''Most subscribers came in at the top of the market," Gilder recalls of those dark days, when even his chief financial officer filed a lawsuit against him. ''So the modal experience of the Gilder Technology Newsletter subscriber was to lose virtually all of his money. That stigma has been very hard to overcome."(my bold)
The process is very meta, but also very predictable - all it takes is a certain kind of emotional signalling and you can sell almost anything in the US. (And to a not so obvious extent elsewhere too.)
Without common sense or restraint, disaster follows.
Citing Claude Shannon of Bell Labs in this regard is particularly offensive to me, given my regard for his contributions: grounding information and communications theory in thermodynamics through the recognition that the meaning in a text or the usefulness of a library was due to the work that had been done against entropy in the creation of that order and that transmission degradation constituted an increase in entropy. He and Warren Weaver presented this in an accessible form in The Mathematical Theory of Communication, University of Illinois Press, 1949. This was after writing a Masters Thesis at MIT in which he described vacuum tube operational amplifiers; described their possible applications mathematically and showed how they could be applied as analog computers continuously solving the problem of aiming naval guns on a moving platform aiming at a moving target. His Masters Thesis at MIT was immediately classified and used to design the fire control systems on allied ships during WWII.
Gilder's arguments that the amount of information contained in the genetic code and the elegance of its organization can only be explained by the presence of an intelligent creator remains a giant non sequitur. It is and has been refuted by experiment over and over and only reveals his predisposition: there must be a theistic deity "up there" like a super father who is making sure everything is ok. That is a far cry from Ayala's position, which is essentially naturalistic. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
Creationists (and Intelligent Design Creationists) have only about 20 arguments all told, and not one of them is younger than I am - they just dress them up in different language all the time.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
In conversation, Gilder is something of a rhetorical hummingbird, darting from topic to topic so rapidly it's difficult to get a word (much less a question) in edgewise. Each topic arrives with its own set of footnotes, reference texts, and unvarnished -- some might say unhinged -- opinions. Predictable Gilder is not, however. On balance, it's much easier to peg him as a hip-shooting contrarian than a cookie-cutter conservative or raving holy roller.
So is there a unified field theory to Gilder's work? Some thread that connects his interest in everything from supply-side economics to stay-at-home moms? Yes, says Gilder, looking beyond his balcony and across the verdant valley adjoining the farmland he still calls his own. There is. ''Much of what I've written about has been in reaction to the materialist superstition," he says, ''the belief that the universe is a purely material phenomenon that can be reduced to physical and chemical laws. It's a concept that's infected the social sciences as well." And, he adds, ''it's preposterous."
''Much of what I've written about has been in reaction to the materialist superstition," he says, ''the belief that the universe is a purely material phenomenon that can be reduced to physical and chemical laws. It's a concept that's infected the social sciences as well."
And, he adds, ''it's preposterous."
In this, he's right. The bold portion represents perhaps the single overlap between my world view and that of Gilder.
We do, however, see very different ways to resolve the failure of the "clockwork universe" as an adequate description of the world. Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.
