Posts by linger
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Public Address Word of the…, in reply to Ewan Morris,
Bubble-bursting
aka pop!ulism, of course.
(It’s like ordinary populism, but more irreversibly destructive,
and driven by some complete pricks.) -
Hard News: Public Address Word of the…, in reply to Trevor Nicholls,
Not bad, though brings to mind the mountain range rather than the town.
Coastal Pacifuquakes, in honour of the railway line buried?
-
Hard News: Public Address Word of the…, in reply to JessicaRose,
AF is definitely word of the year in the gossip mags
I’m at a loss here. When I see "AF" it’s a button on an OHC, and stands for "auto-focus" … so is that like a selfie?
-
Clusterfucked seems to be the natural successor to 2011's munted; the only problem then is, where do we go if 2017 is worse?
-
tbh not sure I have any words for this absolute fluster-cuck of a year.
Kaikoura's been clusterfucked (and will be again by central government, if the Chch experience is anything to go by).
Though the Brexit campaign, the rise of Trump, the fall of the "expert", and the spread of “fake news” appear to be covered by blusterfuck
-
There’s a huge difference between “a drug you expect people to take” = a drug that people will choose to take regardless of what you think, and “a drug you expect people to take” = a drug that you are recommending a patient should take. “You” (ultimately the government) have a very different level of responsibility in those two cases, so why should the standard of evidence for safety have to be the same?
-
Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Farmer Green,
To some extent they are, but the mistake is to see either as a long-term transferrable trait.
-
Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Farmer Green,
Not sure how you get to that conclusion from anything said above.
The propensity for humans to find overly simple solutions to complex problems is hard-wired (driven by economy of effort for likely benefit, which is a recognised environmental selective pressure). Superstition is one possible outcome. And instability and trauma will make people more likely to seek quick solutions, and to believe superstitions.
The thing is, in many cases, the simple solution works in practice … until it meets a problem for which it is catastrophically wrong. -
Yep, “rationality” is definitely far less an inherited trait than culturally transmitted, and both at individual and societal level it’s subject to widespread and marked fluctuations in response to events, hence not genetically transmitted. On the contrary, there is some evidence that long-term traumatic stress, reducing rationality, can be [heritably] (epi)genetically as well as culturally transmitted. Individual and cultural “rationality” is thus in part a product of long-term stability; it can easily be disrupted by temporary instability, and hence cannot itself represent any inherently stable genetic state.
It is, for example, difficult to imagine that the USA would have sunk to its present level of collective irrationality without the 9/11 attack or some event of similar identity-shattering magnitude.
It is even harder to believe that rationality would be the most prevalent human trait in the face of planetary-scale turmoil. -
Access: Help needed! Deciphering the…, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
The [MoH] [...] ‘system’ [...] has little if any flexibility
Which in practice makes it a schistem, i.e. brittle and flaky, and not too far removed from something full of sh**.