I want a Machine, into which I can put a book. I would not open the book, just set it on a lit­tle pil­low, and per­haps press a green glow­ing but­ton, or use a lit­tle joy­stick to send it into a big metal tube or some­thing. The lights in the room would be low, and indi­rect; the Machine I Want would be in the mid­dle of a large white expanse of floor. We would be sit­ting at a con­sole, at a dis­tance, not look­ing at the Machine I Want, but rather hunched over the Results Screen.

Expec­tant. Excited. Maybe, I dunno, just a touch concerned.

When the Green But­ton had been pressed or the Small Joy­stick wob­bled appro­pri­ately, rays would come from the heart of the Machine I Want, which would pierce the vol­ume — with­out harm­ing it. Sen­sors would be watch­ing, gath­er­ing ter­abytes of data. A high-​​resolution three-​​dimensional scan (at least 600³ vox­els per cubic inch) would be cre­ated by the Machine I Want’s onboard con­trollers. Oh, regard­ing the rays: if you pre­fer, mag­nets might be involved. That would be good, because there would also be large sweat­ing tanks of liqui­fied gas in the room. This is a mere detail; I would be happy to wait in the next room, gaz­ing expec­tantly down at the con­sole, while your choice of pow­er­ful ener­gies were brought to bear.

Go ahead. Try a few.

Now, before the expec­tant read­ers were shown much on the Results Screen, the result­ing inter­nal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the high-​​resolution 3-​​D scan of the book would first be sent to a mod­er­ately pow­er­ful com­puter in the Machine I Want. Or next to it. There, the pages of the text would be dis­cerned, the char­ac­ters and illus­tra­tions saved, and OCR^†ed.

In the end, a valu­able antique book would not have been busted open like road kill on a hot sum­mer day, just so every page can be apposed to the over-​​small platen of a flatbed scan­ner. Brit­tle or uncut pages would not be dam­aged. Bind­ings would remain intact. That would be nicer than what we have now — which I admit is far nicer than what we had before that.… No, what we have now is an amaz­ing and excel­lent piece of hard­ware, and I expect we will use it hap­pily until I wear it to a lit­tle scanny nub.

But see, it’s not the Machine I Want.

So, any­way… I’m waiting.

Any­body?

---

^†One piece of actual tech­ni­cal util­ity to this post: I find myself won­der­ing if OCR in three dimen­sions is eas­ier or harder than OCR in two dimen­sions. I can see argu­ments for both answers.…

Peo­ple are dumb. They make mis­takes, they mis­lead them­selves, they are merely bound­edly ratio­nal in a com­plex world, they think fuzzily, they rely on heuris­tics that gen­er­al­ize poorly, and they are prone to over-​​reliance on super­sti­tion and mal­adap­tive instincts and pat hack­neyed answers. If you want to know some­thing, don’t walk up to an arbi­trary per­son and ask them to fig­ure it out for you.

In read­ing and com­plain­ing about Kevin Chang’s arti­cles on Intel­li­gent Design in the New York Times, it strikes me that what peo­ple mis­un­der­stand the most about sci­ence is this: We as sci­en­tists expect peo­ple to be wrong, includ­ing our­selves. The sci­en­tific process is not about find­ing the truth, but rather notic­ing and recov­er­ing from the stu­pid mis­takes we make, faster and bet­ter than any­body else can.

The infra­struc­ture of sci­ence, what makes it sci­ence, is no more philo­soph­i­cally com­pli­cated than that: it’s the trans­parency, the pub­lic state­ments of hypothe­ses and results, the check­ing each other, the argu­ments, the peer review. It’s not fal­si­fi­a­bil­ity and what’s a “the­ory” or a “fact”, it’s not pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive heuris­tics and research pro­grammes, it’s not athe­ism and mate­ri­al­ist bias in inter­pret­ing real­ity, it’s not log­i­cal con­se­quences and induc­tion and deduc­tion or even abduc­tion. Sci­ence is all about lis­ten­ing to other peo­ple when they tell you you’re full of shit. It’s about say­ing every­thing in a frame­work designed so that other peo­ple can check it. And it’s about respond­ing grace­fully when they do, inevitably, tell you your shit-​​levels are a bit high, sorry, revise and resub­mit, thank you very much.

That’s the cru­cial point where ID falls on its face. It surely doesn’t man­age to be judged by the same cri­te­ria as sci­en­tific research on evo­lu­tion, or its believ­ers would have vast bib­li­ogra­phies of rea­son­able papers in peer-​​reviewed jour­nals. Which they do not.

So when you get right down to it, ID’s attempts to evade the sci­en­tific community’s steady and con­sis­tent stream of invec­tive, call­ing them vac­u­ous and wrong, is just another way of let­ting peo­ple stay stu­pid longer.

Note to Self: Invent New Pub­lish­ing Model:

Remark­ably, some of the edi­tors liked the book — “A mon­u­ment to schol­ar­ship,” “A tour de force,” “An incred­i­ble achieve­ment.” But no deal: there is just no way, they said, to make any money on such a book. Not even the insti­tu­tional pur­chasers — libraries that are basi­cally forced to buy obscure books — could make my propo­si­tion profitable.

The printed mono­graph is dying.

(Via Ed Vielmetti’s Vac­uum Blog.)

And the New York Times, of all places. PZ Myers sim­pli­fies it greatly:

Please, New York Times, we don’t need yoqr help if all you can do is shuf­fle cred­u­lous jour­nal­ists with no under­stand­ing of the issues through the story. If you aren’t going to put some­one on the case who under­stands biol­ogy (like Carl Zim­mer, for instance), don’t bother. All you’re accom­plish­ing is to give frauds and char­la­tans and bible-​​bleating pseu­do­sci­en­tists respect they do not deserve.

If only we could not bother with them. Alas, their cred­i­bil­ity has ghostly iner­tia: most of the read­ers see­ing the arti­cles will never hear from the peo­ple crit­i­ciz­ing them for being writ­ten by fools.

It’s that time of year. Signs are pop­ping up along the sides of the road, here in the mid­west. Corn mazes are now as much an aspect of our shared expe­ri­ence as religious-​​themed haunted houses, or arbi­trary fruit-​​themed fes­ti­vals aimed at get­ting peo­ple to please fer­chris­sake just look away from the Wal*mart for one god­damned minute and come down­town will you please!? If you’ve not been in a good, mod­ern, GPS-​​inscribed corn maze, you should. Good exer­cise, and sur­pris­ingly dif­fi­cult and amusing.

Just check the weather first.