Posts by linger
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
(1) I do find myself wondering who the paper’s intended audience (and their relationship experience) could be.
(2) The assumptions made here about evaluating (poly, or any) relationships really are at the level of abstraction of the old joke about physicists (“Assume a spherical cow…”), so it’s not surprising they’re rejected by people with direct experience.
(3) I suspect we might find that most humans, and most relationships, by whatever label, and by whatever metric, arehighly non-ideal cases
– but that doesn’t make them meaningless or valueless. The existence of different individuals, different relationships, different meanings, different values, does not entail the applicability of any global scale of “better” or “worse”. Construction of some such scale may be possible, but it is a step that absolutely requires validation from participants.
-
Hard News: The Editorial Image, in reply to Scott Chris,
Rosemary McLeod was once consistently worth reading, too … until about 30 years ago. The returns for the reader have steadily diminished since then, at least for her work as a columnist (rather than as a journalist).
-
OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Matthew Poole,
ironic that [NZ has] a strong culture of anti-elitism [and] a strong culture of intellectual snobbery
Not just ironic; conflate the two and you get anti-intellectualism.
-
The contribution of brilliant individuals to research quality is something that can be observed – unlike, say, the supposed value added by CEO performance, which is vastly better remunerated!
-
OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Bart Janssen,
The science community don’t have an SI unit for brilliance
and lux is not merely the plural of luck .
-
OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Lucy Stewart,
I’m in broad agreement with Lucy here.
If you accept that Kitcher’s view of science is somewhere near correct, then two things follow:(i) people who are able to “think differently” enough to identify previously unrecognised false assumptions are able to act as catalysts, speeding up (unfortunately, to an unpredictable, so before-the-fact-unquantifiable, extent!) the discovery process, and possibly enabling an entirely different, more efficient, route to that discovery than could be obtained through brute-force computation;
and
(ii) anyone who does not understand this much about the scientific method should not be allowed anywhere near the decision-making process for how science gets funded. There isn’t, and can’t be, any guaranteed minimum return on investment, at least not in the short term. (Which would exclude most of yer stereotypical bean-counters.) Yet, in the medium-to-long-term, we can be pretty confident that R&D will pay off – somehow – even if not necessarily in the direction that was envisaged when the project was funded.
Which is not to say that there is no role for management or funding decisions. There are a few questions that could validly be asked of any research proposal, e.g.:
(i) how important are the questions being asked? (...& yes, that's going to be subjective, and will depend on how much money is made available...)
(ii) what is the likelihood of the proposed method being able to answer those questions? -
I’ve also studied both science and philosophy.
Popper’s falsificationalist model is certainly flawed and incomplete.
But we don’t have to agree with Feyerabend and conclude that there is no reliable “scientific method”.
One way falsificationalism can be made more applicable to real science is to acknowledge that we usually can’t test hypotheses in isolation. Instead, in practice, scientific experiments and observations are used to test hypotheses in bundles (as argued by Kitcher). If we get an unexpected result, then that means that something is wrong with at least one of our starting assumptions – but we don’t know which one(s), and the flawed assumption(s) might be some that we didn’t even know we were making. We then need to test different combinations of hypotheses in order to work out which one(s) are flawed.So, progress in science requires that we can recognise hidden assumptions and devise ways of testing them.
It’s not a perfectly automatable process. It involves creativity. It involves some trial and error. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a reliable method of finding out about the universe.
-
Hard News: The Base, in reply to Bart Janssen,
There's another, maybe even more charitable, but still plausible, reading of "share" in that sentence, which is to imply that his leader (and perhaps, also, his audience) may already have those values. If that's the intention, it does not support in the slightest any speculation of a coup.
-
Impressive content aside, some proofreading of language is still needed, e.g.:
3. “[…] a minimum that its is substantially lowered” –> “a minimum that is substantially lowered”;
5. “This significantly strengthens makes the imperative […]” –> “This significantly strengthens the imperative”;
19. “Iam” –> “I am”;
26. “we’ve had 5% threshold” –> “we’ve had a 5% threshold”;
29. “will not an easy task” –> “will not be an easy task”;
43. “and that this is” – is interpretable as “I find […] that this is…” but is that what you intended rather than “and this [statement] is …”? ;
50. “qppear” –> “appear”;
59. “is that it an open list” –> “is that an open list”;
61. needs a final full stop;
64. “does it removes” –> “does it remove”;
64. “it open to” –> “it is open to”.(This comment can be removed once the editing is done.)
-
pile of increments
Surely, the reverse? It’s not “cutesy” or “blithe”, it’s bullshitting, and deserves to be bluntly labelled as such.