Mark Hoofnagle has a MD and PhD in physiology from the University of Virginia, and is now a general surgery resident. His interest in denialism concerns the use of denialist tactics to confuse public understanding of scientific knowledge.
BarryA at Uncommon Descent talks about a startling finding using this tool the blog readability test.
Thanks to one of our commenters for pointing out this website that calculates the reading level of blogs. Just for fun I inserted UD and it came back "High School," which means that the general discussion at this blog is at a high school level. I then inserted Pandas Thumb and it came back "Elementary School."Make of this what you will.
Interesting, when I insert pandasthumb.org I get College/Post Grad. Oh wait, I forgot, the people at UD are morons. They put in Pandasthumb.com, an unregistered domain.
Now granted, this is a really stupid metric, that doesn't really say much of anything, but you'd think these geniuses could at least criticize the right website. The only lesson here is never take anything the evolution denialists cdesign proponentsists say at face value.
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No, I'd say that the lesson is that creationists are an infinite time, energy and sanity sink and it's best to just ignore them if you value your allocation of any of these resources.
Posted by: Ian B Gibson | November 12, 2007 5:08 PM
That's what we thought a few decades ago, Ian. Didn't really get us anywhere.
Posted by: Bronze Dog | November 12, 2007 10:11 PM
www.talkorigins.org gets a "Genius" level.
Posted by: Scott | November 13, 2007 12:21 AM
The only lesson here is never take anything the evolution denialists cdesign proponentsists say at face value.
There's also the lesson that creationists are a really stupid bunch.
Posted by: small words for small minds | November 13, 2007 7:17 AM
Shouldn't the good guys hustle to register the pandasthumb.com name before some major intellect (relatively speaking) among the creationists starts getting what passes for a brilliant brainstorm in their circles regarding potential prankery?
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | November 13, 2007 10:09 AM
I kind of wish the real Panda's Thumb website had returned an elementary reading level. Wouldn't that reinforce the point that evolution is such common sense that even a fifth grader can understand it?
Posted by: Harry Abernathy | November 13, 2007 12:04 PM
That thread was particularly illuminating. Dembski chimed in with a site that would check a block of text against the Flesch-Kincaid readability indicator. Now why would Dembski know about such a thing? He isn't an editor for USA Today, and he isn't a (real) educator.
I have this creeping feeling that Dembski modifies his "math" until it scores below a 10 on the readability indicator so that he can delude himself into thinking it's bona fide scholarship while ensuring that his bafflegab is baffling enough.
Posted by: Dustin | November 13, 2007 5:46 PM
s bafflegab is baffling enough.
ok
Posted by: testing | November 20, 2007 9:15 AM