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.

Comments

[dilbert dogbert]

NYT owns the Globe? If so it all comes clear.

[christo]

Five years has been long enough for all of the subscribers to get over it. Now Gilder has a new argument to bloviate. Has he gotten any promotion grants? NYT owns the easy read Globe. He's a homey for Massachusetts living there and has something to do with tech (Titanicosm, a newsletter) so he's probably a life style think piece.

[Brock Landers]

Fitting that one of the world's biggest charlatans is now a spokesman for the world's biggest bit of pseudoscientific sophistry.

These Intelligent Design Creationists don't even really know what information theory is, and make most legitimate mathematicians want to pull their hair out.

[wkwillis]

Hey, he's a technology geek. He should have known that the optical infrastructure people would overbuild (which is why I told my mom not to buy them) because the railroads did all during the eighteen hundreds, and the canal companies and the turnpike companies did during the early eighteen hundreds, and the automobile companies did just before the depression. (They'd sold a car to ninety percent of the families in America! How could they keep selling more!), but that's business prediction, not technology prediction.

[psh]

Gilder's onto it -- a sure sign that human evolution has peaked. Prolonged degeneration will ensue. So that's how the GOP came out on top!

[marquer]

>"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...

I was not, thank goodness, one of the dumb-asses who listened to George Gilder for technology stock investing advice. But if I had been, I would find myself utterly infuriated to hear a comment like that.

If, hypothetically, I had subscribed to Gilder's silly rag around the peak of the tech stock boom, and if I had taken a position in his recommended stocks, which had promptly declined, say, 20 percent, before such time as I had been instructed by him to exit the trade, that wouldn't have been a felicitous experience for me.

But far more infelicitous it would have been for me to stay long in the trade as the position declined further, and wiped out, say, 80 to 90 percent of my investment. Or the whole enchilada. Which was not an uncommon experience among Gilder's flock, because the bloody fool never did tell them to take their losses early and small.

I'm still amazed that more of these charlatans have not been actually physically shot dead in the street by former clients who have been reduced to penury. One must assume that enough of them had the blow padded by the ensuing residential real estate boom to at least be able to survive financially.

[Ralph]

JDS Uniphase's meteoric rise in the market came apart in 2001. They had borrowed themselves into a precarious condition as did Global Crossing on the basis of the telecommunications revolution. I recall watching CNBC's shows all afternoon in those days as the roller coaster went off its rails. Paul Sagawa, a top telecom analyst at Siegal Associates, predicted the coming meltdown in telecom stocks in the summer of 2001.

[Jonathan Goldberg]

Gilder seems to suffer from a need to be aware of things beyond the reach of most mere mortals. Even if he has to invent it himself. For instance, the "Law of the Microcosm." I never did figure out exactly what that was. "Telecosm." Now, apparently, it's information theory in biology.

I'd give about two mills to see his calculations, except that he hasn't got any. If someone could do a calculation on the information requirements of evolution he or she could make their hotel reservations in Stockholm now. I do exect it to be done eventually. I wouldn't give much for my chances of living to see it.

The wonder is that he can get anyone to take him seriously enough to pay him for his drivel. If I could do that I'd be rich. Of course, Gilder was rich, on paper, for a while. He lost it all because he couldn't bring himself to recognize a loser and bail. This may give a clue about how he got rich in the first place. Is so, would someone please tell me what it is?

[Gary Cornell]

Gilder has been associated with the Seattle based discovery institute basically since it started. He has been a proponent of intelligent design for ages. For example there was an obscene column in Forbes by the well known (reactionary) Paul Johnson that I believe quoted him at length. What boggles the mind is that anyone pays attention to people like Gilder anymore.