Why Dembski should more often look at a mirror
In his reply to the critical comments by Cosma Shalizi, William Dembski asserts that his “dear critics” to whom he has emailed his new paper on Variational Information are not qualified to judge his mathematical breakthroughs. He lists six such “dear critics” - Shallit, Levitt, Wein, Stenger, Schneider, and myself. A question is, if we all are not qualified to appreciate the great achivements of the Isaac Newton of information theory, why did he send his article to us and explicitly requested our opinions? I can’t speak for the rest of the “dear critics” but there is little doubt that at least the three mathematicians on that list are versed better than I in the material of Dembski’s article. I indeed do not claim to be an expert in the subject matter of Dembski’s new paper, nevertheless I had no problem with understanding his paper. There is little doubt that the mathematicians like Shallit, Levitt and Wein must have even less problems with that. As promised in a comment to another thread, I have now posted an essay to TalkReason, which, although is not directly about Dembski’s new paper, contains some material which may shed light on the question of who, Dembski or his critics, is better qualified to judge the merits of his newest mathematical opus - see www.talkreason.org/articles/complexity.pdf .