Posts by BenWilson
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Keir Leslie,
All I know is that there are a lot of people spinning self-serving stories about how their disciple ought get a fuck load more cash......Fundamentally, this is nonsense.
I may disagree with you about free markets, Keir, but on this, I agree with you. No matter what political system you're under, when you want a shitload of cash or major policy changes, there's an onus to provide better arguments, preferably arguments with some quantitative aspect, and some engagement with the criticisms leveled at them. Using one's own experience and position as a scientist to justify more science spending is like turkeys voting against Christmas.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Deborah,
Yeah, I don't have a heartfelt view. It seems quite possible that every different science could have a different method, that there really is no unifying theory. It also probably doesn't matter at all.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Bart Janssen,
Ben is arguing (I think) that there is no qualitative difference and that the quantitative difference is insignificant. We don't need the best and brightest we can make do with more of the good ones.
You think wrong. I'm arguing against something far more specific - your point about attracting the best and brightest by paying for the through education funding, justified by their higher scientific output. You're trying to turn it into a question of whether having more brilliant people is good, with your fantasy version of me saying it's not. I'm asking the question "How good is it? Is it really worth the cost?". You can't answer, except through pointless anecdotes about how brilliant people did brilliant stuff, which don't even need to be addressed because they are not in dispute. I raise the obvious counter anecdote that non-brilliant people sometimes do brilliant stuff, and don't get me started on the number of brilliant people who came to absolutely nothing. I also raise the point that brilliance is a nebulous quality, quite possibly largely accounted for by simply working hard, or measured only after the fact by the quality of the output. You tried to turn this into me saying there is no such thing as brilliance, which is patently absurd, and I've denied it several times, and yet you persist. This is failing to engage.
Yes, I know it's hard to quantify brilliance. Which is exactly what's wrong with making claims that you must have more of it. You can't even measure when you've got it, nor what it was worth. Some of your anecdotes are even explicitly to that point - brilliance that was unacknowledged. How are you going to convince me that you could find a Margulis, or that you would recognize her when she interviewed? More likely, you'd be one of the people writing something back to her from the journal saying her ideas are too whack to publish, because you don't get them, being a self-confessed B grade.
Furthermore, the idea of encouraging more brilliant scientists into the NZ workforce via education is so indirect that it might do nothing at all, except produce brilliant scientists for other countries at great cost. Indeed, that is what you identified as the problem right from the start, that you're not seeing the good CVs. Which suggests that the problem is not the education system, but your actual industry, here in NZ, which may simply be unappealing to the brightest graduates. Maybe it's the pay. Maybe it's the funding generally which means crappy labs and not enough equipment. Maybe it's just that this is an isolated, impoverished, small backwater, and talent always goes to the center of where it's happening in their thing, in every field, and you're always going to have to make do with the B students.
This isn't tall poppy syndrome. It's a simple acknowledgment that you have an unrealistic idea about what's involved in convincing people to part with their money. Everyone wants the best, until they have to pay for it. Your say so that you need more brilliance in the lab, therefore science degrees should be more heavily subsidized needs more work. I'm actually trying to help by pointing out the shortcomings, believe it or not.
Generally, I think we need more funding for science, sure. I have never agreed with student loans, period. And I think you may have something of a point that in this country we have a problem attracting people to degrees for which incomes are not high, and that is to the detriment of the entire society. But I couldn't really care so much about brilliance - my take is that it's fairly random where it shows up. The problem of making students think about the financial outcomes of their education affects ALL student numbers in the impecunious subjects. I actually care about ALL people, rather than just brilliant people, who I think have considerably less need than most people to be given extra advantages. We already give them far, far more help than other people. This is not tall poppy syndrome, it's my sense of fairness and social responsibility.
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Yes you did.
No, I didn't and I've answered this criticism, whereas you're just reiterating your last post and now inventing positions for me. You're not engaging. Good day, sir.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to BenWilson,
But that doesn’t mean it’s not a reliable method of finding out about the universe.
Well, what else do we have? And if someone found something better, that would just become the new thing we called science. It must be able to evolve, or it could go into a long stagnant period. But if I got anything from all of those thousands of hours of tweaking evolutionary algorithms, it was that there's no ideal set of forces and pressures for solving all objective functions. Sometimes massive diversity in the evolving population led to rapid convergence. Sometimes the opposite, a sudden rush of convergence would be coupled with a very low level of difference, as the algorithm discovered the exit to a local optima, and all the population crowded into it into the rush to the next plateau. At those times, a population of two converged fastest. And at the end, there's no knowing if it's done, it doesn't prove that it's found the optimal solution - maybe it has, or maybe there's another rush just around the corner. When that is suspected, that we're in vicinity of the optimal, the evolutionary algorithm became very inefficient, and brute force methods made a lot more sense. I'd flip those on, and see the objective start climbing again. Always, unless you got to a solution that was perfect (like a classification algorithm perfectly partitioning the sample data), you couldn't really be sure that you hadn't climbed the wrong mountain entirely, and were fighting for every inch of uphill when just across the valley some towering colossus's mere foothills were higher than where you had got to. There's a very deep analogy to the human search for truth in all of that.
