Re: Who's Burden of Proof?

glennmorton@entouch.net wrote:

> ---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
> From: Walter Hicks <wallyshoes@mindspring.com>
> Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2003 23:56:47 -0500
> >You do give us rise to some doubts on occasion.., Glenn :).
> >
> >So you live in a chancy field of endeavor!! It does not follow that "design" itself is is a "chance" process!
>
> It doesn't follow from anything that chance can't be used in a design process.
>
> >
> >
> >And you, Glenn Morton, should become more educated in the processes followed by design engineers (The ones who developed the tools that you use!!). To brazenly proclaim that design engineers use "chance" in design is the absolute height of stupidity! If you expect people to believe that stuff that you publish, then you will have to become much far-far-far more astute about the design process!!
>
> Many of the tools I use in my business are built upon chance, if by that one means a probabilistic process. It has been that way from the beginning. Our job as geophysicists is to deduce the structure and lithology of the subsurface without actually drilling a well (e.g. pre-drill), and predict correctly what we will find. All we have is soundwaves which bounce off the rocks. The reflection coefficient at each rock interface is determined by the product of density times velocity, which is the accoustical impedance of the rock. There is an infinite number of mathematical patterns which will produce the acoustic pattern we observe at the earth's surface, but we can narrow down which patterns are closer to reality by a variety of statistical (read that probilistic) techniques. Deconvolution, which is a mathematical process I won't bore people with defining, tries to determine which reflections are real and which ones are echoes. It determines this probabilistically. Th!
e o
> utput of that becomes the input to the inversion process which takes the seismic and turns it into an accoustical impedance volume, from which we can deduce certain lithological properties.
>
> And this isn't just being done in the geophysics world. It is being done by drug companies to screen new drugs--chance mutation and then testing. Design today does involve darwinian selection and random mutation. You are thinking only of a 1960s style of design for very simple problems.
>
> >
> >Now, I may not be a geologist, but I currently know about 30 - 40 dB more than you will ever know about the design process of the tools used by others -- including the softer sciences like yours.!!
> >
> >Stick to digging wells (using chance) and analyze what others have done before you. Other thinking is clearly beyond the scope of your current knowledge -- which is obviously outdated ;).
>
> Don't think I will because your concept of design is outdated or applicable only to very simple problems, not the complex multivariate problems most of the rest of the world faces.
>
> Amazingly, even the YEC John Baumgardner came to my defense on this at the Nature of Nature conference in 2000 when Dembski tried to say the thing you are saying. Dembski denied that chance could be involved in design. Baumgarder, to my amazement, told Dembski that at Los Alamos the engineers were using random variation in designs to find more efficient designs. And that that process worked. Maybe you should look around more at what other fields are doing.

I concede the point, since I have used more than one variety of a "random search" to solve optimization problems. I just got in a snit over your comments and was rude. I apologize. and hereby award you a third "n", Glennn.

;)

Walt

--
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Walt Hicks <wallyshoes@mindspring.com>
In any consistent theory, there must
exist true but not provable statements.
(Godel's Theorem)
You can only find the truth with logic
If you have already found the truth
without it. (G.K. Chesterton)
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