Posts by B Jones
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"What happens next will move you to tears."
I wouldn't go that f.....Oh. I see what you did there.
There's a lot of repackaged content going on as well. I've read several times over the last few months about that poor chap who died of methanol poisoning after having a cocktail in a badly-regulated holiday spot. He's popped up again today under a totally different headline, with no obvious additional news value as far as I can tell.
It's the sort of thing junk-advocacy channels do - you think people are dropping like flies over a particular accident or place or product, but when you look at it closely it turns out to be the same scandal, written about in a slightly different way. The effect is to make it look as if the problem is bigger than it is. It's a bit of a funny thing for a mainstream news channel to do.
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Reminds me of David Lange in 1989. NZ Labour got most of a decade in the wilderness for those crazy five years, and a permanent hole in its left wing support base that's only been filled when it plays nicely with its support parties. Building a majority isn't an easy job.
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Hard News: An interview with Ben Goldacre, in reply to Russell Brown,
Marie Antoinette's ghost must still be pissed about that cake line.
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Level 2 Biology (which I don't think is compulsory) has an achievement standard of assessing public information about biology and deciding which is accurate and which is misleading, eg do sports drinks really work.
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The problem with being self taught is that your teacher is a soft marker. The first thing, as Richard Feynman said, is not to fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool.
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We've been trusting experts since we let electricians put wires in our houses. But electrician skills don't have the same sort of social and economic cachet and scarcity that scientific expertise has, so there isn't an alternative electrical industry*. You can train as an electrician in a relatively short space of time, compared with research or medicine. A lot of the criticism of science comes from a place of (justified or unjustified) suspicion of the power that people who wield it have. Socially marginalised groups have trouble with it, but so do social elites who think that they're just as entitled to wield that power as those who have worked for it.
*also, staff turnover would be pretty high.
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Hard News: An interview with Ben Goldacre, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Interesting what he says about the anti-vaxxers.
I had a conversation once with someone expressing a view opposing vaccines (she wasn't anti-vaccine, but...), who cited Ben Goldacre in support of her position. "You can't trust anything researchers say, they're all employed by big pharma, Ben Goldacre says how they hide all the data," etc. It wasn't how I thought the conversation was going to go.
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Hard News: This. Is. Crazy., in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
Quite apart from drug policy, that’s not even natural justice.
Depending on what power the department is exercising to do this, that could be grounds for judicial review.
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Hard News: Crowded houses, in reply to Russell Brown,
Also “incoherent” and “unfair”.
You have to run that through the bureaucratic anger translator to get the full impact of that. I'd guess at least three or four measured, cautious folk with eyes on what their bosses and minister would be prepared to accept wrote and reviewed that paper. Words like unfair aren't used often in reports - normal usage would be something like "the potential to lead to inequitable outcomes", sadly.
Also, topping the poetic heights with easy grace there Russell?
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