Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (George Gilder Back in the News Department)
One of the scam artists of the late 1990s has reemerged as an intelligent design advocate--and he's using the Boston Globe to call biologist P.Z. Myers "crazy":
Pharyngula: Oh, come on, Boston Globe. They tip-toed around, avoiding naming me or the weblog, but I think everyone here can figure out what they're talking about.... Here's the article... The Sanctimonious Bombast of George Gilder. It's too bad they didn't give that link in the fluff job they wrote for Gilder, because he repeats the same nonsense again, and adds a new set of lies to the mix:
"But I really think those guys" -- meaning the scientists who attacked him on the weblog -- "are pretty crazy." Gilder pokes at his spinach salad and smiles wanly. "They must feel very vulnerable," he muses. Then he warns that if biologists don't take information theory seriously enough -- information theory and not Christianity being the basis for Gilder's embrace of intelligent design -- then they'll be the ones branded fools in the long run. Not him....
For an article that allows Gilder to whine about his unfair persecution, it is ironic for him to call us "crazy". And the key thing is that, as in my original complaint, Gilder doesn't know anything about information theory. Scientists do take information theory seriously, and we can see that Gilder doesn't understand it. Or biology. Or science in general. What he is is a fast-talking con-artist who thinks he knows something. The reporter seems to accept his glib babble uncritically...
One would think journalists would have a longer institutional memory about guys like this. Joseph Kahn of the Boston Globe does write:
The evolution of George Gilder - The Boston Globe - Boston.com - Living / Arts - News: By the mid-'90s, Gilder was confidently touting ''telecosm" (the convergence of communications systems and computers) as the next big thing -- and making a fortune giving speeches and investment tips.... "Most subscribers [to the newsletter] 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."...
But what Joseph Kahn of the Boston Globe does not do is quote Gilder from an earlier article in Wired:
Wired 10.07: The Madness of King George: "In retrospect, it's obvious that I should've subtly said, 'Hey, things have gotten out of hand at JDS Uniphase, and it's not worth what you'd have to pay for it,'" [Gilder] says. Each month, he thought about providing a warning to his [newsletter] subscribers, and he decided against it every time.... "I'd think about telling people that they should sell half their holdings, and each time I'd conclude that my subscribers would be enraged...." Fully 50 percent of his readers had signed up for the report at what Gilder now calls the "hysterical peak" of the market. "Half of my subscribers would have been eternally grateful [for a warning], but the other half -- the new ones -- would've been enraged because they had just come in," he says...
One would think that Gilder failed at the time to tell his subscribers that he thought the telecom stocks he was touting were overvalued--you would think that would be a fact worth reporting, no? But it isn't--not for Joseph Kahn of the Boston Globe.