I'm totally undecided on the value of philosophy anywhere in this. Ideas like Popper's stand a good chance of becoming counterproductive dogmas (Popper foresaw this, and consider his own theory to also be a scientific theory, which could be refuted one day). Science that's right on the cutting edge is often struggling to be recognized as science, because it involves rejecting a lot of current principles, and possibly the tolerance of being less accurate on a number of point for a while as the theory develops.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Deborah,
I'm still quite keen on Popper / falsificationism, as a minimum standard for a science.
I still rate the guy extremely highly. For starters, his writing is highly accessible, and that's a sign of brilliance to me, when someone can explain a very sophisticated idea without very much jargon. Falsificationism is, to my eyes as a philosophy student, one of the most original and profound ideas to have entered the field in the twentieth century. It's the best answer I've ever heard to Hume's problem of induction, the problem that effectively ended the entire school of empiricism. Prior to Popper, it was all about induction and legions of philosophers trying vainly to reconcile that the principle of induction can't stand on deductive grounds with horrible theories like "we are programmed to believe this irrational thing". Popper opened the possibility of putting science back onto a deductive footing to explain it's extraordinary access to truth.
Lakatos builds on Popper, puts theories into the context of entire research programs, rather than individual ones, which goes a long way to redressing the main problem with Popper, that practically every scientific theory would not have got off the ground because it would have been refuted early on, before it could be developed. Feyerabend argues very strongly that Lakatos was effectively an epistemological anarchist like himself, though, masquerading behind Popper's demarcation criterion as a strong believer in method. When I read that, I had my first real experience of aporia, in the Socratic sense, to this day it has me totally confused and feeling like I don't really understand anything at all about science, despite having forged through all that theory. I'm essentially a skeptic, I can see that anarchism can't be refuted, but it does seem rather useless. So now science is incomprehensible. I don't mean that I don't understand scientific theories or believe them. I just mean that I'm buggered if I can say clearly where they get their power from. I haven't kept up with the theory since then, I understand postmodernists engaged in an all out war to have their views accepted/understood, and that many of the softer social sciences have benefited from that. To me, that kind of war is like a paradigm shift, indeed such ideas as paradigm shifts and incommensurability are part and parcel to that angle. I'd love it if someone who did get that stuff could comment.
ETA: Linger! Snappy snap.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Bart Janssen,
And when we present you with examples you dismiss them as luck or sexism. Sorry Ben but that isn't productive.
I'm not sure whether you're speaking of one or two argument lines in this thread, or just making a general comment. I didn't "dismiss" anything, I responded to an argument given with a counter argument, which is what my understanding of one part of constructive discussion is. Do you have a counter counter? Can you deny sexism in the sciences? Do you deny that there is a tremendous amount of luck in science, that things are often discovered or not discovered quite by chance, and this can mean years, decades, maybe even centuries before some kinds of progress are made? Have you never gone down a blind alley, and reflected that you could have saved yourself substantial time if you'd taken the other path, but how were you to know in advance? Furthermore, do you deny that a lot of brilliance is often judged by success, so luck may be a big part of it?
Of course it isn't proven, no theory is, merely failed to be disproven.
You're Popperian, then? You do realize that idea came from a philosopher, right?
You are arguing that you should ignore the advice of those with actual experience. That's an experiment that has already been done.
No, I'm not arguing that, nothing like it at all. You present a completely false binary:
either you let scientists who have had the experience of working with brilliant people make the choice on who should get funding or you let an accountant in wtgn make that choice on who should get funding.
which is a hobby horse of yours, but by no means covers the options. Another option is that many people can have input into the decision, including the shop floor scientists, the scientists who are somewhere up the chain towards management, the specialist managers, and the people who have to pay for it all decide. Also, the books have to balance, or it's unsustainable, so accountants really do need to be involved. That's a fact of life you have to deal with, I'm sorry.
You have repeatedly made the contention that we suffer from a lack of brilliant people in the sciences, but you're coming entirely from only one of those perspectives, the guy on the science shop floor. Which makes you like some footy player in a club saying that they really want Dan Carter in their team. Sure, great, that would be nice if you could afford him, and if it would make a difference, really. The rest of the team might be so crap that it would be a complete waste, and you'd still lose every game. Of course it would make some difference, but the question of the quantity of difference is important and you've really come back with nothing on that, other than to say it's difficult to evaluate. If it's so difficult to evaluate, why are you so certain of it, then? THAT is really my main point. For every anecdote, there's a counter anecdote, so we moved rapidly to an impasse which can only be solved by harder evidence, rather than a longer list of more anecdotes.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Lucy Stewart,
With all due respect, Ben, I'm getting the feeling you don't actually understand how science - or, rather, scientists - work. "But you wouldn't believe it if it was!" is not actually an argument for the disprovability of a scientific theory.
