Posts by BenWilson
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See, now that’s where I blame the lycra. ;)
Yes, I often wonder what is inherently difficult about the idea of lycra that actually looks cool.
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I’m all kinds of angry about that.
Smith shouldn’t go giving his family ideas like that.
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Just watch out for the “hand of God"…it’s notoriously sneaky.
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I wonder if it’s also because female goalies might be in the same league as men. Goalie is a position much more about skill than raw power.
I say this as a waterpolo goalie of 15 years. The top female goalies were far, far closer to the men in ability than other positions. The goalie does not need to match the men in speed or stamina, nor is physical domination of them such a factor. The goalie tends not to be manhandled (OK, poor choice of words, but it kind of makes the point).
Obviously strength and size is a factor too, but female goalies made up for raw power with their lighter frames that could move more rapidly, and they could hold their upper bodies out of the water longer, a core goalie skill in polo.
I don’t know how much of that generalizes to hockey goalies…the factors relating to water don’t, but perhaps a light frame is highly advantageous. Certainly the ability to read the shooters is likely to be equivalent between men and women, and in my experience is the core skill of a goalie.
It used to make me laugh when we played shootout competitions at the end of club training, where everyone lines up, and if you miss the shot you have to go in the goal, and if you get scored on 3 times you are out. Usually the last 2 would be me and the female goalie, and we’d have to call it a draw or pay for extra pool time.
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>“Any pedantness on this chapter would be great”
>Where to start…Well, that’s obvious.
Yes, “Pedantress” surely.
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Mainly because we’re running out of Nazis and there is an almost total acceptance of the horrors of the Holocaust and Nazism in general.
Not total. My father-in-law has landed and already I’ve been subjected to several attempts to convince me of the far greater horrors of Stalinism, Americanism, and of course those insidious Jews who have been pulling strings since time began.
It began even faster than last time – unfortunately the road to Auckland from the airport is called ‘Bader Drive’ after the famous pilot. I got to hear the ‘other side’ of accounts of Allied war heroes (Bader included), mostly focusing on how lame they were compared to the German ones.
Not really sure how to deal with it at this time. I don’t usually care to make subjects like The War taboo, but if he keeps pushing it, it’s going to end in tears.
So I kind of get where you’re coming from pitting Voltaire (who I would usually agree with wholeheartedly) against Popper (ironically a German). There might have to be limits to how much I’ll put up with in my own house.
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Steve Parks, I was wondering when you were going to show up, that Feyerabend reference was mostly for you – I thought you’d disagree.
Re: Astrology and racism – I not sure if Feyerabend was saying Astrology particularly had been a victim of racism. He spoke of many ‘alternative’ beliefs, and I think he was making his ‘racist’ attack on different things, like the dismissal of rain dances. But then again, maybe it was a coded reference to an earlier prevalence of ‘paranormal’ practices amongst Gypsies in Europe. There might be a case to answer there, at least in reference to earlier refutations of the paranormal.
As for his actual point behind, I don’t think he is particularly defending these beliefs, or saying that they are true. It’s more a case of saying that they haven’t been proved wrong anywhere nearly as conclusively as cheerleaders of scientific orthodoxy might like us to believe, and there is still a chance of significant discoveries from them.
For starters, that which is not mainstream science is a colossal amount of beliefs and practices. A complete and systematic review of all of them is seriously a pretty big ask. But it seems that many cheerleaders would like us to think that not only has such a review been done, but that it was also 100% conclusive.
Secondly, within any particular practice that we might want to put a box around (lets choose chiropractors for instance), it’s not like there is some small set of doctrines that one could call the ‘core principles’, the rejection of which would reject the entire business. Chiropractors train for many years, learning hundreds of techniques. The individuals often then go on and combine what they have learned from that particular training with ideas from many other disciplines. By the end of it, you have a massive collection of individuals only loosely connected by some training that may have formed only a small part of their professional lives. To refute ‘chiropraction’ in general doesn’t seem like a particularly straightforward matter at all.
This is why Lakatos refined the idea of scientific refutation from Poppers initial system, taking into account the idea that science is not a simple collection of propositions, but a process undertaken by entire ‘research programs’, which collect loosely around an idea or collection of them (the negative heuristics, he calls them IIRC), but have many competing ideas within the framework, and the refutation of these is entirely possible without any damage to the reputation of the program. Indeed that task is the business of the program. The negative heuristics can’t be refuted at all, in his framework, and the perceived value of program as a whole will be dictated by the amount of ‘discoveries’ it is making. If it is not making any, and is spending most of its time defending the negative heuristics, it is said to be ‘degenerating’. But not false – that has no place in his system – although degenerating is certainly a negative connotation.
