evidence of
> evolution. He told me that actually he didn't really know too much
> about the subject, and that he had signed it because he saw the article
> as being essentially anti-Bush. This was definitely a dissapointing
> experience for me.

Who was this professor?

You do realize that however convincing this personal anectdote might have
been for you, it's hardly going to be convincing to anyone else, don't you?

> You guys are really having problems, because a lot of scientifically
> trained professionals are buying into this I.D. paradigm. For example,
> I notice that many graduate math students are christians like I am (I
> would be happy to use the label "fundamentalist" but I don't think that
> they would be - so please regard "fundamentalist" as a label, not as
> necessarily descriptive). Another example - I get the sense that a
> large proportion of the engineering faculty and grad students are
> pro-Bush, and surely in many ways he is your worst enemy.

Mathematicians are by and large not scientists. They are certainly not
biologists. I wouldn't expect biologists to conjecture meaningfully on
the Riemann hypothesis, so I don't expect mathematicians to be biologists.

> Indeed many years ago, I looked at a book called something like "After
> the Flood" written by out and out creationist scientists (young earth,
> etc). Even though I have taken many science classes in school, it
> became obvious to me that I simply didn't have the scientific
> background to be able to make a genuine assessment.

Wow, you have to be pretty damned ignorant to be able to seriously avoid
rejecting the Flood.

> And if I didn't
> have this background, you can be sure that a large number of other
> scientific professionals (doctors, economists, agriculturalists,
> mathematicians, physicists) also don't have this background.

Hubris?

> I mean, I
> did get this sense that the photos of men's footprints next to dinasour
> footprints was fishy, but this was simply based upon a "smell" sense,
> and nothing more.

You might be more convincing if you could at least spell "dinosaur".

> Now you guys do have this faq which tries to explain the ideas. But
> (1) it is written either over-simplistically or over-technically, and
> (2) large parts of it are very vitreolic. If I come in as someone with
> an open mind who really just wants to know, it is hard for me to
> seperate out the science. I also get the sense that someone is trying
> to put something over me.

Someone is. That's why the FAQ is at times vitriolic.

> This communication method shows in your newsgroup. So, in sci.math, we
> get a lot of posts about how 1 is not 0.999..., or about their latest
> short proof of Fermat's last theorem. Now sure, these guys do get a
> lot of snotty remarks. But they also get a very large number of
> posters who very patiently try to explain to them why their argument is
> wrong. Most times this patience is wasted, but once in a while it
> really pays off. And despite the overwhelming bad experiences, these
> teachers simply never seem to give up in their attempts to help these
> people.
>
> On the contrary, when I ask for the evidence on your group, I mostly
> got snotty remarks, or huge web sites - just the occassional person
> really tries to help. It might be that the evidence is just too
> technical and hard to explain in short emails, I don't know. But this
> lack of ability to explain your position "standing on one foot" is a
> big negative.

There are plenty of people who patiently explain things to those honestly
trying to pursue knowledge.

> Indeed, it was most disheartening to see the argument between Ken Shaw
> and Rich Townsend on the other thread which I started. For starters it
> was just very difficult for me to see precisely where they disagreed -
> it was almost as if they carefully studied each other's posts looking
> hard for reasons to be offended. In one place, I got this sense where
> Rich was begging Ken (and here I openly admit I am putting words into
> his mouth, but) "I love ToE and I'm sure that it is a great theory, but
> please, can you give me some examples where ToE's ability to predict is
> as amazing as is the theory of atoms." Yes, I thought, I cannot wait
> for Ken's answer - this will really help me. But it didn't help one
> bit. I do understand that it is "apples and oranges" but there wasn't
> even an attempt.

If a particular discussion is not helpful to you, you are under no obligation
to consider it.

Mark
>
> Stephen

.

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