Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Ross Mason,
That is enough in itself to admire without any earthly reason to bring some invented deity into the discussion.
Or you could go even simpler and not think at all, and just look. Simpler. But not better or worse, in the cosmic scheme of things. Might matter to you, though.
Edit: I was looking out at the sea only about an hour ago, but not much concerned about quarks. I was wondering if there were fish out there I could catch. While I looked, a reasonable sized fish (I'm guessing a mullet) jumped in front of me. Nature spoke! But what was the question??? Tooooooo deeeeeep. Mmmmmmm fisssssh.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Simple:
Input - desired output = lossWhat's the desired output of biology?
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Bart Janssen,
In my field it is absolutely unquestionably clear that Occam was a moron who knew nothing about the real world
I'd question that. Seems to me from the things you've said that you're arguing against overly zealous applications of Occam's razor, rather than the principle itself. In fact, you seem to be applying the principle, shaving off the need to postulate efficiency into biology.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Steve Barnes,
See, to me that seems like a cop out, having a Bob each way as it were.
I would imaging a good scientist, such as yourself no doubt, would have "faith" in the ability of the scientific process to find all, eventually.Nah, science's main reputation comes from concerning itself only with things that can actually be proved one way or another, given the right experiments and reasoning. Where it takes religion on and wins is on matters of fact. On matters of opinion, deeper questions about morality, the meaning of life, etc, the scientific method doesn't typically apply, and a scientist's opinion has no more gravitas than anyone else's. Which is why scientists can believe what they like about the unknowable, without feeling the need to reach a consensus or worrying about their credibility being damaged, because they happen to occasionally eat wafers of bread in a church, or genuflect in a temple, or whatever other rituals they care to be involved in.
That said, whatever regularities do appear in those opinions amongst scientists are interesting, and speak to the mindset involved in the discipline. If there is a high number of atheists, for instance, that suggest to me that they value a principle like Occam's Razor very highly - almost to a level of religious conviction, if they are the very hard-nosed atheist types who claim they have very strong and powerful reasons for believing in the absence of any deities.
There quite possibly is a set of unjustified beliefs that form the core set of values of scientists, which could loosely be called their religion. It's virtually impossible not to have such a framework and to be a functioning human being engaged in practical endeavours. But this most certainly should not be confused with what has been proved by science itself. It could have a very limited usefulness, good only for a period of time, to get science to a certain point. Rather like most moral codes, including those of most major religions, which were the starting point of a great many good institutions as well as bad ones.
To that end, a plurality of viewpoints on these matters amongst scientists is actually vital. If it fades away, that would be a rather worrisome turn, a sign that science had become another dogma. This has happened quite a few times in the history of the business, and there is no reason to think that it can't happen again. I'm not much concerned that it is happening at the moment, though. There may well be large research programs that have better political control over funding on reasons that are not that strong, but only in hindsight will we really know, when the lesser programs make breakthroughs that suddenly move scientific consensus. This kind of situation is impossible to avoid.
I also think that scientists freely thinking about matters beyond science is both normal and healthy. Most of the ones I know do this no less than other people, and it is quite probable that their motivations in science are driven by the dream of reaching into the unknown and finding out something astonishing and new, upturning conceptions about many widely held beliefs, even amongst scientists. But when they reach too far, they generally get no further than non-scientists. That is the brilliance of science, that it progresses by little steps, one experiment at a time, but with an eye to the big questions. It is not clear how far it can get. Some questions may always be matters of opinion.
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If we follow South Africa's method, and have no threshold, we can expect therefore to have a de facto one party state, and a reduction in the number of parties in Parliament :-)
;-0 Heh. Actually, since 1 of our seats is about the same size as 4 of theirs the number of seats they have with 1 of our seats worth of representation is 21/4. So it's like they have a touch over 5 one party seats. Spread across 9 parties.
But yeah, one data point from a country very dissimilar to NZ doesn't help too much.
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But does our current form of MMP really allow for strong local representation?
No. Local representation in the state government has always seemed like a daft old system to me. Where you live is but one of a hundred factors that matter to you in your choice of who represents you. By dividing the country into little pieces you magnify the importance of that one, but I can't really see any reason why that is necessary. It only matters to us because our system is designed to make it matter. We could vote on parties/candidates because of where they live, even if that wasn't built into the system.
But that isn't changing. We're stuck with electorates for the foreseeable future, so Graeme's question is interesting. I'm pretty sure that banning dual candidacy would make electorates more important again. I think they're far more important than they should be already so I'm against it.