Feyerabend’s views must be seen in the context of an answer to Lakatos. That was his intention when he wrote Against Method but Lakatos died before they were able to work on the intended work which was to begin with Lakatos’ theories and end with Feyerabend’s response.
He perceived that even though Lakatos theory was a massive improvement on Popper, it was still ultimately trying to do the same thing, to allow certain ideas to seize power (quite literally) over humanity. The meta-research-program which could be called ‘orthodox science’ is thus again only one such program, and competes side-by-side with many rivals. These rivals would probably be called ‘degenerating’ by Lakatos, but Feyerabend believed that such a label only served a rhetorical purpose of making life harder for the other programs, forming a self-fulfilling prophecy of the supremacy of the orthodox. Of course the orthodox is the most reputable, the most powerful, the most wealthy, and the most successful – that is almost true by definition of the word ‘orthodox’. But that is not an argument for the suppression of the unorthodox. If you step outside of the religion of science, and look at the history of other ideas, you usually see that the massive ascendancy of one orthodox idea to total control is extremely unhealthy in the long run for humanity, and it was for that reason that Feyerabend believed in the ‘separation of science and state’.
Interesting ideas. I wouldn’t say I agree with all of them, but I agree with many of the sub-points. I think orthodox science is extremely arrogant in a way that serves no good purpose except for the perpetuation of it’s own colossal power. I think that no idea is too crazy to be explored, indeed my favourite inventor of all time is Edison, who was famous not only for his colossal output of amazing inventions but also his totally whack beliefs, including numerous dalliances with the occult. I think racism (and sexism and all sorts of other prejudice) may play a huge part in our mental construction of science. I think scientific method is understood in only an extremely superficial way even by towering geniuses in the field of science – perhaps this is a psychological necessity, but it surely not an institutional necessitiy, nor should their ignorance form the basis of political decisions about the direction of humanity with respect to inquiry into the unknown.Are these postmodern views? That I don’t know – I never studied postmodernism in too much detail.
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When he’s not fronting a blues band, he’s doing ‘real police work’. I can hardly wait!
ROFLMAO.
Funny thing is, Aikido probably is quite useful for police. It’s the kind of art in which psychological dominance is a big part of it being able to work at all. If the other person is already on the back foot because you are a cop with the full weight of the law behind you, then they are easy to off-balance, take down, and pin. If, on the other hand, they are coming at you, with skills and nuance, with an intention to trick you and dominate you, then I don’t think it’s so effective.
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I would have liked to see Feyerabend and Dawkins communicating in the current context – I like the ideas of both but from time to time they are both guilty of pulling out straw men and bogey monsters to lend impetus to what they write, which IMHO masks the analysis of good ideas.
That’s actually a tough question. Certainly straw men should not be your only way of arguing, but they do serve a purpose of showing what one side’s misconceptions about the other side’s position is. In a funny kind of way, straw men are hypotheses about the position of the other person, and are useful if you are misunderstanding them. I don’t think you should seek to make straw men deliberately (ie deliberate misconception), but you should seek to make explicit what you believe the other person to be saying, thus giving them a chance to show where they are missing you. There’s only so much you can get just by listening to people, sometimes you have to talk, in order to understand what people are saying. Personally, I’d rather err on the side of talking too much, so that people can totally see where I’m in error. The only downside is that you constantly risk looking like an idiot, but I’d rather be an idiot with a chance of understanding than one who remains silently idiotic. I’m also helping the silent idiots, who may just be struggling with the same straw man, and unwilling to speak up. Which makes me feel good, from a karma point of view.
As I see it, it’s analogous to experimentation in science. The world you are examining is the inner space of other people’s minds, and you do it through observation (listening), hypothesis (thinking about it), experiment (saying what you think they said and what it might mean and then more listening), refine and repeat. Quite often you can’t start with observation, because people won’t talk, or they’re not talking about what you want to know. So you have to just start with the hypothesis. Often the bolder, the better. It’s much more likely to get the dialogue started. The more readily disproved you are, the more likely people are to speak up.
The hard part is that it comes across as incredibly arrogant and ignorant a lot of the time. I think that’s a good characterization of the ideal scientific attitude – it’s arrogant enough to think that it could understand, and it works mostly on things about which we are currently ignorant. In that way it pushes the boundaries of knowledge back constantly. It’s a rough and rude form of pushing, and much can be harmed in the process, but it does work. Things are discovered.
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I believe one of the most common psychic “insights” in this sort of case is that the body will be found near water – because, one has to assume, it’s pretty difficult for bodies not to be found near water unless they’re in a desert.
Also, I’ve heard a rule of thumb for unattended toddlers is that they tend to walk downhill. Which usually leads to water. And rare is the toddler who can swim.
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