07.18.08
The usual hatchet job on Altenberg
Luskin has lost it (on Altenberg)
Needless to say, you can read Luskin’s post, and, whatever his other failings, he manages to give a pretty fair depiction of Mazur and the Alternberg news. ‘Mistake strewn’ applies to most critiques at Panda’s Thumb.
Meanwhile, Mazur did a good job of eliciting the behind the scenes action in the Paradigm, and as for Pibliucci we should know a liar when we see one, no?
Enter Luskin, who for some reason always takes on the unenviable job of defending and then making worse the mistakes of other people in his camp. He devoted an entire post to explaining why Mazur’s second-hand, ill-informed hearsay conspiracy theorizing about the meeting should trump the opinion of Pigliucci, the very guy running it. But Luskin, in classic creationist form, is simply taking a bad source (Mazur), then piling his own mistaken assumptions on top. The result is a conspiracy story which he and all ID followers (who virtually completely lack the spine or gumption to ever double-check their sources, or correct each other even on obvious factual points) will strongly believe, despite the fact that it bears only the vaguest resemblance to what actually happened. (In passing, it is worth noting that this sort of filter-assume-extrapolate-copy-don’t-correct-repeat process explains far more creationist behavior than the “they’re liars!” hypothesis). (E.g., here’s an example of Paul Nelson at Uncommon Descent uncritically passing on Mazur’s silliness.)