Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Bart Janssen,
The sad thing I experienced when competing with other specialists for the trust/money of non-specialists was that it came down very often to non-rational things. Better presentation. A more exciting story. More prestigious reputation. Nicer suits, spankier toys. More cunning tactics, and a ruthless milking of cheap shots. Better relationships with the people you were trying to convince. A broad political agreement. Secret deals.
Which pretty much suggests that coming to a decision on something you are not a specialist in is hard work. It's really no surprise that so many people don't know the truth about a lot of science.
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Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Sacha,
Well, celebrating birthdays is a common practice. But I think some of these are more crucial than others. When kids are young is the most important time, but increasing intervals from there, synchronized with times of social/cultural significance makes sense. That's what 21sts were originally about. But to me seems like every birthday until 13 is important, then probably 15, 18, 20, 25....etc. It might start getting closer together at the end of life, where every year is hard won, and the social isolation of aging needs more formalized efforts than people will tend to spontaneously give.
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Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Che Tibby,
i'll admit that calling hide a complete arsehole might not have sat so well...
Did that actually come up? Does rather point in the direction of your unknown malefactor.
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Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Che Tibby,
whomever you were who tried to have me sacked, fcuk you.
How did it go down with the employer? Did they hass you about anything you actually said, or was it just on some kind of estimation of the time you were spending when you "should" be working?
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Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Sacha,
There's always the Blend..
That's cheating. I meant from some truly random connection, like someone chancing to see my name on my credit card, or a work meeting, or such. Like I say, unlikely.
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My use of my real name began on Kiwiblog, so I was hardly going to change it for here. Initially I think I did it because of something Craig said there that made sense about people simply respecting the courage of a real name more. But the thing I most like about it, something I guess was in the back of my mind all along, was that it makes me behave better. It makes me take more care. That is also a cost, of sorts, because things said for the sake of argument can make for good arguments. But I opted to simply signpost things like that. Make it clear that you're arguing a line that you don't necessarily believe and it works just the same.
In the back of my mind have been some fears that real life could turn up and bite me. But over time, noticing the transformative (and good) effect that this site and the characters residing on it have had on me, I have come to think that if real life tries to bite me, I'll bite back. I stand by words said here, and if, for example, an employer opted to hold that against me, then that's almost certainly a good thing because I doubt I'd be able to see eye to eye with anyone who simply could not work with someone holding my beliefs. I'd just as soon know straight up if that's a problem. And if someone wants to attempt to victimize me for my beliefs I'll fight them, hard.
Also, I live for the day I meet someone randomly who says "Hey are you the Ben Wilson from PAS? Love your work". Not holding much hope out, but you never know.
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Sacha,
(thanks, sir)
My pleasure, enjoyed the chat immensely.
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Think of it as a great piece of literature written in Arabic. If someone shows it to you and says "wow this is amazing" you look at the scribbling and nod and smile. If you want to appreciate the art you'll need to learn another language first
Or appreciate it in translation. That's still worth something, indeed I've been appreciating a famous Arabian classic on and off for years, any time I can't sleep - 1001 Tales of Arabian Nights.
It's even more difficult than simply the language.
Yes, I remember a poignant example of this, when a friend was telling me he had been studying fast Fourier transforms and saw the applicability of them to voice communication over low bandwidth connections. I asked him to explain these transforms, so he began with "OK, so you get what a vector space is, right?". I had to confess to only having a hazy idea of this, at which point he simply gave up, telling me that until I grasped them in some detail the explanation would be impossible, and that grasping would take quite a while (he was also tutoring people in maths, I think, so he knew roughly how long it would take a motivated student to click to the ideas).
I felt annoyed by this, that it was as much a failing of him in being able to describe the idea via a metaphor as a failing of mine to have not been diligent in stage 1 algebra, and it was highly likely that the result he was talking about would have been very useful to me in computing. But, on the other hand, I can't be sure that he wasn't right, and no explanation of FFTs would have conveyed more to me than what he had already told me, that it was a compression method that was highly applicable to pattern rich soundwave-like data.
ETA: I raise this example since mathematics and computer science are very closely related disciplines, and yet the communication of ideas between them, that are to the practitioners quite basic and simple, can be very difficult indeed.
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Sophie Fern,
Appreciating great art and music would be the same as appreciating an elegant experiment.
That would be cool, but I do think it's a way harder thing to appreciate. I've looked at great art and heard great music, and appreciated, but I can't even think of a coffee table treatise on chemistry that I've grasped more than a very small fraction of. There's not a great deal of science that's going to knock your socks off that doesn't come out of the collected efforts of a massive team of people these days. There's no real parallel to artists, authors, musicians who create quite specifically in part to communicate their ideas to a wide range of people. In science only a small number of people getting it at all is really relevant to the progress. It's not a business of generating wide appeal, it's about seeking truth.
But yes, I agree, people having a broader understanding of science as basic knowledge is a good thing. It's just such a damned broad field that it's hard to get more than sweeping brush stroke understanding of vast tracts of it.
I think to some extent art is imitating this trend, that the study and appreciation of plenty of art is becoming more of a specialization, that there are whole worlds of appreciation within subgenres. Yet I also think in art that the ability to generate appeal outside of the specialized discipline of training characterizes true genius, and is noticeably appealing even to laypeople. I'm not convinced this is so in science. It's quite likely the greatest discoveries of our time won't sweep the world like a pop star, but will carefully and slowly build with time.
The rock stars of science aren't, in my opinion, necessarily closely related to the good science.
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Rural commuting was arguably the beginning of the successful cycle infrastructure in Europe. But they have quite a different rural makeup, countries like Holland are small and flat, and at the time that cycling was taking off, the horse was probably the most popular alternative.
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