Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Barry Arrington: A Walking Dunning-Kruger Effect


The wonderful thing about lawyer and CPA Barry Arrington taking over the ID creationist blog, Uncommon Descent, is that he's so completely clueless about nearly everything. He truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

For example, here Barry claims, "Kolmogorov complexity is a measure of randomness (i.e., probability). Don’t believe me? Just ask your buddy Jeffrey Shallit (see here)".

Barry doesn't have even a glimmer about why he's completely wrong. In contrast to Shannon, Kolmogorov complexity is a completely probability-free theory of information. That is, in fact, its virtue: it assigns a measure of complexity that is independent of a probability distribution. It makes no sense at all to say Kolmogorov is a "measure of randomness (i.e., probability)". You can define a certain probability measure based on Kolmogorov complexity, but that's another matter entirely.

But that's Barry's M. O.: spout nonsense, never admit he's wrong, claim victory, and ban dissenters. I'm guessing he'll apply the same strategy here. If there's any better example of how a religion-addled mind works, I don't know one.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

The link is broken. Perhaps the post was deleted?

MNb said...

The link to BA's article doesn't work. It seems that he has removed the article. That's remarkable, as he seems to you like you very much:

http://www.uncommondescent.com/?s=Jeffrey+Shallit

Rkt said...

That's no problem, it is cached:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-qRqpAYeJiYJ:www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/keiths-the-gift-that-keeps-on-giving-to-id/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk

Mikkel Rumraket Rasmussen said...

Oh man, Barry is one funny man. Kids, this is your brain on religionism.

Fawad umair said...

this link is not avaible bro check your link

holy book

Jeffrey Shallit said...

It's not available because Barry silently deleted his own post.