From: Damien Broderick (thespike@satx.rr.com)
Date: Sat Mar 18 2006 - 14:47:11 MST
At 03:21 PM 3/18/2006 -0600, Brian wrote:
>Section 2 here is mostly just sour grapes... I
>mean really, complaining that this book had the
>audacity to use data that you yourself compiled.
No. His complaint (justified or otherwise) is that Ray *mis*used his data.
>In Summary
>
>All four summary bullet points seem to be
>utterly destroyed by the misunderstanding of
>shifting paradigms, and S curve upon new S
>curve, and the fact that in many cases the
>curves Kurzweil shows are meta curves that
>subsume these multiple paradigms into one graph.
The most disturbing instance is that this works
only if the data points are independent; Modis notes that:
< The data consist of fourteen sets of milestones
in the evolution of the universe, which I
researched. But while I strived for the data to
come from independent sources I did not succeed
very well. Two sets were not independent and I
made that clear in my articles. ...
Any hard-core scientist would try to double-check
the quality of the data that support his or her
central thesis and/or estimate the uncertainties
involved. Kurzweil does neither. Instead he
augments the number of data sets by one adding
the set from my second publication-which is the
average of 13 of the previous data sets-and thus
boasts evidence from 15 *independent* sources! >
No big deal? Maybe, but it suggests less than
rigorous scrutiny of his sources by Ray or his researchers.
Damien
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:56 MDT