Comments for Wikipedia bias at http://adamsmith.org , comment 1 to 6 out of 6 comments http://adamsmith.org Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:36:56 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://adamsmith.org/blog/media-and-culture/wikipedia-bias-200807181717/#comment-632 On the Belgium page, and I quote "Belgium is well known the world over for its cuisine..." - JABITheW Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:11:55 +0100 http://adamsmith.org/blog/media-and-culture/wikipedia-bias-200807181717/#comment-613 ...but intelligent design is not science. This is because it cannot be used to make a prediction, so it fails to meet a major requirement for the scientific method i.e. falsifiability. To illustrate the problem consider bacteria in alcohol. Evolution via natural selection predicts that, given enough variety in the initial colony, the bacteria remaining after a week will have developed alcohol tolerance. Intelligent design could predict that. The problem is it could equally predict that the intelligent designer would intervene and turn the bacteria into giraffes. Or a nice bottle of champagne. There's no predictable consequences, so it cannot be tested, as any outcome could be construed to support the theory. On the other hand, if your alcoholic bacteria *have* changed into a magnum of champagne, you can fairly confidently throw evolution out of the window. If you subscribe to irreducible complexity, then the only real flaw in ID is that no irreducible complexity has been found. Of course an intelligent designer could have created the universe to appear any way it wanted, but then we're back to falsifiability as an issue. Intelligent design is not a theory, it is the absence of a theory. Waving your hands in despair at eve understanding anything that's not immediately obvious while neglecting the somewhat irreducible complexity of the designer itself. ID is an awful example of Wikipedia's bias, anyone educated in science or philosophy can see why that article is balanced. Far better examples of bias are the free and fair trade pages and any of the numerous pages on socialism. - JABITheW Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:39:57 +0100 http://adamsmith.org/blog/media-and-culture/wikipedia-bias-200807181717/#comment-610 AI - to be fair young earth creationism and I.D. are not one and the same - the latter is a far more sophisticated and indeed plausible form of creationism and is compatible with a 13 billion year old universe. - John Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:16:08 +0100 http://adamsmith.org/blog/media-and-culture/wikipedia-bias-200807181717/#comment-608 Agree with John, I have no idea why you mentioned ID here. It's not really a left/right political issue and if, as far as I am aware, ID is just another word for 'creationism' - ie. the world is only a few thousand years old - then you are a serious fruitcake to give it more than a second's thought. But maybe I'm wrong as to what ID actually is. - Al Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:55:58 +0100 http://adamsmith.org/blog/media-and-culture/wikipedia-bias-200807181717/#comment-607 I'm not sure conflating the pleas of scientific persecution by proponents of intelligent design with the genuine political, economic and scientific controversies involved in anthropogenic global warming is going to do anything to enhance the reputation of GW sceptics with other scientifcally interested sceptics who are still 'on the fence'. - John Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:20:14 +0100 http://adamsmith.org/blog/media-and-culture/wikipedia-bias-200807181717/#comment-606 What does one expect when the largest audience editing Wikipedia is the dope-head viewers of The Daily Show? - Boro Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:16:19 +0100