Posts by BenWilson
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Fairly sure Leo was a Tiger. It was my son's favorite library book earlier this year, and I distinctly remember it from my own childhood. Nice message, and something I constantly see happening in reality.
The thing I think is always worth remembering about any standards system is that there is a colossal number of different things to be good at. By academic standards at school, I was a good student, and an excellent sportsman, but it was usually not the yardstick I measured myself by. I was envious, for example, of the "low achievers" who seemed to be able to woo girls. It was a very poorly taught subject and I flunked it for my entire teenage years.
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Impressive Peter. It's your knees I'd be worried about, not your heart!
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I love that you love your garden, Sofie. And that your garden is all green and jungly.
It's an amazing place, I can attest to that. The little piece of it that Sofie donated me is flourishing in homage.
As for being extensively medicalized, it's definitely a source of unease. Just feeling comfortable in a hospital is sign you've come too often. My little man broke his arm last week, and I could have walked blindfolded from the car to the Accident ward. Keeping him amused in a waiting room was so natural I didn't even need to plan for it.
The worst part about it is actually the tedium. The pain, misery, sickness, prodding, tests, pills, bizarre machines etc are expected and actually welcome because they all mean something might happen. But the long waits in rooms, the endlessly covering the same material with different doctors, the driving and walking the same paths to and from constant treatments all merge into a long feeling of sickness almost being a day job. I've got to the point that I go to a hospital with the attitude and preparation of a commuter.
Doctors are much better than they used to be on the interpersonal front, but you still get the feeling of grinding your way through a big bureaucracy, in which there is a procedure for everything, norms of behavior that will be enforced no matter how unnatural, and ultimately being a tiny piece of a big machine.
I'm not complaining and I don't think anyone else here is, really. Intelligent people can see that it's this way for a reason. It's probably the best way for things to be, unless you have enormous financial resources. My own care at the hands of the hospital system is better than it's ever been, and I have nothing but admiration for what they achieved for my boy. But that doesn't ever mean it will feel normal or natural to me.
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Very good! Where do I send the cheque?
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Craig, I think it's impossible to be all three. I'm not sure if this corollary has ever been named so I'll coin it the Argument from Good . But you could well be 2 out of 3, so you can feel 66.6% stoked.
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Being an ex-actor might be a big plus, though. Worked for Reagan. I could see Simon eating Banks up in head to head confrontation. For that reason, I doubt we'll get to see that scrap.
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While it's not the ground I want this campaign fought on, strategically "Banks is a cunt. I'm not Banks. That's all you need to know to VOTE ME!" works a treat.
I'm not so sure anymore. Whilst I don't attribute c-word qualities to most of the denizens of this city, I do think they have a strange belief that having those qualities is essential to being an effective politician.
They might even be right. That scares me.
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I think it's also a symptom of people being educated in either the arts or science, with little crossover in between. Most BA grads would have read or at least encountered the arguments of Chomsky, Foucault and so on, and encountered science through the politics of science. A smaller proportion would have post sixth form statistics, or have read scientific papers and be able to make informed judgements independently. And fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
I'm not so sure. I'm one of those people whose formal training was a crossover, Undergraduate Arts, Graduate computer science. But I don't think I've got any better place in this discussion, just a different perspective. People who sit between disciplines are limited in how far they can go with either one. So they end up lacking all credibility with both of the disciplines they straddle. I know very little university level science, basically no chemistry or biology at all, and very limited physics, and reasonable mathematics. I also don't have a wide Arts background either, there's not too much history or literature, social sciences, etc. Just a lot of philosophy, for whatever that is worth. Well, it's plain to me what it's worth, actually - I'm extremely well paid, because I can understand technical stuff, and then explain it to laymen. I would put at least half of my success in selling software to people down to the selling rather than the writing. But I can't sell it to specialists - they are able to form their own opinions and they value the detailed complexity of what is uttered much more than the simple way it is uttered.
Which brings me ultimately to an opinion on the impossibility of agreement in this discussion. Everyone is some kind of specialist - there is absolutely no person who can claim to be a real generalist - they're just specialized in having lesser knowledge of more fields. The GM scientist can claim to know more than anyone else about the mechanics of the process, but they have to leave it to others to fully assess the total environmental impact. Others might be better able to judge the ethical balances (I don't actually think so, but certainly other people might be better trained at articulating the balances, to facilitating the discussion). Then there is the final and impossible balance to agree on - risk.
Statisticians have often argued that people don't understand risk properly with simple examples. Most people can see mathematically that a 99% shot at 10 million dollars has a much higher average payout than a 100% shot at 1 million dollars. But an awful lot of people would prefer the 100% shot because the 1% chance of losing the lot bothers them much more than the 9 million they will certainly lose the other way. I don't think the statisticians are right when they suggest this is "irrational", though. It fails to take into account what risk means to different people. For Bill Gates it would be a no-brainer bet. He wouldn't really be too bugged about dropping a million bucks. For me, if I could have had a million, took the gamble on 10 million, and lost, I could imagine a lifetime of rue.
I see this as highly analogous to the GM debate, because GM does give us the shot at a big payout. Really big. But, as Bart says, if a massive environmental disaster is even theoretically possible, even without any examples at all in the history of the science, that will always lead a lot of people to think the risks are too great.
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From my time in Oz I got the impression that Australians are very easily scared politically. It was quite a weird feeling that they talk so tough, but are such sooks about some things.
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Seriously how could they expect someone would figure out how to kite a world boss into the major cities.
Yup, another legendary event.
The standard computer viruses are probably better examples of the dangers of viral technology. They're also mostly solved as an issue, to anyone that bothers to take any care at all.
Spam, OTOH...perfect example of how any low tech twit who's prepared to keep throwing endless ways of rewriting pocket puss can get around the best efforts of an entire industry.
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