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knb comments on The Importance of Self-Doubt - Less Wrong
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How would you address this?
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/kurzweil_still_doesnt_understa.php
It seems to me like PZ Meyers really doesn't understand information theory. He's attacking Kurzweil and calling him a kook. Initially due to a relatively straightforward complexity estimate.
And I'm pretty confident that Myers is wrong on this, unless there is another information rich source of inheritance besides DNA, which Meyers knows about but Kurzweil and I do not.
This looks to me like a popular science blogger doing huge PR damage to everything singularity related, and being wrong about it. Even if he is later convinced of this point.
I don't see how to avoid this short of just holding back all claims which seem exceptional and that some 'reasonable' person might fail to understand and see as a sign of cultishness. If we can't make claims as basic as the design of the brain being in the genome, then we may as well just remain silent.
But then we wouldn't find out if we're wrong, and we're rationalists.
Myers has always had a tendency to attack other people's arguments like enemy soldiers. A good example is his take on evolutionary psychology, which he hates so much it is actually funny.
He also claims to have desecrated a consecrated host (the sacramental wafers Catholics consider to be the body of Jesus). That will show those evil theists how a good, rational person behaves!