A reasoning error

My thanks to Carlos and to my namesake Eduardo for mentioning my previous post on their blogs: The fabulous robot Arturito.

I just read the brilliant post “What if Arturito were a lie?”, which I recommend you read before going on.

Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto

Eduardo goes through some exercises to try to explain the pseudoscience displayed by Arturito’s creators. However, he makes a reasoning error at the end, one that many have made these days.
Believing that if the treasure is found on Juan Fernández, then the robot must be given credibility.

Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way, because they could have another source for the location of the gold, there could be gold there for other reasons, and the gold could even be planted there to prove the proclaimed credibility (quite hard to do, but not impossible). It could even be pure luck.

No, to evaluate Arturito, the right thing is to subject it to independent tests, carried out by experimental scientists (who I believe have already said they are willing). The certifying team must give guarantees to the skeptics and to those who believe in the robot.

Only after that can we back the Nobel nomination and every possible prize, and I’ll get in line to ask for funding and patent Arturito’s technology across the whole galaxy.

For now, the only thing I can thank Mr. Roboto for is letting sensible people with a basic scientific education raise their doubts in a reasoned way, and also letting me measure the level of scientific literacy in our society.

On assisted evolution and the extraterrestrial connection?

Let’s recall the “principle” behind how Arturito works:

“[..] it is the nonlinear integration of the basic unit of the conformation of life as it is known; therefore, and in the merely functional and explanatory concept, I specify that our unit is the integration of highly sophisticated electronic components capable of deciphering the unanimity equation within chaos theory in the context of an integral raised to the radical exponential, based on the conformation of the species, just as they are known after 20,000 years of assisted evolution.

I’m not going to waste time picking the sentence apart, but you’ll notice that at moments it seems coherent, when in reality it says nothing.

But the ending is interesting, because it raises 2 possibilities about the scientific foundations of Arturito’s creators:

“…based on the conformation of the species, just as they are known after 20,000 years of assisted evolution”.

There’s something here if you consider that the creators say they belong to some evangelical creed.

That “assisted evolution” bit sounds to me a lot like “intelligent design”, that is, a nod to creationism. Normally, creationists talk about an age of some 6,500 to 7,000 years for our Earth, based on calculations from the dates that appear in the Old Testament.

Let’s remember that creationism holds the literal interpretation of scripture to be the only true explanation of how life arose on Earth. That is, life was created in 6 days by God.

Today there are many creationist scientists who have recast their ideas as what they call intelligent design, because of the irrefutable evidence provided by the study of the Human Genome. They have had to come up with an alternative way of fitting creationism into the truths that DNA reveals.

The other possible explanation for assisted evolution I found on Google, when I came across this page by Dr. Iván Seperiza Pasquali, of
Quilpué, Chile, http://mm2002.vtrbandaancha.net/nefilim.html

At the end of it there is a story, “El Nefilim”, which is probably the origin of this theory of assisted evolution.

So in the end, the extraterrestrials may well be involved in this plot too. (Could Arturito be the work of extraterrestrials?)

h2 Final thought

It’s a shame journalists are so uninquisitive. How I would love for them to interview Arturito’s creators properly….

Why do I waste time on this? Because I’m in favor of entrepreneurship and of science and technology in our country developing the way they should. But this Arturito story can do a lot of harm, to the people of Juan Fernández, to the creators of serious technology, to tech entrepreneurs, and to Chilean science in general.

“Great will be the disappointment”