Posts by BenWilson
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Legal Beagle: A matter of conscience, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I'm trying to draw a distinction between personal votes, and conscience votes. I think there is a place for conscience votes, being votes on which MPs are only accountable to themselves/God, and other votes, on which their parties, supporters, and voters generally can and should hold them to account.
I don't think the two are different. MPs should always vote on their consciences, indeed, they should always act on them in every way, as all moral people should. And they should always be held accountable for their votes and their actions. This does not mean compromise is impossible - it's every bit as much on your conscience if your failure to compromise led to bad outcomes as if you violated a heartfelt principle.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Bart Janssen,
But there is simply no way we would make the progress we do in science without their ability.
Could you give me an example? Some breakthrough that you have personally actually witnessed happening at the hands of a real live genius that you couldn't imagine having been stumbled across by someone else in maybe a little more time? I'm sorry to hack at this point, but seriously, it's something I've simply never seen at work. The comparison with Dan Carter is a poor one really. The guy is good, sure, but double marked, he's not better than two players at once. That's what I'm getting at - that sure, people being brilliant is great and all, but throwing more brains at a problem is usually a reasonable substitute when the best brains aren't available. Considering the best ones are also the most costly, it's often more cost effective too.
I think you're conferring abilities onto the bright that border on mystical, and that's odd coming from a scientist. Mental work isn't really too much different from physical work, time invested produces eventual output. I'm not prepared to accept that there is something unusual about the sciences in this respect. Why should there be?
I'm not saying brightness is of no value, of course it is. But it can be overrated easily, it's not a different coin to the way less bright people are, it's just a different quantity of coin. So we may have to agree to disagree - I think we overrate the importance of talent. To me, having spent 20 odd years designing systems to solve difficult problems, it's pretty much axiomatic that if the system requires talent, it's been designed badly. To me the endemic problem in NZ is not that there's not enough brains about, it's that there's not enough money about. People won't pay the money that is required to do things properly, and insist the people doing the work should perform at the highest levels, just because there are geniuses around. This isn't realistic, it's an attitude that leads to constant frustration.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Keir Leslie,
I don't think there's too much wrong with picking winners, Keir. By subsidizing education at all, we are picking winners. But I do think we've picked the wrong ones for quite a while. One thing the country is very short on, for instance, is tradespeople. Bringing back subsidized apprenticeships could do a lot to address this. We've got a city to rebuild, and it might be nice if we had more housing being built too. It would possibly help with youth unemployment as well, particularly at the tail end of "achievement".
I'm not anti-academic, have an Arts degree and a Science diploma myself, but those were my interests. A kid who hated school is pretty much faced with minimum wage in a dead end job at the moment. Small reason they are becoming tertiary students, even in things that aren't going to lead to jobs. I don't think that's encouraging excellence, quite the opposite.
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I'm not sure how much I can agree with you, Graeme, because you seem to be taking both sides on a couple of points. As far as I'm concerned, every vote is a conscience vote, my own included, and parties do not enhance democracy at all, for that reason. They are a shadow cast over representative democracy, powerful only because of the iron law of oligarchy, rather than because they are good in themselves. One of the best things about MMP (and other proportional representation systems) is that it takes account of the horrid influence of parties in the process, enabling more than a duality of them to exist.
No one is "forced to vote" in a particular way, even by a party whip. They can leave the party, and if they disagree on enough policy they probably should. For quite a few politicians, this has been a path to a higher level of influence and (ironically) job security than to suck it up and vote against their beliefs. The rest are, in my opinion, cowards, which is not a quality I find at all endearing in the supposedly excellent people who rule my country.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Bart Janssen,
And despite what I've said above, us B graders actually do make genuine discoveries which are every bit as exciting as my dreams were when I was a student, really our next paper is going to be so cool!
I have no doubt of that. Charles Darwin rated himself as a B-grader. I think the world has an obsession with grades, frankly. Quite unrealistic views about the importance of high achievers. They're always, by definition, going to be a small number of people, and thus responsible for only a small amount of what gets done, and often at a hidden cost that is really substantial.
This perpetual rhetoric around the need for excellence in all things, the pursuit of excellence, the development of excellence etc annoys me a lot, particularly in education. Our problem in NZ is not at the excellent end, it's at the other end. An education system focused around excellence seem to me the perfect prescription for massively increasing the number of failures and dropouts, people who are too embarrassed to even have a go because they are not excellent and are never likely to be. The focus should be on perpetual improvement. It's a path to excellence for those with the talent for it, but it's also a path to betterment for everyone.
