Posts by izogi
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Access: Fighting seclusion with…, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
I actually felt sorry for him...
Well, I can't truthfully say I feel sorry for him.
He's not a little kid being forced to say stuff. He's not being made to represent the National Party. He always has the option to say No and deal whatever consequences his Cabinet overlords choose to inflict on him.
He's chosen to be there and be part of the machine, to stand up as a Member of Parliament and say some stuff which has unjustified real and demeaning effects on other people's lives, either because he agrees with it or because he doesn't care.
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Credit: xkcd.
I found this part of his response interesting...
Now, if you see somebody writing something stupid or dumbed-down in the newspaper, you don’t just complain about it to your friends. You can write a blog, and you can go out there and read somebody else's blog. And you can go out there and access papers and review articles and Wikipedia pages and blogs and Twitter streams from people who really know what they're talking about – and you can train yourself on the basics .....
As Russell then pointed out, the internet is also a major mechanism for pseudoscience. Ben's claim seems to be that it's much easier to detect than it used to be. That's almost certainly the case, but I'm uneasy that it doesn't seem to mean that many people are automatically going out of their way to try to detect it. Sometimes it's just easier to gravitate towards the information you're more interested in finding.
Traditional media might have lost the power and influence it used to have, but it seems that a whole new type of influence has emerged in the hands of less predictable groups with vested interests (marketers, local and foreign governments, corporations, political parties), who are figuring out how to use social media and other aspects of the internet to manipulate on at least the same level that perhaps the media used to do before it.
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Hard News: This. Is. Crazy., in reply to Russell Brown,
I should confess that I know the resident personally (well, through my wife).
It mightn't be the house that's the problem but I hope the shift helps them one way or another. Jess handles things amazingly, imho, considering the circumstances she's been through in life until now... over and over again.
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Hard News: An interview with Ben Goldacre, in reply to Russell Brown,
I think I've developed decent practices for working out who not to trust, and in many ways that's easier.
Do schools do much in this area in modern times?
In the 1990s I remember that parts of the curriculum I was subjected to for social studies, or whatever it was called, involved stuff like going through newspapers and identifying fact versus opinion. At the time it seemed pointless and I doubt that was the only influence that's tended to make me a stickler for wanting to see references, but in hindsight it seems to have been all about what's apparently such a blurry space for many out there today.
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Kirsty Johnston eventually got the go ahead from the Herald to work on the story, and she came to Wellington and sorted through the papers and complexity. She met the gentle man who liked the outdoors and horses and made delicate trout fishing flies. But, like his parents, she was not allowed to see the room where he lived.
Is there a clearly stated reason why?
I've only had a chance to see the beginning of the Attitude TV show, where his father was guessing it was something about privacy, but that doesn't seem at all clear. -
Hard News: An interview with Ben Goldacre, in reply to Grant Taylor,
In my own fields of understanding I have frequently come across people who have 'done their research' but are so far off beam with the self-tutored conclusions they have come to that it is difficult to know where to start in having a constructive conversation with them. Interestingly, I have usually found them to have an attitude of far greater 'faith' in their knowledge than the experts usually have in their own.
It's not in a pure area of science, but if anyone's struggling to find examples of this, take a look at the world of parental advice. Everyone's an expert, and frequently it's based on subjective personal experience with a sample size of n<=3, combined with cherry-picked resources that reinforce pre-existing opinions.
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Speaker: Are we seeing the end of MSM,…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
It looks as if they've changed it. It must have been literally within the last 3 minutes based on when I reloaded the page.
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Speaker: Are we seeing the end of MSM,…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
It looks like they've taken it from a Tourism NZ video that received a heap of criticism, for exactly that reason, last year.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Marc C,
"Comments are now closed", I read, so this debate was shut down early, I wonder why.
I don't think it's fair to refer to most comment threads as debate, so much as mostly-anonymous people taking sides for screaming at and insulting each other to little effect except for the purposes of self-reinforcement.
Stuff comment threads, and similar things, are probably minor contributors to dumbing down of the media and general polarisation of opinion. (Only a small part.) Need to find an apologist to explain to you why the uncomfortable thing you've just read is stupid and the author's a moron? Scroll down!
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Hard News: Ali, in reply to Hilary Stace,
+1 to that, except I don't personally fit the gender claim.
I guess I can't know how I'd have been affected by Ali if I'd been around when he was doing his thing, but in retrospect and as with people like Ed Hillary, I have far more respect for what he did with the attention than for the specific things that gained the attention.
