Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
I hope Tom Semmens is wrong too, but predicting whether he is involves serious crystal ball gazing. Labour could play a very hard game here, encouraging more racism and rushed decision making, which could backfire on National. Or it could backfire on Labour, and hurt Maori.
There is an opportunity for all the parties to enter the negotiations with good intentions, and for a solution that has broad support to emerge. If it succeeds, all will bask in the glory. If it fails, that will generally hurt National and the Maori party more than Labour.
So I don't think there is inevitability about Tom's cynical outlook. Consensus government is both achievable and desirable on something as important as this, and it only works when the parties enter negotiations in good faith. This could well be the very best time for it to happen, as the Maori Party forms part of the support of a right wing government, so it's really on the left whether to help it happen, or hinder it. History could be made rather than repeated.
-
However, I'm confident the decision wasn't about driver reluctance to go an extra 3kms as Roughan swallowed.
Yup that's not likely to be the only factor. It might be a contributing factor though.
Either way are about the same overall distance, especially if you are going west along the motorway rather than doubling back east towards the CBD. It is designed as a ring route, after all.
I guess if you write off the cost of anyone using as an 'alternate route' from the city, then there's no real driving factor of any kind about where it should connect up. Why stop at Rosebank? It could follow Gt North Rd and connect at Te Atatu, linking most of the Western Districts more tightly to the motorway network.
My objection to the connection being at Patiki Rd is that basically it's in the middle of nowhere...you really should put the nexuses near to where people are.
But it's academic...the route it's going to take is to Waterview, and the only question is how. I wanted a tunnel. Pretty much everyone in the area wanted a tunnel. The only people who didn't want a tunnel are people who don't live in Auckland, because they didn't want to pay for it, and don't care a stuff who loses their home or what heritage is destroyed in the process of making yet another ugly motorway through the middle of the suburbs.
-
Apparently I’ve made a great many claims about what science is already, and yet you want me to make another, bold one!
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I want you to make some specific claims about what science is, rather than the kind of nebulous generalizations that play into Feyerabend's hands. Dictionary definitions might cut it in a high school debate, but not when you want to cut down someone who spent their life writing about science and philosophy. I could not take your Stanford encyclopedia definition and work out whether alchemy was more scientific than orthodox chemistry because it is simply not specific enough. You can do your own alchemy to "check or rediscover" if there is any truth in it. Similarly with witchcraft and voodoo. So, according to Stanford, are these things scientific? In being so unspecific, you really are playing his game.
You also need to take care to understand what it is that Feyerabend is arguing against. He is not arguing against science. He is arguing about what science is. He is arguing against the idea of an all-embracing method. It is patently clear from his writing that he admires scientists a great deal. He just thinks that what they do isn't really quite as systematic as is popularly believed. In refusing to define any method, you completely fail to argue against him. Instead you strengthen his point that it is actually very difficult to put a box around it that separates it from a number of other ideologies.
If you don't think it is difficult to construct such a box, then please do so. That was the bold claim I was asking for, in a deliberate reference to Popper, who did indeed suggest a method, one which involved making very strong and specific statements about the world rather than the kind that are hard to pin down, that say very little, and risk almost nothing. In making such a claim you might learn something. In merely claiming that there is a method, but you can't define it, we just come back to definition by analogies and examples, rather than what I asked for, some criteria that would be both necessary and sufficient.
I’ve read a little more of Feyerabend’s views, (although I haven’t read Against Method yet), and it does seem my suspicion that I wasn’t going to agree with much of what he said was fair. He’s a social constructionist, and so to answer your earlier question, I’d say ‘Yes’, he is a post modernist. He’s also seems to be a supporter of a kind of cultural relativism related to an incommensurability theory, which I’m against. (I’m more aligned with the critics of incommensurability, such as Selya Benhabib, touched on in this book review.)
