Posts by B Jones
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Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to Russell Brown,
My guess is that it has been influenced by the emotional climate around the earthquake. I can't think of any other explanation.
No, my observation is much broader than that. Perhaps people are biting harder because of the earthquake, but many people I talk to are far happier with credulity and pseudoscience than I am. Vaccine rejectionism, homeopathy, etc. Amber teething necklaces got some good Campbell Live treatment a few months ago (although not quite so confrontational) - the results on the Little Treasures board were similar.
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Judging by the Twitter response to the Ring interview, and the apparent pressure placed on TV3 to cover the issue in the first place, I don't blame the journalists. I think that they're being led by a credulous wider public. I'm not quite sure where that credulity comes from - perhaps the world is a nicer place when you might be surprised one day by a paranormal event, or you can prevent cancer by drinking vitalised water, or taking flower essences reduces stress. Or if you listen to one guy who claims to predict earthquakes with certainty, you can avoid tragedies like last week's.
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Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Gio, wikipedia is a human activity and vulnerable to the same or similar pressures - influence, status, free time - that some people have and some people don't. It creates systemic biases and excludes minority points of view. It's still better than my Personal Self Published Theory of Everything, or Conservapedia, or a bunch of other ways of collecting information. It's the correctability that puts it ahead, and I've yet to see such openness to revision in any of the popular fringe theories, except for the sort that shifts the goalposts every time that one of their tenets is successfully knocked down (see MMR/autism/mercury/aluminium/too many too soon).
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Science has its fair share of untested beliefs, which is I think what irritates some people when generic appeals to Science (as opposed to rational empirical scepticism) are used to shout down fringe beliefs and theories.
Depends on what you count as science I suppose. There isn't some record keeper somewhere who sticks things in the scientific encyclopedia if they make the grade. It's more like wikipedia, where many people work in it, mistakes get made but there's a process for weeding them out when they get in there (perhaps it's harder to become an editor or moderator). Pseudoscience doesn't.
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There are many instances through history where the widely held belief has proved to be both scientifically wrong, and life-threatening.
While that's true, it's also not helpful. Science isn't a body of widely-held beliefs - it's the body of beliefs that have been subjected to testing and checking against evidence. Any candidate for acceptance into that body has to pass the same standards.
If I'd been in Campbell's shoes, I might have asked how committed Ken Ring was to making sure he gave the best predictions to his readers, and whether he reviewed his past predictions to see how many were right, and whether he improved his prediction techniques based on what he found. Then I might have hit him with the actual accuracy figures: Mr Ring, last year you predicted x earthquakes and x of those predictions came true. Do you think you can do a better job this year, because that's no more accurate than chance? That's what a scientist would have done.
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Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to Emma Hart,
This was the equivalent of shouting at Andrew Wakefield, and who wouldn't like to do that?
There's an appropriately harsh interview with Wakefield by CNN's Anderson Cooper linked to here.
I liked the interview at first watching, enjoying watching JC unleash his grump on an appropriate target, but in hindsight think Rachel Maddow's lovely way of letting a subject hang himself might have been more effective. All this science vs everyone else narrative that's developed is enormously frustrating.
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Oh no, they're not predictions. They're "opinions", which means that even when he gets one close to being right, he really shouldn't be taking credit for it. Otherwise he needs to explain all his misses.
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Hilary, I'm getting a lot of that, plus a dose of Wellingtonian survivor's guilt - we all know it was meant to be our city that was trashed. Every time my bus rolls under the motorway down Bowen St, I think about how I'll get back over or under it to get home to my daughter.
But Ken Ring? No. Anyone with half a brain and no conscience could say that Christchurch will have an earthquake, since they've been having them for months. That's not even what he said, and even if he did, he got the size of it totally wrong. It's no more an accurate prediction than the guy on Waitangi Day.
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I reckon it's worse if that site's a joke. Bad enough to rain down hellfire and judgement on suffering people when you genuinely believe it's warranted; considerably worse to do it as a prank.
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On one hand, being able to access free contraception for anyone is good. On the other hand, having to talk about your contraceptive arrangements as part of the process of applying or reapplying for income support? Horrific.