Lucy, I have a postgraduate diploma in science myself, and have worked as a scientist for at least ten years in my life. I just don't work in your science. Furthermore, I wrote the start of my master's thesis on the philosophy of science, so it's not like I'm ignorant about the matters I'm discussing with you. Yes, I know that's confusing, a philosopher and a scientist. The horror. I'm sorry that the way in which I'm discussing science with you is confusing because it's informed by dozens of modern philosophers and scientists opinions on the epistemology of the discipline. It's meta-science, and it's standing on the shoulders of giants. I left naive inductionism behind decades ago. I left Popper behind then too. When I'm discussing Darwin with you, I'm doing it having read a great deal of the philosophical discussion on the topic, which has left me with a very strong feeling that it's far, far more controversial than you let on. Or perhaps realize. I don't know which is true, which is why I'm discussing this with you, maybe you'll learn something too. Did you understand the idea of the negative heuristic, as expounded by Lakatos? Try it, then you might begin to understand that I'm not trying to deny evolution, nor am I saying that natural selection being nearly a tautology is a bad thing. It's just a curious thing, a theory whose position in science serves a rather unique function.
When I said you have a bunch of recourses that make the disproof of natural selection virtually impossible on logical ground alone, I wasn't just pulling your tit. This exact argument has played out so many times that I'm just bored of doing it again, and cutting to the chase. Have you even considered the point I'm making, or are you so busy giving me a Darwin for Beginners course that you haven't spotted that I already understand the theory? That's how it feels to me.
So, one more time, the hypothetical experiments or observations that you suggested would hardly do any damage to the idea of natural selection at all. They would just join the massive plethora of odd anomalies that have been observed in nature, where some trait would seem advantageous, but hasn't occurred, until the reason that it hasn't occurred is explained by some other contra mechanism. Or, it can just be put down to "hasn't happened yet, oh well". Or it might just involve a slight change to the particular timelines of evolution. My point is that the core belief is pretty much unassailable, and mostly that come down to tautologous nature of "the survival of the fittest" where "fittest" comes down to "what the survivors are like", so it's a theory of the survival of the survivors. Which doesn't make it a bad theory, especially considering what it displaced, it just makes it a rather strange theory, one that could really only be defeated by an entire paradigm shift (read Thomas Kuhn for an explanation of what that is) right across biological science. I make no predictions of the likelihood of this. I think evolution is true, after all. Natural selection is just a little part of it, and the idea of it opened up a whole different way of looking at how things can come to be as they are, which led in turn to the discovery of a great many of the mechanisms along the way. Most of that stuff is the more conventional kind of scientific theory, stuff that can be proved or disproved by experiment and/or observation.
I've personally studied natural selection at work intimately in optimization models, in particular genetic algorithms. That was my work for several years recently. I've not only watched evolution, I've designed it. It works. It's an ironic position to be in, intelligently designing evolution.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Keir Leslie,
I mean, if you talk to most economists, they will tell you that if you have to set up some way of organising an economy, a market is the best way to start.
I never at any point said that there should be no markets. By the "refuted economic theory" I mean neoclassical economics, which you appeared to be advocating in your constant claims that government intervention distorts the purest workings of markets, and that only the markets can pick the winners, and Bart should be listening to the market signals to decide how best to organize his own kind of research.
Some will then tell you should do other stuff to fix the flaws in the market, while others will tell you you can never meddle with it.
Yes, I agree with the first kind and you seem to fall in the second camp. But you also have made a few contra claims to that since, so now I'm not sure.
But there are almost no economists who will tell you to start by centrally planning everything, for instance.
Bold claim. It's convenient to forget that communism ever existed and held sway over billions of people, isn't it? To deny that what went on within their nations was "economics", or that vast legions of people were trained to organize it, study it, improve it. Also convenient to forget that such people existed outside those spheres of influence, that every economic theory under the sun has been thought of at one time or another. It's a bit sad, really, that the bulk of economists coming out of our universities are so blinkered to the endless possibilities of human economic organization that one theory could have such dominance, whilst also having so many flaws, and so many rivals that compensate for those flaws. Indeed, it's convenient to forget that the industrial powerhouse responsible for most of the world's production these days is still run by the Communist party, and using open markets is a very late change in the nation.
But it wouldn't be the first time in history that the bulk of educated people were wrong about something, even something they specialized in. That's normal, really, we have to travel through falsehood to get to truth, that's science in a nutshell. Sometimes it's annoyingly slow, though, when a false set of ideas gets too strong a hold.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Keir Leslie,
But personally, that sounds so perfectly crackpot as to be a sterling example of why governments ought stay out of it.
Yup all those people at NASA are crackpots...
Of course, it is very easy to point to examples of misguided government investment. Think Big, for instance.
Which gave us massive renewable energy resources and the ability to refine our own petrol? Which is on the verge of being the National government's solution to the recession, in a big IPO bonanza? Yeah, real bad investment, those ones were.
I do not think think throwing more government monies specifically at the undergrad provision of STEM subjects is economically justified.
If you mean to the exclusion of non-STEM subjects, then I'm inclined to agree. It's quite an unfair subsidy, just as farming subsidies are, because they're subsidizing activities that already have a good payback.
As far as I can tell there are almost no reputable economists who reject the market as the basic economic structure.
I don't really know what you mean by "reject the market as the basic economic structure", so I can't comment.
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