Posts by James Butler
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Emma Hart,
The One Rule is ‘don’t be a dick’.
Also known as Wil Wheaton's rule, with the rider "but it's OK to play one on television".
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
Well that’s easy. You can teach people analytic thinking and reasoning skills without exposing them to subject matter that is trivial, or that they can effortlessly aquire on their own. You don’t have to ‘study’ Harry Potter – you can go do an LLB.
In what way is an LLB, if one is not going to be a lawyer, any less trivial than a BA, which might include analysis of Harry Potter? There seems to be no less value in being able to critically analyse what you can "effortlessly acquire on [your] own" than there is in being able to analyse an obscure body of arbitrary rules, precisely because it can be effortlessly acquired. Things like Harry Potter and LOTR make up a vastly greater part of society's discourse than the legal system, and surely deserve to be understood fully on their own terms for that very reason.
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Also, is it redundant to add that you don't need to have a Humanities education in order to benefit from a Humanities education? Teachers would be the obvious example - not only do I want my children to have high-school English teachers who have studied literature, but I want them to have primary teachers who have a real grasp of analytical reading and thinking. You might imagine that people who want to be teachers would have that already - most I know do, but I have known counterexamples, and I imagine teacher training needs to foster this.
If the cost of maintaining the academic critical mass necessary for these subjects to continue to be studied is some hypothetical number of students who take "easy" humanities papers "just for interest" and somehow don't benefit from the experience, then so be it.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
I don’t think it’s that provocative or unreasonable, and most of the people who do seem to be people with degrees in such courses.
OK, bait taken. I have a mere BSc in Physics, but I have frequently had cause to wish that I had not been so blindly science-focussed as a teenager. For one thing, I have only written one essay since high school, so my analytical writing skills have atrophied; more tellingly, I find it very difficult to *read* critically, not only to unpack the meaning the author intended, but (especially when reading journalism and blogs) to place authorial claims in a context where I can evaluate them for reasonableness, verifiability etc..
Its fair to say that many people have a knack for this without needing to be trained in it; it might also be that I am unusually dense in some respect. But it’s certainly not something you can get just by reading – I like to think I read pretty widely, but it doesn’t help much if one can’t read deeply. Looking back I think that some of my high-school teachers were trying to show me this, but I didn’t listen, to my cost.
And I value this about PAS – that I feel I can (occasionally) participate in a discourse which is not otherwise open to me. It’s a useful intersection of technical culture (in which I am very comfortable) and, erm, cultural culture (which I’m desperate to understand).
ETA: The utilitarian part of this, I should add, is that a populace which is better able to evaluate information and engage in rational debate is - I naively imagine - a populace more able to peacefully and effectively govern itself. But maybe I'm wrong, I don't have a degree in this kind of thing.
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Hard News: Perverse Entertainment, in reply to Joshua Drummond,
Snap.
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Hard News: Perverse Entertainment, in reply to MikeE,
I still think that Redbaiter is a troll account set up by a lefty :-P
I called Poe's Law on Redbaiter once, in a Kiwiblog thread where he claimed that the problems with road safety in New Zealand are all caused by drivers being a bunch of timid socialist poofters, and that if everyone drove as fast as possible all the time (like he does, apparently) the road toll would go down. I kid you not. Even "big bruv" broke with him over that one.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to recordari,
Looks complicated. I guess Homer predates autotools.
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Hard News: Time to get a grip, in reply to Rex Widerstrom,
indolent, blindly loyal list MPs
This is, surely, a matter for voters to give serious consideration to when placing their party vote, rather than a reason to ditch the system. </utopian_fantasy>
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Hard News: Time to get a grip, in reply to Rex Widerstrom,
The system Yvette proposed wouldn’t stop, say, Winston having an “advisory board” (at his own expense), but we would’t be paying for the fallacy that there’s an actual caucus he consults.
We also wouldn't be paying for minor parties' workloads according to the proportion of the country they represent, which does seem unfair. Whether it's MPs or some other form of party staffer, surely someone has to do the hard yards.
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Hard News: Time to get a grip, in reply to Rex Widerstrom,
I’ve always favoured STV in some form, possibly heavily modified, but a comment by “Yvette” on a post I wrote on MMP suggested an interesting alternative.
Basically it’s that the party vote gives a “weight” to the votes of the Party, cast by the Leader of Whip. So each electorate MP votes, then the “party vote” is simply added on (she explains it better, hence my link whoring).
I've considered a similar idea myself, but it does assume that the entire purpose of an MP in the chamber is to vote. Consider the Greens, with ~10% of ~100 MPs - this puts the entire responsibility of voting, asking questions in the house, sitting on select committees etc. for ~10 MPs worth of representation on one person.
To make this work would require a huge overhaul of the way our parliament is run. Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing, but...