Eliezer,

Well, let me see. Where shall I start?

Tooby is not an evolutionary biologist or population geneticist. He is an evolutionary psychologist. This screed from 1997 is about half a whine about Gould's treatment of some of his work. Perhaps the whine is justified, but it is a whine, and most of the rest of it is off-base. The argument about inverted panadaptationism is simply wrong, as a perusal of Gould's 1400 page plus magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, will tell. BTW, Tooby does not make it into the 43 page bibliography of that book, although Williams is discussed at great length and with great respect in it. I would note also that Williams altered his views somewhat between 1966 and his 1992 book. (Just for the record, I like the main book by Cosmides and Tooby.)

Krugman? Excuse me. He admits himself that he does not know much about evolutionary theory. He spends most of his talk noting the similarities between neoclassical economics and the Dawkins view of evolution, praising it. Except of course at the end he notes that it does not always work, and the messier, non-Dawkins stories are sometimes better. Duh.

Sure, there are some people who really dislike Gould (Dawkins, Dennett, and some others) who will make these statements about Gould not being respected by other evolutionary theorists. But his main idea, punctuated equilibrium, has entered the textbooks and is more studied and discussed than ever. Sorry, this is just whinging by the jealous or those who deeply disagree with him (Dawkins especially).

Oh, and as for me being taken in by bluffs, well, I have written on this stuff and have cited Williams, Hamilton, Maynard Smith, and numerous others, beyond those that Krugman claims are not cited by evolutionary economists, as well as Eldredge and Gould.

Finally, I have actually spoken with some of the most senior and distinguished evolutionary theorists, including some now dead. While Gould is often treated with some bemusement for his celebrity and eccentricities and the peculiar evolution of his views, I have not found these people viewing him as worthless or as having a rep worth mud. This is just silly bilge and drivel.

Finally, I would recommend you read Chapter 9 (I know, it is almost 300 pages long) of Gould's magnum opus. He does an excellent job of covering most of these controversies, with a fair amount of mea culpas for some of his own misstatements over the years. A lot more fair-minded than the junk in your post or in your links, frankly.

Well, this is partly a matter of what discipline one is dealing with. So, sure, for AI or computer science more generally, Kolmogorov or Chaitin or Rissanen measures are more useful and reasonably well defined. For other disciplines, other definitions may be more suitable. Thus for economics, I have (following Richard Day) defined complexity in a dynamic way based on erratic dynamics appearing endogenously out of the system (with "erratic" defined more specifically). I laid this out in a paper in 1999 in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and have a more recent paper up on my website ("Computational and Dynamic Perspectives on Economic Complexity") comparing the two approaches, at http://cob.jmu.edu/rosserjb.

Hmmm, well there is an endogeneity problem in that the believability of the police commissioner's statement depends on the degree to which it constitutes legal evidence. To the extent it constitutes legal evidence, it may be less believable precisely because this give police commissioners power that they may be exercising in corrupt and power-hungry ways. A statement that cannot be seen to potentially provide some personal gain to the person making it presumably has greater credibility.

Although it is almost always the case, I can imagine legal evidence that is not necessarily scientific. The problem in my mind is precisely this bad memory of witnesses problem. I guess we have to say that an eye witness account, under oath, is "scientific." It certain is legal evidence, although potentially challangeable by countervailing testimony or evidence. However, a scientist might be more willing to be skeptical, e.g. all those alien encounter accounts that are being discussed in other postings.

BTW, in regard to an earlier thread by Eliezer, of course "norm" does have various mathematical meanings, including the length of a vector (or multi-dimensional equivalent of "absolute value"), and there is the process of "renormalization" in algebra, which has some importance in several theories of physics. However, I remain unconvinced that any of these play an important role in establishing the earlier argument.

