William A. Dembski

Founding and Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture, Distinguished Fellow, Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

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Science, Faith, and Einstein

William A. Dembski
June 20, 2024
Einstein’s dictum about thinking for yourself therefore holds for faith as much as for science. It must come before commitment and obedience.

Orwell’s Cold Dystopia is Closer Than We Think

When we speak lies as truth, tyrants come marching in
William A. Dembski
April 8, 2024
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him… And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s center. With the feeling that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote: Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. GEORGE ORWELL, 1984 Simple Truths? Back in the early 1990s, I flirted briefly with working for one of the big U.S. intelligence …

The War on 2 + 2 = 4

William A. Dembski
April 8, 2024
The people weighing in against 2 + 2 = 4 are not mathematicians but in education departments where they teach the teaching of mathematics.

What’s the Relation Between Intelligence and Information?

The fundamental intuition of information as narrowing down possibilities matches up neatly with the concept of intelligence
William A. Dembski
April 4, 2024
The key intuition behind the concept of information is the narrowing of possibilities. The more that possibilities are narrowed down, the greater the information. If I tell you I’m on planet Earth, I haven’t conveyed any information because you already knew that (let’s leave aside space travel). If I tell you I’m in the United States, I’ve begun to narrow down where I am in the world. If I tell you I’m in Texas, I’ve narrowed down my location further. If I tell you I’m forty miles north of Dallas, I’ve narrowed my location down even further. As I keep narrowing down my location, I’m providing you with more and more information. Information is therefore, in its essence, exclusionary: the more possibilities are excluded, the greater the information provided. As …

Can We Trust Large Language Models? Depends on How Truthful They Are

Just because a piece of tech is highly sophisticated doesn't mean it's more trustworthy
William A. Dembski
April 3, 2024
The trust we put in Large Language Models (LLMs) ought to depend on their truthfulness. So how truthful are LLMs? For many routine queries, they seem accurate enough. What’s the capital of North Dakota? To this query, ChatGPT4 just now gave me the answer Bismarck. That’s right. But what about less routine queries? Recently I was exploring the use of design inferences to detect plagiarism and data falsification. Some big academic misconduct cases had in the last 12 months gotten widespread public attention, not least the plagiarism scandal of Harvard president Claudine Gay and the data falsification scandal of Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. These scandals were so damaging to these individuals and their institutions that neither is a university …