Posts by linger
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Also note: the conditions that allowed Savile to offend in plain sight have not magically disappeared since the 1970s. If you want a more recent parallel, you need look no further than Penn State University’s coaching scandal last year. In both cases, one individual was regarded as essential to an institution; in both cases the institution protected itself by pretending the offending was not serious or ongoing, and certainly did not draw police attention to it.
(To clarify: in the Penn U case, the head coach, Joe Pasternak, was not accused of any offence himself; but he had turned a blind eye to long-term offending by an assistant who was seen as an important part of the coaching team.)In trying to take social lessons from these cases, I don’t think “moral panic” is really what we should be focussing on.
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Steve’s point, I hope, was that each culture has its own moral code, which appears “normal” to its members. Deploring historical wrongs from our own, hopefully more enlightened, standpoint is all very well, but the moral code of that era also needs to be considered to understand those actions in context. We can’t automatically take our own moral system for granted.
Which is not to excuse Savile or his enablers in the slightest. 1970s England wasn’t that different to today, and sexual abuse of children certainly wasn’t morally OK in that society (though perhaps easier to ignore).
But one really important reason for not taking our own society’s current moral system for granted is that we constantly need to work to maintain it. If we are not careful, there is always the possibility of a return to a morality in which the powerful can do what they like to the less powerful with this being seen as “normal”.
It can start in such small ways: e.g. prisoners being denied the right to vote, or WINZ clients being treated by default as suspects whose privacy does not matter... -
Hard News: When we had hope and change, in reply to Russell Brown,
We’ve discussed [accent in NZ broadcasts] before here.
Specifically, in the discussion on this thread.
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OnPoint: H4x0rs and You, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
not a breech presentation
just slightly off kilter -
Hard News: The Advocate, in reply to Tim Michie,
Song? I only know it as Les Barker’s poem “Have you got any news of the iceberg?”
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Milne’s response to having statistical errors pointed out was a classic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. The original paper (Kruger & Dunning 1999) notes that those with insufficient competence in some field ipso facto cannot recognise and respond to corrections in that field, but instead may interpret any such corrections as irrelevant personal attacks. Kruger & Dunning give the example of students who “explain” their low test scores as indicating that their teacher hates them.
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@Brent: Of course, media faith in statistics as a magic device to create information out of pure noise isn’t limited to newspapers – as seen in CSI and similar shows where “we used an algorithm to enhance the resolution of an image reflected in the victim’s eye, captured on a crappy security camera”.
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OnPoint: Because Statistical Rigour, in reply to Angus Robertson,
The data is uninterpretable, because the numbers used do not express a single known quantity. To put it briefly: the data is rubbish. Too much noise, too little signal.
You defend publishing the data :: you defend publishing rubbish.
Any attempt to “analyse” such data cannot possibly be any better than interpreting chicken entrails, an utter waste of your writers’ (and then your readers’) time before you even begin.
Worse than that, it does actual harm, because the act of publication makes the numbers seem meaningful.Add to that the complete lack of any mathematical skills on display in this “analysis”, as evidenced by
- the wild leap to claim that there is a “trend”, based on a statistically non-significant level of correlation,
- between two sets of numbers both of which are at best only indirect proxies for what you want them to measure,
- a correlation which even if it were significant still should not be claimed to demonstrate any causal relationship,
… and … I’m actually angry that something so uninformative, so devoid of solid foundation in fact, got published as “news”. -
Hard News: "Because we can", in reply to Che Tibby,
Yes; but now wait for the disgruntled middle classes not to see that. The really really annoying thing about this strategy is that, largely, it’s been working [in terms of maintaining support for National, rather than doing anything productive for NZ] – partly because the disgruntled middle-class subset of the audience is likely to experience confirmation bias; and the worse National do on the economy, the larger the ranks of the disgruntled.
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Hard News: Media3: PIF, Paralympics, and…, in reply to Ross Mason,
Actually, that’s true of both the 2001 and 2011 surveys of children, so I should correct myself a little: the comparison seems to support “… a rise in overall recreational activity”, rather than specifically “… a rise in sports activity”.