I mentioned Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert and now blogger, in an earlier post. Now I learn, via Louise via Pharyngula, that Adams has decided to wade into the wrong side of the creation debate. Louise Pharyngula compares Adams to Wally, which doesn’t sound right to me. For my money Adams is more like the hyper-talented garbage man who knows how to fix every f-cking thing on the planet.
Have you ever gotten into it with the idiot savants behind six-sigma and hidden-planet conspiracy theories? I have. Don’t bother; there is no authority you can reference that they can’t find some obscure reason to doubt. These guys are often gifted engineers who’ve spent so long knowing practically everything about their particular specialty that it seems like a short leap to imagine that they know everything about everything. The same guys torment mathematicians and physicists tirelessly with inane theories of Everything.
Scott Adams was apparently a very good engineer and while I wouldn’t put him in the six sigma camp (which he has mocked), the same tendency lets him believe that he knows enough about evolution to stick it good to the people who spend their lives studying it. That’s not the sort of thing I’d expect Wally to do, but it would be right in character for the Good Will Hunting garbage guy.
That said, his blog is still funny and I still read Dilbert before doing practically anything else in the morning.
***Update***
Minor error fixed (sorry, Louise!). Also, Scott Adams not an engineer? There goes my damn theory. Next week remind me to share with you my expanded theory of EVERYTHING, hidden planets included.
Dave Ruddell
Actually, Adams was never an engineer, I think he has an MBA. He certainly derived much enjoyment (not to mention cash) from observing engineers, but he isn’t one.
Patton
Having read through his postings on the matter, it’s not at all clear to me that he’s taken a position at all, let alone the wrong one.
The commenters at Pharyngula, however, seem to have read different postings than the ones at Adams’ site presently.
Walker
I cringe when I watch this movie. They needed a better mathematics advisor. The problems he solves at the beginning are adjacency matrices. I teach this stuff to freshmen — they have no problem with it. Plus the prof talks about fourier series in his opening lecture and then spends the rest of the movie on graph theory. I am unaware of any deep connection between the two, but it would certainly be worth a Fields medal if there was one.
Of course it doesn’t hold a candle to Sneakers. The speech by the cryptographer is such a nonsensical mishmash of technical terms that it is hilarious. He delivers it well, however.
Zifnab
It’s the knee-jerk reaction to attack the side of the debate you think is “winning” when both sides look – at least on the surface – equally valid. Darwinian science is estabilished and possesses that Ivory Tower elitism unquestionable mystic. Intelligent Design is new and trendy. Sure the later is almost entirely baseless in fact. Sure the former was heralded by over a hundred years of previous scientific discovery. But by god this is America and we’ll be damned if we’re not allowed the freedom to doubt and doubt vigoriously, especially when it makes us the underdog.
Give Scott Adams a book and a few hours to read up on the subject, and I’m sure he’ll come around.
RSA
I think it’s very seldom that movies or TV can come up with a convincing smart person. The only one who springs to mind immediately is Dana Scully from the X-Files (but that may just be wish-fulfillment.)
Zifnab
She was totally hot.
Louise
Hey wait — *I* didn’t say he was a Wally! I still haven’t had time to read everything and figure out who’s ticked off about what. I just put the update there so I would remember to do that (It never occurs to me that someone else might read my blog!)
I do thank you for pointing the way to SA’s blog, because he has some funny stuff there.
David Gillies
Actually, the lecture by the cryptographer in Sneakers wasn’t as goofy as you might think. Len Adleman of RSA fame was a technical consultant for the movie. I seem to recall the lecture being about elliptic curve methods, which is certainly not implausible. I haven’t seen the movie in years, though.
Walker
I have to go back and watch it again; I saw it when I was an undergraduate. I remember at the time that he used all the right terms, but that what he was saying was pretty content-free. Which would be a reasonable thing for Len Adleman to get him to say.
Dave_Violence
Scott Adams is, by academic training, an economist. His ideas for Dilbert must’ve come from observing my company’s managers, though.
canuckistani
Scott’s opinion is that the ID supporters and the evolutionists need to listen to each other, rather than shouting past each other; this is, in the opinion of serious scientists, like telling astronomers and flat-earth theorists that they need to listen to each other.
I was sufficiently upset by Scott’s giving credibility to the undeserving that I resigned my position in Dogbert’s New Ruling Class.
-canuckistani
Battlepanda
Whether or not it applies to Scott Adams, the “they’re so darn smart they must know what they’re talking about” phenomenon John observes must explain how the giant dose of vitamin C will cure colds and flu theory gained so much traction — it was endorsed by legendary chemist Linus Pauling. It is also completely nuts.
Walker
Horowitz is a little too Chicken Little for me, but one thing that he does have right is that there are several rockstar academics that use their properly earned authority in one area to “authoritatively” spot crap in an area that they know nothing about. Penrose and Emperor’s New Mind (verification versus discovery; it is a junior-level computer science concept, Penrose). Chomsky and, well, anything.
