Do Jeffrey Shallit’s writings offer more information than a blank page?

Michael Egnor wonders whether that’s true. But he faces the difficulty of convincing anti-ID mathematician Jeffrey Shallit, that he, at least, ought to think they do:

The irony is that in denying that information content is increased by carving a sculpture, Shallit implicitly denies that information content is increased by carving words on a computer screen or equations in a book. Shallit blogs regularly, and he writes books and papers, and by his own analysis, he has added no information to the world by doing so. Is Dr. Shallit sure that he adds no information to computer screens and pages in a text?

We can rephrase Dr. Marks’s observation as follows:

“We all agree that a page of Dr. Shallit’s textbook contains more information than a blank page.”

Dr. Shallit doesn’t agree. The one point in Dr. Shallit’s defense is that it may be argued that his blog posts add no useful information at all. That may be true, and it would not be a stretch to say that Shallit’s blog posts subtract information, like little self-refuting black holes.

Michael Egnor, “Rankled by Mount Fuji, Darwinist Jeffrey Shallit Offers Little Self-Refuting Black Holes” at Evolution News and Science Today

See also: Jonathan Bartlett replies to Jeffrey Shallit’s pedantry

and

Jeffrey Shallit also holdsforth on Yale’s David Gelernter

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