Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: Choice, Bro, in reply to Paul Williams,
I reckon Muldoon was right about Brash.
What did he say about him?
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Hard News: Leaf and Tips, in reply to 81stcolumn,
It's not the only way, but it is a highly practical way, very conducive to law-making. I think utilitarianism is better than previous systems, with ideas of revenge and so on in them, it's an improvement on that. But it's still a damned old idea.
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Up Front: Choice, Bro, in reply to Hebe,
I don't think voting against the marriage bill makes an MP a homophobe.
The contrapositive holds, too. Voting for it doesn't stop you being a homophobe.
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Hard News: Leaf and Tips, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
there is a cause/effect ambiguity.
That's always extremely difficult to decouple. The ambiguity stood against proof that tobacco was harmful for a very long time.
This should at the very least, start with balanced research into what actually harms people
I've often wonder if a policy of harm reduction is itself, in many ways, harmful. Bike helmets mean less people riding, discouraging healthy exercise. Stopping people doing things they like makes them suicidal. Preventing violent disagreement can mean group tyranny, and individual weakness. Etc. Not a simple question in the abstract. Harm minimization is in itself an offshoot of utilitarian moral philosophy, which is hardly the only moral theory.
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Curious conundrum. Another possibility is a preferential system, ranking the three options and doing an instant runoff. But Graeme's is simpler (and would probably have the same outcome), and I think his argument that the Condorcet criterion should hold makes sense on something that is basically picking a number along a range. A method that makes a polarized outcome more likely isn't "compromising". However, if the opinions genuinely are polarized, I'm not so sure. What if 59 favour 18, 59 favour 20, and only 3 are in the middle? Perhaps excluding the middle and re-voting makes more sense. I'd think, though, that if they were so divided, then it's actually a bad question, and should probably be recast to unpick out what it is that is controversial.
Yet another possibility would have been to set a range along which a number can be picked, and to take the median. There's no limit to the number of possible ways to choose.
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Hard News: Changing news, in reply to Bart Janssen,
While the language may excite the managers and marketing teams it causes severe forehead bruising for the scientists in those teams.
You're giving me an idea for a smartphone app. It does management maths - looks like a calculator, but produces much more exciting results.
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Hard News: Leaf and Tips, in reply to Will de Cleene,
How about Dr. Donald Tashkin?
Interesting stuff. Good honest science finds things that are highly counter-intuitive, sometimes. So much the worse for intuition. So many reasons based on micro analysis, why cannabis should cause lung cancer, and yet, it seems not to. I was very interested to hear about the strong connection to chronic bronchitis, though.
Alcohol is fourth.
Another counter-intuitive result. It's so close on that graph to P, that there's barely any excuse to get down on a meth-head at all. They're no different to millions of people in this country going home and cracking open a few beers. Or I'm reading the data wrong.
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Good Choice, Bros and Bro-esses. Good night.
ps Fuck you, Brendan Horan.
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Hard News: Leaf and Tips, in reply to Russell Brown,
The harm-minimisation approach would presumably favour something like this
LOL, classic. But would it take off? There's even smaller, easier to use things for nicotine smokers, that actually look like cigarettes, but they're not making major inroads.
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Up Front: Choice, Bro, in reply to Paul Williams,
I don't think it diminishes the legitimacy of a person's sexual orientation/activity if there are also exogenous factors.
Word, that leaped out at me from Emma's post also. I'd go further and say that even if it's entirely non-hereditary and changeable (I don't think this - this is an even if argument), there's still no excuse whatsoever to even attempt to force people to repress or change their sexuality. Even if there were a straightforward way of changing it, with a high success rate, it would be bad thing to do. In fact, it would almost be worse if that were the case.
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