The other cost of excellence that is often overlooked is that it's typically achieved by specialization. This is OK to a point, there is economy in specialization, but people can become overspecialized very, very easily. This carries a lot of problems with it. It is extremely risky, can leave those people with nothing if what they are specialized in loses value. It can lead to an inability to understand what is outside of the specialization, which is almost everything. It can create isolated, unhappy, unhealthy people. This is my biggest criticism of an emphasis on vocationally oriented training. I have no problem at all with people taking those paths, but I don't think they need to be pushed to take them or that people who take paths which are far less specific should be discouraged.
Indeed, I think that if anything, people need more encouragement to develop broad skills than they do to develop specific skills - those sell themselves. It's a much bigger ask to get people to push outside of their comfort zone and work on their weaknesses than it is to let them naturally just go to their strengths. This is the main reason for general schooling, it's why we force kids to learn maths even if they hate it, it's the reason for core subjects. It's the reason for PE, rather than just letting kids do sports in which they will typically pick one and end up with the asymmetric development that almost every sport produces. Dan Carter may be exceptional, but is he model of health? The guy had to sit out the RWC due to injuries.
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Southerly: Liveblog: Moving House (Literally), in reply to Ross Mason,
Is Roger serious that he was unaware that people were giving up tryiing to move their houses????
It's pretty hard to believe. But he looked genuinely moved. Who would not be? The initiative and hard work of David and Jen can't be ignored, and they've managed a real solution. There's nothing theoretical about it, no if-onlys that can be fobbed off. The house was moved and David's got a massive stack of paperwork to show what he went through to do it. The huge ocean of trouble has been navigated, and there is a New World on the other side, for those who wish to follow.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Bart Janssen,
In fact medicine is a perfect example of the problem we often see, good students who like research but choose medicine because the pay is better.
I do wonder if half of the problem is because one's chances of making a significant breakthrough in science these days are pretty small. It seems to be a business that demands vast numbers of B students, chipping away at the Great Wall of China sized edifice that is modern science. Could be demoralizing all on its own to anyone cursed with brilliance.
ETA Mind you at least half of being an A student seems to come down to being a total swot and not having to hold down 2 paid jobs at the same time, so maybe accusations of brilliance on their part are unfair.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Bart Janssen,
When we ask our colleagues in the university they say the bright ones just aren't taking the sciences any more.
Even for med students?
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to James Clark,
On the subject of funding tertiary education as an investment (that Keith touched on) I think a much stronger topic is that of full funding in exchange for bonded employment. Govt will fully fund your degree provided you agree to work for govt for x years.
The reason that won't happen is because that would involve the government guaranteeing a job to students. It would be snapped up by practically every student, I'd expect, what would there be to lose? They're bonded to their debt anyway. If they got a better job, they could pay off the bond. If not, take the government job.
It's not a bad idea, quite the opposite, I think it's an excellent idea, trumped only by the even better idea of free education with a reasonable allowance for everyone.
@DeepRed
Sadly, appeal to sour grapes is one of the most effective forms of divide-and-rule – it is but a subset of fomenting latent inferiority complexes
I'm not sure inferiority complexes are the source. It's an appeal to people's sense of fairness. That's what's evil about it. Once it becomes part of the basic structure of life, then it becomes a radical suggestion that the debt was odious. It would be unfair to forgive one person's debts and not another's and when the other's has been already paid off, to forgive it would involve giving them the entire value of the debt and all the repayments back. That's considered a very radical idea, even though it would be a massive boon to the economy. People have their struggles personalized by their debts, their pride bound up in the repayment, and their ability to judge others who can't/don't repay is lessened. When the idea of it is that it's a common struggle in which shirkers are the enemy, rather than a struggle that should never have happened, then real solutions can't even enter discussion.
Long term, I'd expect that the outcome on education of all this debt will be exactly what it has been for property. Massive inflation of the value of something that isn't really that great. Just as a basic house isn't really that fucking awesome, something that humans have had since time immemorial, so will our educations become, something that we have to have just to subsist, something that costs us a big fraction of our productive lives, and in doing so takes away from every other contribution we could make to our society. People who turn away from it will increasingly end up better off, although the best off will still be those who just buy into the debt-slavery and give their entire lives to it, and suffer no misfortunes that tip them into the paupery sitting just around the corner from such a risky path. This will typically be achieved by coming from wealth in the first place.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Kumara Republic,
Prostetnic Vogon Joyce is probably gambling that students will be too disillusioned, apathetic, or toadyish to challenge the student loans & allowance changes.
Or simply powerless, as they were when I was a student. We were never able to stop anything. Students actually enrolled aren't a very big voting bloc, and no one listens to kids. 3 years of an adult life, and zip, it's behind you and you're paying off your debts. When you've done that, then you're bitter on anyone who doesn't. It was always an evil, stupid, divisive, impoverishing idea, very difficult to remove once entrenched.
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