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Given we're stuck with 120 MPs I presume this means in reality the 0.83%
I better clarify there - up to 0.83% excluded on any particular representation. Across multiple parties this could add up to a much higher number in total. The only solution to that in a representative system would be to have more total representatives. It's hard to know exactly how much the granularity at this level kills off representation, forcing people to choose a candidate less likely to mean no representation for them. Maybe if there were 1000 MPs, with a 1 seat threshold, we might have a hundred people getting 0.1%, meaning 10% of the electorate voting for these obscure people.
Any thoughts on how the answer to that could possibly be known are welcome. Is there a PR system out there with a much larger parliament and no threshold? Does it have a high proportion of tiny parties?
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0% threshold. Anything higher is simply asking the question "what proportion of NZers are we prepared to have unrepresented?". For me the answer is 0. Given we're stuck with 120 MPs I presume this means in reality the 0.83%, at the moment, although I'd prefer to say zero, because that is what I personally mean. 1 seat, effectively.
Every other number is picked out of thin air, and the justifications very much remind me of the justifications given in the 19th century to prevent women from voting. They were all fabricated around preserving the existing power structures, and some of them so patronizing that they actually slip under the radar of common sense.
They wouldn't be effective
Like that's a reason at all. If they're not effective, then it wouldn't matter if they were there or not. Also, it's not like effectiveness is a guaranteed quality of any elected representative.
They shouldn't have power, because they can't wield it responsibly
Another classic old chestnut - as if it's ever possible to learn to wield power responsibly if one is never given the chance, indeed as if it is even possible to know if power could be wielded responsibly when it is denied. And as if the current power wielders are paragons of responsibility.
The system would become unstable
The virtues of stability not having been proven, this one is actually a tautological argument, which boils down to "We can't change the system because then it would be different". Yes, existing power structures might be challenged a little bit. Mikaere has done a good job above of showing just how much that would be. Very little. ACLP, Destiny, Bill & Ben, Kiwi Party all might have got one seat out of 120. Wow, catastrophic.
It's more pragmatic
Can't think of a reason, but feel it instead. Firming up on that wild unjustified stab in the dark, in much the same way one firms up on how many gods should be in the pantheon. Let's go with something a bit like what we've got now, but moving in the right direction (without just committing that the natural end point of moving in the right direction is sitting there as an obvious choice). Let's be conservative about it, trust in tradition and the preserved wisdom of generations, rather than making a wild radical move to allow one more party into parliament each time, with one seat, and prevent the madness of what happened to NZF in 2008.
Only the last of these reasons makes any sense to me. It's conservative to the point of cowardice, when we consider that the chance to make real change to our electoral system comes up maybe two or three times in our whole lives. Every time we get a chance to have a big think about the rights of humanity, and most times, we sacrifice those to pragmatism. So change comes at a glacial pace, and everyone feels comfortable, except of course all the people who are excluded. Ironically, the party that has been most systematically excluded from our system represents a viewpoint that is not even radical in NZ. More people think the laws on cannabis in this country need to be changed, than voted for the National party.I doubt a change will really make any difference, though. That's the funniest irony of the pragmatism excuse. Nothing would really change in NZ anyway, so locking in that it can't change really serves only one purpose - to show that human rights aren't our priority. But if that's how people feel anyway, it wouldn't matter if it was locked in or not. They'll vote accordingly, and have been doing so for years. A conservative country doesn't actually need a conservative constitution. Indeed NZ is so damned conservative it doesn't need a constitution at all.
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Hard News: One man’s Meat Puppets is…, in reply to Simon Grigg,
The complete Buddha Bar series (try eating out on South East Asian tropical isles and avoiding that shite)
Heh, I've got a soft spot for China Dolls, despite them getting a thrashing the entire time I was in Thailand way back. I had the words to "O Jep" (never known the spelling), nearly down pat, and the family I was staying with absolutely pissed themselves every time it came on the radio and I was singing along with gusto. I thought that was because of my appalling barbarian accent, but a friend told me just before I left that the main chorus line is "It hurts! It hurts! It really, really hurts!", and that it was a song by a teenage girl about losing her virginity.
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Hard News: One man’s Meat Puppets is…, in reply to JacksonP,
OK, you got me. Not everything that we hate was once good. There's no moment of vulnerability when such a song would have ever had me tapping my feet. Ironic.
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