I took several courses in graduate school from the logician Richard Platek. A genius when it comes to the lambda calculus and modal logics. Also mad as a hatter. In class one day he announced that he would rather his kids be hooked on heroine than dairy products — because heroine addiction is curable. Then he admitted to breaking down and going to Amsterdam for his cheese fix every once in a while.
It was still a great math class so long as you filtered out these ticks. Oh, the stories.
RSA
It must have been your story, but I read this as, “It was still a great meth class. . .”
Fred Hoyle, the astronomer, is another example of someone making a splash outside his area of expertise. On evolution: “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”
Louise
Thanks, Tim!
tzs
I heard that the “Vitamin C cures colds” was a folk legend already at Caltech and Pauling just picked it up and put the force of his name behind it.
Of course, some folk legends have something behind them–willow bark for fevers, for instance.
InsultComicDog
Can’t you tell when a guy’s messing with you?
InsultComicDog
As far as Pauling endorsing Vitamin C, his view was not accepted by hardly anyone in the scientific community even after he adopted it.
Andrew J. Lazarus
Dunno, they did hire an MIT grad student to propose the problems in Good Will Hunting (I know, because a friend of mine really was MIT’s combinatorist at the time, and far from being a hotbed of combinatorics, MIT didn’t tenure him). I thought starting off with a straightforward problem (it was an eigenvalue problem, wasn’t it?) was meant as an inside joke.
I didn’t notice (I only saw the movie once) that they moved from Fourier series to graph theory, but after looking at Nash’s use of the Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem in graph theory, I can only say, God may not exist, but beauty does.
Did we ever figure out why every second reader of this blog is a mathematician?
David Gillies
Assertion without proof. All we know is that an anomolously high fraction of commenters have some training in mathematical formalism :)
There was this one movie I saw which actually had some quasi-interesting looking maths in it. Was it the one with Jeff Bridges and Barbra Streisand? If so, I think my extreme aversion to la Streisand kicked my mental censorship function into high gear and erased most of the memories associated with it. I seem to recall some plausible-looking commutative diagrams.
Walker
I am a mathematician, but I never noticed this before.
It was an eigenvalue problem, on an adjacency matrix, as far as I remember.
The winner for most realistic mathematics in a movie is It’s My Turn. The opening scene is the female lead presenting a proof of the Snake Lemma.
demimondian
And they even placed it correctly — she was allegedly a professor at the University of Chicago.
Andrew J. Lazarus
The actress in It’s My Turn was Jill Clayburgh. I used to know who they had tutor her in the role; it may have been Barry Mazur. If you look in Larry Washington’s fantastic book on Cyclotomic Fields, check out the citation where the Snake Lemma is used in a proof.
[Aside to Walker: On another thread where I don’t remember your commenting, there were IIRC at least six posters who were ABD or better in math, including me, demimondian, and DougJ. And I do suspect we can add David Gillies to this list.]
Andrew J. Lazarus
The self-correcting Internet. Clayburgh was coached by Benedict (Dick) Gross. Apologies for the error, but I went back to my original source.
demimondian
Yeah, the “anomalously high number of posters” line had a certain “There is at least one sheep in Scotland which is black on at least one side.” quality to it.
Walker
I found your entry in the Mathematics Genealogy Project. I cannot find David Gillies. Perhaps he is ABD.
Search on my first name to find me in the project. I am the 2000 hit.
blogReeder
I cringed when I started going through these comments. I read the comments on Scott Adam’s blog during the big “smack down” the Pharyngula crowd was performing. And I have to say, It’s very civilized here. Whew, what a relief.
demimondian
I didn’t know about the genealogy site. That’s pretty cool!
And there I am, a lonely leaf node in the 1986 University of Wisconsin crowd.
David Gillies
My first degree’s in Physics, then I moved to communications theory, cryptography and finally software engineering. I’m a very indifferent mathematician (I don’t even play one on TV).
Tim F.
I wish there was a geneaology for biologists. At my PhD defense I plan to surprise my advisor with an advising genealogy going back as far I can. So far I’ve traced back to my advisor’s advisor’s advisor’s advisor, but the trail runs cold in a diocese-affiliated research institution that doesn’t exist anymore. With persistence I hope I can at least make it back to the 19th century.
demimondian
You know, I only know two generations of my academic genealogy, and I only know two generations of FDDD’s…and I only know one generation of my father’s, and I don’t even know my grandfather’s advisor’s name.
So maybe it’s a generational thing.
Walker
I knew four generations before I found the web site, but only because my advisor and his advisor are both famous, still active in the community, and their descendancy from Church & Rosser is often noted.
Now with the web-site, I can trace my way through E. H. Moore back to Leibniz. Excellent.
demimondian
Yeah, with the website, I can go back to Leibnitz as well. It looks like you and I are distant academic cousins — my genealogy goes me->Ken Kunen->Dana Scott->Alonzo Church (common ancestor).
Don
Did we ever figure out why every second reader of this blog is a mathematician?
No, for that we’d need a statistician.