The Fine-Tuning and Design Catch-22

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@EricMH

If you define CSI as “that which requires intelligence to create” then your argument is completely circular. Dr. Swamidass has pointed this out to you multiple times I believe.

If you’ve been reading my posts carefully you’d know this is not what I’m saying. But you seem to, like @swamidass, be more interested in beating on ID than understanding it.

That is not what is happening it all.

I’m seeing math errors everywhere in these information arguments. I cannot make sense of a mathematical argument with obvious math errors. These are unequivocal errors that ID proponents are very resistant to seeing. Look at this exchange…

@swamidass

The wikipedia page you reference does NOT define KL as the difference in entropy between to probability distributions. Why would you keep saying that when you can just look at the page and see that it is defined differently? It is defined, just as I explained before.

Yes I am totally exasperated as I say this to @kirk. We’ve had email exchanges before. This might be around the 10th time I’ve explained to him that he has the math wrong here. It took literally writing out the equations:

@swamidass

@kirk is it possible that you are mistaking this:

@swamidass

for this?

@swamidass

Notice the switch from p to q in the first term. KL looks a lot like a delta H, but it most definitively is not.

At that point he writes:

@Kirk

@swamidass You nailed it. I totally missed that. Thank you for pointing that out. I see now that that definition is consistent with the other definitions of K_L; it is always positive. My apologies for the time wasted and I appreciate you pinpointing the problem.

Remember I deal with PhD students all the time. This is a very abnormal experience for me. I love teaching students. I am good at it. It usually does not take this much effort to get someone to see a mathematical error. Something else is at play here, but I don’t know how to name it.

To @Kirk’s credit, I do not think he is dishonest. I do not think you are dishonest either. It looks instead like he genuinely couldn’t see the blazingly clear error I could see. For years I’ve been watching him argue (and watching others parrot him) that 1 + 1 = 3 (metaphorically), where it is just so obvious that this is false to me.

Now, having realized a dramatic and foundational error in his math and understanding, I’m taken a back by the claim that this is just “minor,” and then charge into a direct error that arises from not understanding the consequences of the first correction:

@Kirk

since we are talking about only one site, it won’t be hundreds of bits. MaxEnt = 4.32 bits. Using MaxEnt as the ground state, we would get 4.32-4.2 = 0.12 bits, a gain in functional information for that particular site. However, that would be the incorrect way to measure the change in information from P53 in a healthy cell to P53 in a cancerous cell. The ground state for P53 in a healthy cell is not MaxEnt; it is the functional state.

As I explain to him here:

@swamidass

I disagree. This has to do with the fact that you’ve only worked out the math assuming that KL = delta H. Now you realize this not the case, you have rework out the math. It turns out that the true amount of information is much more. This mathematical error we just caught has a massive ripple effect on all the calculations.

It has been the same issue with your work @EricMH. This is my bread and butter. I’m really good at computational biology, and coming up with how to leverage information theory to solve real problems here. I know how this works. I read the ID information theory work and it is just making mathematical errors.

So I am not attacking ID. I’m just saying that ID certainly does not benefit from fallacious arguments based on math errors. And yes, I do understand ID arguments. I’ve engaged with you guys far more than any one else with this level of training, right?