Eliezer,

Fair enough. You get credit, then, for coining the term. However, the problem remains, why should that equals sign be there? Sure, if you put it there, the logic holds up, my niggles about Bayes' Theorem and time to convergence and all that aside. But, it is not clear at all that the equals sign should be there, or is there in any meaningfully regular way. Your defense has been to cite an essentially empirical argument by Robin. But that empirical argument is much contested in many arenas. Sure, Burton Malkiel posed that financial markets are a random walk, but that argument has undergone a lot of modifications since he first posed it in a best-selling paperback. In that regard, your proof essentially amounts to one of these "proofs" of the existence of God, wherein the proof arises from another assumption that gets snuck in the backdoor that gets one the result, but that is itself as questionable or unprovable, much like the old complaint by Joan Robinson about the magician making a big deal about pulling the rabbit out of the hat after having put it into the hat in full view of the audience.

Eliezer,

I just googled "law of conservation of expected evidence." This blog came up. Nothing else like it. Frankly, I don't think you are selling a law here. You are asserting one that nobody else is aware of.

Stuart,

Argentina recently defaulted and all but got away with it. Yes, there were demonstrations in the streets, but there are also on a regular basis in the US. What is your definition of "civil disorder" then? Elections were held, there was no revolution or coup.

In fact, the Argentine example might yet come to mind in the next decade if not-so friendly foreign creditors start to give the US a hard time. I think it was Keynes who argued that if you owe somebody a million dollars you have a problem, but if you owe him a trillion dollars, he has a problem (have changed the numbers to account for inflation). We could default and view it as "screw them" act.

Stuart Armstrong,

I think you are way overstating things. Did you read earlier comments? Are you aware how close we came to defaulting in the 1990s when Congress and the president gridlocked over a budget? We have a systemic setup in contrast with all those countries with parliamentary systems that could let it happen much more easily with nothing near some kind of horrendous catastrophe. And if we began to experience some kind of serious pressure from a foreign creditor, China anyone? on top of some internal deep conflict and economic problems (and US politics is not all polarized, now is it?), it could happen.

Regarding this business of the foreign creditors, there is an important reason why most Americans simply pay no attention to our mounting foreign indebtedness: up until now the that humongoug foreign net indebtedness has not resulted in a noticeable net deficit on the investment income part of the current account part of the US international balance of payments. However, as that foreign net indebtedness increases, this will inevitably change. When we start to see several hundred billions of dollars flowing on net overseas as interest on that debt, and the accompanying upward pressure on US interest rates start to negatively impact the US economy, there might even be an outright move to do what Argentina did to our bankers, and what New York state did to British bankers back in the nineteenth century regarding the debts for financing the Erie Canal construction: consciously default.

The bottom line on why we even fuss about the "risk-free rate" is that it is a necessary input to the standard formuli for pricing all kinds of options and derivatives via Black=Scholes and its variations. Something has to go in there, even if the wise really do understand that the underlying asset on which that rate is based is not really so risk free after all.

Hopefully Anonymous,

That is according to US based bond raters. A lot of people think there is politics in that. Do you really think the US government is more reliable about paying back its bonds than the Japanese one? Really?

Rather than some blowup like al Qaeda smuggling in nukes, a more likely scenario would be something much more mundane and stupid, e.g. a political gridlock between the President and the Congress, as happened briefly back in the 90s between Clinton and the Newt Gingrich-led House. Various government activities were shut down. It never got far enough to lead to not paying interest on the national debt, but it would not take all that much more of a conflict to do it, especially if we had pressure from abroad, with our humongous foreign debt. It has long been a ridiculous joke that Moody's downgraded the quality of Japanese bonds, when they sit on nearly $1 trillion in forex reserves, while US securities get top rating, while the US owes over $3 trillion abroad, a substantial chunk of that to the Japanese.

Another way of looking at this is to realize that we are all pretty much hard wired to operate in a surface reality that more or less fits a Newtonian-Euclidean model of the world. We now know that this does not hold at high accelerations or at very large or very small scales in a lot of ways. So, these deviations, many of which have been clearly established beyong any doubt, seem weird to most people when they first hear of them, and may even still "feel weird" even after they have long come to intellectually comprehend and accept them.

Heck, even now, after quite a few decades, there is a part of me that finds the simple outcomes implied by special relativity with respect to time dilation still a bit weird at an emotional level, although delightfully and fascinatingly so, even though they are clearly the direct logical implications of the (apparently) "universal" constancy of the speed of light.