Some interesting stuff there. I'd personally like to hear from someone who claims any kind of sympathy with postmodernism what they think about Feyerabend's postmodernism, although I'm inclined to agree. But that is because I'm a modernist, after all, as I think you are. At least I'd say I'm more sympathetic to modernism, despite recognizing a great many strong criticisms from postmodernists. In saying Feyerabend is postmodern I could just be confessing that I don't understand him.
As for incommensurability, Feyerabend mentions it constantly, but he never really attempted to be that precise. I think he thought it was impossible to be precise about it. Certainly it is an extremely powerful idea, that basically some notions can't be translated between different viewpoints without losing something.
I'm undecided on the matter myself. It seems to me that translation can never be 100% perfect, but it can get close, and that part of the objective of communication is to achieve this end. That said, I totally despair of understanding certain things, because the work involved is simply too great. I doubt, for instance, that I will ever understand Chinese. I think this could happen quite a lot in comparisons between scientific theories.
Furthermore, incommensurability is not always accidental. Very often, people opt to be misunderstood, or to misunderstand others. They usually do this to obtain some advantage, particularly if they can convince other people to buy into the misunderstanding. This is a political dimension to thought from which science is not exempt, nor ever has been.
Being a modernist, I like to think that human understandings can converge, if the parties involved undertake to make it happen with honesty. But there is never any guarantee of that, and modernism is to that extent Utopian, and suffers from all the criticisms that such 'big dreams' always have suffered from. Dreaming don't make it so.
Certainly my own attempts at 'knowledge engineering', a study I pursued for many years both academically and professionally, showed me that powerful forces come into play to make one simplify the ideas and talents of other people, and that in pinning down exactly what it is that people mean by things you often basically kill off what they really meant and replace it with a pale substitute. But just as often, you also expand their understanding, and help to share in it, and automate it. I've seen it go both ways a number of times, and find it impossible to believe it doesn't happen in other sciences just the same way.
-
I'm not entirely sure what would be better about going via Rosebank. It would be longer, which would involve killing more suburbs, for the purpose of making a more expensive piece of road that would waste more gas for more people. The cost of that gas (not to mention wasted time) would quickly outweigh any benefits, even if there were any, and I can't see any.
I think the main reason the Rosebank alignment of SH20 was abandoned was because it had an estimated cost of around $3 billion, even more than the fully tunnelled version of Waterview. Plus, building a giant interchange on Pollen Island would have been pretty nasty from an environmental perspective.
Not to mention running right through the middle of miles more suburbs and industrial property, towns and schools, all people who would need to be displaced. I could probably milk a compulsory acquisition of my house, but I still think the idea sucks arse.
As for Goff, I've said it before and I'll say it again, he is a placeholder. His purpose is to hold a position no-one wants, the newly-ousted. Picking an uncharismatic guy is probably a good long term idea, because when someone with some lead in their pencil actually challenges for the leadership they will be cast into beautiful stark relief. I'm picking that will come shortly after defeat in the next election. National are going to play the centrist game a bit longer, because it's working, and the recession has left them with few options. They'll get 2 terms, they always do.
-
Russell those Belkin FM tuners don't work well (read at all) around town in my experience because the stations are too close together on the dial. Can't seem to find a frequency clear enouh.
They work OK (just) on road trips when there is less "noise" on the spectrum.
In summary, not worth the money.
I second that. But the device Russell linked to was one that connects to an auxiliary jack on the stereo. But if Russell has an auxiliary jack, why is he using a cassette adapter? Perhaps he was planning to use the cassette adapter as the jack? Wow, that's 2 technologies between iPhone and stereo, one of them analog.
To be honest I think such a setup is even less safe than holding the phone to your ear. The distractions caused from juggling phone and phone answering device, stereo volume control, etc all sound like a recipe for a big stack.
I'm pretty sure the iPhone supports speakerphone natively If so, what's wrong with just using that? Then, as Steve Barnes suggested, some Velcro is all Russell will need to go handsfree.
