Posts by giovanni tiso
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Hard News: Mind Blending, in reply to Megan Wegan,
Given that I have yet to meet a PAS person in the flesh, who isn't a thoroughly decent and intelligent and witty and compassionate human being?
I see I'm going to have to send a stunt double.
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Hard News: Mind Blending, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
But I'll tell you this - I will be at the Christchurch OGB.
We all should.
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Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to Hilary Stace,
OK then, for another distraction, what about those plastic hologram bracelets that are very popular at the moment, particularly with sportspeople?
Don't make me tell the story of Niels Bohr's horseshoe, because I will.
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Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to recordari,
As unlikely as that might seem.
Nah, I always end up bending people to my will.
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Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to B Jones,
Gio, wikipedia is a human activity and vulnerable to the same or similar pressures - influence, status, free time - that some people have and some people don't. It creates systemic biases and excludes minority points of view. It's still better than my Personal Self Published Theory of Everything, or Conservapedia, or a bunch of other ways of collecting information.
I take your point. However I think the problem is that we don't approach anything sceptically: not science, not pseudo-science, not spirituality, not politics, not nothing. We need an education in critical thinking before we need an education in anything else - including the basics of science itself. When people say "it's because journalists are scientifically illiterate that this crackpot theory is getting so much press", I don't think that's the problem. It's that often they can't evaluate propositions critically.
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Oh... this is very relevant to my interests!
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Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to Russell Brown,
Brian seems to believe that Ring is some kindly old man unused to the media who was startled by a "hysterical" interviewer.
He does not. He's just being disingenous, as he almost always is, in order to drive traffic to his blog. I understand your frustration, but you'd be best spending your energies elsewhere in my opinion.
[ETA: nice tone in my last two comments. No it's not, he does not. I'm a regular "no" man.]
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Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to B Jones,
It's more like wikipedia, where many people work in it, mistakes get made but there's a process for weeding them out when they get in there (perhaps it's harder to become an editor or moderator).
No, it's really not. In order to get funded to do most science you need to have influence, and people will go to significant extents to protect that influence. Nothing surprising in that - it's a human activity, therefore it's political. But to think that competing theories are always neutrally evaluated solely on their merits is exceedingly naive.
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Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to B Jones,
While that's true, it's also not helpful. Science isn't a body of widely-held beliefs - it's the body of beliefs that have been subjected to testing and checking against evidence. Any candidate for acceptance into that body has to pass the same standards.
That kind of overlooks the fact that things like the 'refrigerator mother' theory were in fact dogma amongst practicing doctors. And it wasn't that long ago. Science has its fair share of untested beliefs, which is I think what irritates some people when generic appeals to Science (as opposed to rational empirical scepticism) are used to shout down fringe beliefs and theories.
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Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to Stephen Judd,
They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Can I just say that Columbus actually deserved to be laughed at? He was wrong about most things and really if he hadn't bumped into America he would have died of starvation long before reaching India.