Barry Arrington recently got the drive by around these here parts. Now he has another post up on UD that is basically a more self-indulgent expansion of the stupidity he displayed in the post that inspired my shorter. In an attempt to rescue Dembski’s “Complex Specified Information” from the (correct) charge that it is a vague and useless quantity, Arrington makes claims like this:
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the concepts [utility in economics and CSI] are very much the same. We can all agree that the concept of “utility maximization” is very important and represents a real phenomenon. But while we can say of utility there is a lot, there is a little, or there is none at all, there is no way to measure it precisely. The “util” is useful as a hypothetical measure of relative utility, but it has no value as an “actual” unit of measurement, such as inches, pounds, meters, or grams.
I’ve come to expect that most arguments in favor of pseudoscience will invoke a complete caricature of their detractor’s position. The problem with Dembski’s CSI is not that it lacks a dedicated unit of measurement. No other informatic measure I’m familiar with has one either, it is really more a matter of convention that binary encodings tend to be used (one of the impressive properties of Kolmogorov complexity is that it is subadditively invariant from one computational model to the next). The problem with Dembski’s CSI is that it is so vague that no one really knows what they’re measuring. This is compounded by the fact that most people who invoke CSI don’t seem to be measuring anything but rather self-indulgently eyeballing pretty pictures.
With utility in economics, we at least know what we’re looking for. Utility is the benefit of good or service to consumer, and as a function it interacts with cost. Economists use functions to measure both, differentiate to find marginal functions (the instantaneous response of the value of one variable to changes in the value of others), use those functions to measure phenomena such as elasticity, etc.. Regardless of the disputed predictive value the mathematical models have, economists at least have a pretty clear idea of what they’re supposed to represent. Not so with CSI, which is really not much more than a fancy sounding phrase to dress up an argument from ignorance.
He moves on to extrude what has to be the most confused tripe I’ve seen on UD in a long time, and that’s saying something:
Similarly, of CSI we can say it is present or it is not present. That is what the explanatory filter does. In some cases we can estimate relative CSI if we are able to calculate the bits of information present in the two instances. But not usually. Consider a space shuttle and a bicycle. Both obviously show CSI and a design inference is inescapable with respect to each. It is also obvious that the space shuttle contains vastly more CSI than the bicycle. But if one asks me “how much more CSI is there in a space shuttle than in a bicycle?” the only satisfactory answer it seems to me is “a lot more.” I could posit a measure of CSI – call it an “info” – and say the space shuttle contains 100 infos of CSI and the bicycle contains only 10 infos. But this is certainly a meaningless game. Actually, it is more than meaningless. It is affirmatively harmful, because the game gives an illusion of precise measurement where there can be none.
Unfortunately, the nixplanatory filter does no such thing. Most people who encounter space shuttles or bicycles conclude that they are designed because they are familiar with space shuttles and bicycles and their status as human inventions (both in relatively recent history). Dembski fanbois love to play the game of importing a scenario in which they are already familiar with the causal history of the object and declaring it a victory for CSI. In the real world, we call this approach “retrofitting”. Does CSI have predictive power in scenarios in which we don’t have the benefit of knowing the outcome in advance? Such hasn’t been demonstrated, and that’s the problem. CSI is really just a meaningless buzz-phrase that IDists slapped onto Paley’s worn-out watchmaker drum to sex it up for a time when “information” and “complexity” themselves became popular buzz-phrases.