I'm going to go with 'don't use the phone in the car'.
That's probably sensible advice that I will utterly refuse to take. My response is that whenever I receive or make a call, I just start driving safer. The easiest way is to slow down and massively increase your following distance to the vehicle in front. Or stop. Also, I absolutely insist that the other person I'm talking to respects that I'm driving so I can't concentrate on what they're saying all of the time and will often ask them to repeat themselves.
As for handsfree, I'd like to get one for each car, but to be honest, I don't really know that it will help much. The first thing I think when I get in the car is not "Now, get my phone out and plug it in". So when it's ringing, it's in my bag or my pocket. I suspect that when the new law comes in, I will just stop if I need to take or make a call. If I'm on the motorway, I'll probably just risk it - dicking around setting up the handsfree sounds more dangerous than just using my phone how I always have. I'll just make my calls briefer, and drive safer like I always have. The handsfree will be entirely for those extremely rare occasions when I need to have a long conversation.
If I used my phone for pumping music in the car, perhaps I would think that way. But I don't - I use a dedicated stereo, because I actually like that better. They're designed to be used in cars, you never forget them and either don't have them or leave them in the car. They never run out of charge. They pump high quality sound. My one takes SD cards, so you can always just take the card out of your phone if you must have the latest tracks playing and haven't bothered to put them on some medium for the car (SD or CD in my case).
-
Re: iPhone. Does the thing not have a speaker phone mode already? If so, one of those dirtcheap phone holders you stick to the dash should do the trick.
The other option is a bluetooth headset. But I hate jacking things on my ears. I saw a bluetooth device at JB HiFi the other day that is portable and attaches to the sun visor, which could be a better option....a mere $200. FFS, I drive an auto, I don't need both my hands. The problem with phones isn't what you do with your hands, it's what you do with your eyes, and that's the same whether it's mounted or not. My phone has voice-dialing so I never have to look at it anyway.
-
Steve, you make a great many claims about what science is here. But that is the very subject under discussion, the very subject that Feyerabend is engaging with. You can't refute him by just saying "No, science is this", without some kind of evidence or analysis of some actual science, a look at the history of science as it actually happened rather than some mythologized account that pretty much says how 'scientists' (whoever they are - again, this is the term under discussion) want it to be understood.
What do you think science is? It's not sufficient to just say "A method", I'm sorry. What is that method? Give me details, perhaps illustrated by some examples. I want a description that is both necessary and sufficient to describe the criteria by which you could call a view scientific, a person a scientist. This criteria will need to show clearly what it is that puts the groups/beliefs you think are unscientific outside of the box, and those who are scientific inside of it.
I know this is a big ask, but if you really want to criticize Against Method by claiming the existence of a method that adequately characterizes all science, it's on you to say what that method is. Make your bold claim. Declare your membership to a research program, your allegiance to a school.
I've already spent many thousands of words here outlining my POV. To summarize, I would pretty much say that I think Lakatos had the best account of the way orthodox science works, but Feyerabend shows the difficulty and dangers of accepting any general method as the final gospel, and instead suggests that it is actually the openness of science, rather than close-minded allegiance to a dogma, that gives it the most lasting strength.
-
Please take care on the run. Have fun. Curious painful suffering fun though it is likely to be. I wish you some endorphins for the pain.
-
Well I did ask for it, marrying a girl with a German dad. But he wasn't such a cock back then, he's built up to it slowly, taking advantage of my general tolerance for alternative views. Then he divorced the MIL, shacked up with a German woman (MIL is Mauritian French and far too sensible to discuss politics of any kind). Since then he's devolved, as they say in Criminal Minds . His acquaintances seem to be almost exclusively German now, having basically given the big finger to everyone on the other side of the family (who never liked him anyway, it seems). He has no family downunder - Australia, btw, not NZ - wife is Ozzie.
