Posts by Deborah
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I like the three year salary setting proposal, but I think it ought to be inflation adjusted, or adjusted by a percentage increase that is no more that the increase in the CPI over the previous year. Rounded down to the nearest 0.5%, perhaps.
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He suggests that the University of Auckland be allowed to increase its fees. Then it could use fee setting to achieve the ends it wants. However, this needs to be linked to student funding. At present, student fees are about 75% government funded, and 25% student funded, mostly via loans. The way I read it, he doesn’t think that government funding per student should increase, but the extra fee cost should be met by students themselves. My assumption is that he intends that students would be able to borrow the increased fees via the student loans system. That’s a cost to government, because even though student loans are loans (duh), it still costs to provide them in the first place.
I’d be more sympathetic to the idea of *all* universities being able to charge whatever fees they like, and government providing a certain amount of funding per student, which may well be significantly less, proportionally, than the 75% (or so) funding they provide at present. Government could also limit the amount that students can borrow for fees, to say 1/3 of the amount of government funding. Anything on top of that would have to be met upfront by the students. On other words, sure, remove the caps, but don’t expect government to come to the party by providing extra funding, either as fees subsidies or as student loans. Alonside this, develop a robust scholarships package, aimed at students coming to university from low decile schools.
No he doesn’t see much place for a shrinking number of academics, at the University of Auckland. It’s student numbers that would shrink, at the University of Auckland. In order for numbers to shrink at the University of Auckland, they will have to go up elsewhere. It’s staff and students at other universities who will wear the cost of this plan.
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I’m not prepared to give any particular weight to what a professor at Auckland University says in favour of giving much more funding to his university by f#*^king the rest over. Perhaps I might give it more credence if it was accompanied by proposals to disestablish all current Auckland University staff, and make them compete for positions there.
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If we could get only the Sky channels we wanted, we would be buying Soho and rugby / sports, and maybe one or two other things. It would be great to be able to pay for just the channels we want. Because we can't, we don't get Sky at all, and we put off watching series like Game of Thrones until we can buy them on DVD, and spend several nights in a row veging on the sofa watching them.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to BenWilson,
My reading of Feyerabend left me convinced that he was describing a social process, not engaged in the project of trying to work out why we ought to give scientific thought special status. Hmm... actually, I take that back. In effect, he was saying, we ought not to give it special status, because it's just one social activity among many. However, that simply doesn't gel with my confidence in aspirin, or epidurals, or any of the magnificences of contemporary medicine (c/f the woo of homeopathy etc. And yes, if homeopathy works for you, that's jolly nice, but all the double blind studies to date show that it's really the placebo effect. Which is great! Just not something you can prescribe without playing on people's credulity.)
Back to Phil. of Science... I get off the boat somewhere between Kuhn and Lakatos, 'though I am probably somewhere closer to Lakatos. One of the things that works about science is the extent to which we build a web of knowledge, so that things that we learn in one area make sense, or fit in with what we learn in another area. Evolution and botany and geology and physics all help to explain and/or confirm the movement of continental plates. If we were to find that the flora and fauna on either side of the Atlantic were totally discontinuous, then we would have powerful evidence suggesting that plate tectonics was not correct as a theory. As it turns out, at present, all the knowledge we have to date tends to confirm plate tectonics.
Of course, what would really happen is that if the flora and fauna were discontinuous, we would start looking for fossils, or start researching speciation, or whatever, to save the core hypothesis (i.e. that continental plates move). That is because science is also a social process. But over time, scientific truth (believe me, I'm wincing as I write that word) will out.
There's a heap of other examples I could use rather than plate tectonics, but it's one I happen to love, because it is so new. 1960s, I think. Suddenly, when plate tectonics became widely known, within scientific circles, a whole lot of other things made sense.
So I don't go as far as Feyerabend, and certainly not into a state of aporia. But that could just be because I have not read enough Phil of Science to get into the state in the first place.
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Surely a brand new (mind)field.
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This seems apt.
LET US TURN NOW to the celebration of scientific rigor. Individual sciences develop rules and standards for appraising evidence—as they learn about aspects of nature, they learn more about how to learn. At any particular stage of inquiry, communities of scientists agree on the canons of good inference, so that the work of certification of new results goes relatively smoothly. To the extent that the agreed-on rules are reliable, knowledge accumulates. It is important to understand, however, that at times of major change the standards of good science themselves are subject to question and discussion. And this observation, amply demonstrated in the history of the sciences, has important consequences.
From " The Trouble with Scientism", in The New Republic, by Philip Kitcher, who is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University.
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What the hell is going on?
The absence of anyone from Labour on The Nation was explained by Garner at the very start of the show. The programme had invited Labour’s Spokesperson for Economic Development and Associate Finance Spokesperson, David Cunliffe, to discuss more or less the same things that Norman and Peters were discussing on Q & A – the future direction of the economy. Cunliffe was happy to appear but, conscious of the current sensitivities in the parliamentary party over Labour’s leadership, sought an assurance that that topic would not be canvassed in the interview. He received that assurance in writing from Executive Producer Richard Harman and Garner himself.
Despite those assurances, Cunliffe’s appearance was later vetoed by what Garner called Labour’s ‘top team’ which he defined as ‘David Shearer and the media team’. The reason given was apparently that the ‘top team’ didn’t want anything to distract from Finance Spokesman David Parker so close to the Budget.
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Anyway, ‘the top team’ didn’t like Cunliffe’s brilliant speech and he was apparently bawled out by Shearer and others and told the speech was’ naive and stupid.’ That tends to be the price you pay for idealism. And, according to the extremely well informed Duncan Garner, the price may be high for Cunliffe who has been ‘put in his place, somewhere down the bottom of the pecking order’.This is so utterly stupid that it beggars belief. Cunliffe is not only intellectually brilliant, he is by far Labour’s most accomplished debater in the House and on television and radio. No-one in the Labour Party can hold a candle to him as a media spokesperson. Stammering and stuttering seem to be the main criteria for that at present.
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I'm still quite keen on Popper / falsificationism, as a minimum standard for a science. I think falisficationism should be rejected as an adequate description of a science, or as a reason for holding scientific knowledge in high esteem. A necessary, but not sufficient description of science, perhaps?
Disclosure / excuse making: I only ever read undergraduate Philosophy of Science, so my understanding of the area is a bit limited.
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I pop into a thread about student loans and find people arguing about evolution as a scientific theory. Cool.
Just a couple of points.
(1) If you're going to go down a Popperian / falsificationism route, then famously, evolution could be disproved by fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.
(2) You don't need the possibility of an experiment to make a theory falsifiable. You need the possibility of evidence. An experiment is one way of providing evidence, but evidence can be provided from observation too. This is the route that evolution takes, mostly.If you buy into the idea that all scientific theories are tentative and temporary (i.e. going down a falsificationism route), then you can start thinking about which theories are more robust, or less tentative and temporary. There's a whole lot of confirming evidence for evolution, coming from quite different fields of study (e.g. mitochondrial DNA), and a whole lot of work in biology and medicine that only makes sense if you base it on evolutionary genetics. This is proof that evolution is true, because actually, you can never prove anything, but it is damn good support, making the theory much more robust. Plate tectonics is another nice example of a theory that is confirmed / made much more robust by all the supporting theories around it.
Mind you, a geologist friend of ours pointed out that opposition to plate tectonics really only died out when a heap of older geologists died...