He was a child during the War, so I doubt he was involved in any fighting, but he lived through extensive bombing at the end of the war, and his father was killed in the Luftwaffe. So he certainly suffered, but not from any physical harm. Amusingly his only tale of severe harm was at the hands of some German bully boys who knocked out many of his teeth.
Is he typical? I don't know. I met up with the rest of his family a few years back on a trip to Germany, and they seemed much more sensible. Living in Germany, they don't fetishize it, whereas I think he does. It seems to live in his memory as a golden land of the past, despite the totally fucked up times that he lived through. His own brother suggested to me that he "Hat ein Vogel", tapping his head. Birdbrain, we might say in English, although I don't think it's the exact same metaphor. They see Germany as it is now, not then, and it's good and bad, of course. Their complaints are not about the War, but about more recent problems like the East Germans, Gastarbeiter, the EU etc. They were wonderfully generous, helpful, well-educated, and seemed to be Americophiles and Francophiles mostly. My only complaints were the sheer volume of food that they insisted I eat, and their total lack of interest in the Antipodes. If I brought up the war (it seldom came up), they just shook their heads, and said that everything they ever wanted to say on the matter had been said long ago.
The only argument I had was about Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche, a landmark church in Berlin which was bombed, and is kept in its damaged state as a reminder about the war. One relative said it was stupid, and they should fix it. I pointed out that it was a reminder, and she said "Yeah, like we need more reminders". Not sure how I felt about that, and even less sure how I felt about seeing what they were doing to Dresden - rebuilding it as it was before the atrocious firebombing. It seems a little like trying to erase memory, but then we all do things like that. It's not a memory Germans want, and it really was a beautiful city before Bomber Harris went to work on it. Unsurprisingly, war memorials are very few on the ground in Germany.
But FIL might be typical for an ex-pat German of that period. I'm pretty sure his mates have similar views to him. He sings in a German choir, so perhaps that's just a form of self-selection, and the more integrated ex-pats would not be caught dead in such company. I just don't know.
I don't feel too bitter about him, though. If you can get him off the subject of politics and culture then he's entertaining enough, and I even managed to open his eyes to the miracle of Wikipedia while he was here, so maybe he'll get some good out it all. Not holding breath though.
-
LOL, come on Joe, this entire thread was a Godwin right from the start. So people can indulge their desire to say everything they ever thought about WW2 and the Nazis.
But I hear you on the fixation on details. Personally, I had to deal with an actual German who lived through the Downfall in my house during this time and got to hear a whole lot more silly bean-counting than anything on this thread.
I'd give excerpts but they're more disturbing than funny. Suffice to say that one round of me trying to ignore it ended with "OK man, so even if only one tenth of the people who were claimed to have died in the Holocaust actually did, it's STILL one of the most atrocious things humans have ever done.". That shut him up for a bit. But he came back a bit later with "The Russians did worse", to which the response was immediate "So that makes it OK, then?". Shut him up for the rest of the day.
Debating those kind of statistics does nothing for me. It's a way of avoiding the bigger picture, a lot of the time. As far as I'm concerned the bigger picture of WW2 is that it was the time in which humans of every kind showed just how low they could sink. There was nothing good about it, except that it ended, and to a certain extent prevented the same thing happening again in a few years (unlike WW1).
To fixate on it too much is, IMHO, a wee bit crazy. I couldn't shake the feeling that my father-in-law thinks about it most of the time. It colors his every thought. It's especially evident how crazy it is when the point of view is the opposite of one's own, not so easy to see when we're all sharing a position. That's what's fueling him, I'm sure, a bunch of his old German mates are finally deciding in their dotage that they can finally say everything that they wanted to say over the last 60 years. The antisemitism is there, the racism of every kind, the determination to see through every battle to the bitter end, at whatever cost. Unfortunately for him, the cost is his family and friends (again, ironically), because it's a subject that shits people off no end.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 834 835 836 837 838 … 1066 Older→ First