Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Jon Stewart said on C4 last week: "You can't criticise Israel's foreign policy and still get elected president."
If he was a Kiwi he may have said, "You can't criticise Pacific Islanders without being personally attacked."
Well if you think that, you haven't watched Jon Stewart enough. He would have attacked Clydesdale on the top of his show if he was a Kiwi.
And American foreign policy towards Israel, and NZ's policy towards Polynesian immigrants, there's two things that are just so similar, what a useful comparison. Because the way the Pacific Islanders have gone into the islands and built settlements and set up their own country and built up a big war machine supported by NZ, and oppressed the people who lived there already and denied them a homeland, and the whole thing has been supported by a powerful PI voting bloc here in NZ... wow I can see the parallels now you've pointed them out.
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Knowledge that comes with error bars and probability measurements is called science. Knowledge that doesn't have these is what we call beliefs, we have beliefs about things we have an absence of or an incomplete knowledge of and are guesses about what might be there.
K, that's a fair and sensible explanation. Ta.
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None of that is about belief, it is about knowing. Knowledge and belief are not the same things. I know that quartz is made of silicon and oxygen, I fail to believe crystals of it have paranormal powers.
Couldn't the last part of that be rewritten to be "I believe that crystals do not have paranormal powers (based on my scientific knowledge and complete lack of any verifiable proof that they do)".
But my question was more about the edges of scientific knowledge. Gravity we can be incredibly confident about.
A volcano erupting tomorrow? Still fairly confident, but not so much. We believe it won't happen based on what scientists know about volcanos, and the data that they have about this volcano.
But some of the things that we believe to be true about volcanoes are probably actually not true. And we don't have a lot of data about what is going on under the ground. That doesn't make the science of volcanoes bad or not useful, but there's areas that cross over, and surely part of the scientific process is saying "we believe this to be true", and you grow more confident of that statement as investigate further, to the point that it gets like gravity where everyone believes it with absolute confidence, so it becomes accepted fact.
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It has got less satisfying, I agree, but I just can't bring myself to buy the TV Guide.
I don't know why anyone would pay to get their TV listings on paper these days. There's several online.
The Sports columns of Joseph Romanos were always worth a read
Hear hear. He has tremendous knowledge, and always used to make stories about sports that I didn't care about, interesting.
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I've lived with a 4 tuner PVR for a while and actually managed to run out on a Sunday night by scheduling 4 things at once and then trying to tune live
I'm impressed that you managed to find 5 things worth watching on TV at the same time.
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How is that a belief system?
I'm not sure how Shep meant it.
But things that have been through the science process are surely things that we 'believe' to be true, based on scientific testing, observation, review etc. Scientists often seem to use the phrase 'as far as we know'.
Some will be proven to be false, either through bad science, lack of understanding, misleading data etc.
I would have thought that if something that was thought to be correct, can later be proven to be false, then surely we 'believed' it to be correct, and we were wrong.
Science must therefore have an element of belief in it, just belief based on scientific principles rather than religious ones.
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Parliamentary Services are funding parties information campaigns in compliance with a statutory duty they've had based on them. That isn't voluntary, so it isn't a donation.
Yes.
What gets me annoyed about it is that it has twisted 'information campaigns' so far into 'party political advertising'. If we're going to fund that, we should at least say that's what we're doing.
It's not a case of the rules being broken, it's a case of the rules being bent so much that they need to be fixed either way.
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Secondly, Yes! we should propose legislation based on what 'we' (being humanity) 'know' (being the corpus of science). Which means that your formulation that a 'baby' exists from conception is seen as completely bogus so we move on and find a much better, workable scheme based on knowledge and not emotive weasel words.
I think science should inform any debate, but I'm not sure if it can be the end of it. Questions of life, death, and the ending of life (or potential life) are also moral questions.
If we were to take euthanasia, which I have some sympathy for, science can tell us about a person's quality of life, their chances of recovery, their awareness, how they'll cope without life support etc.
After that though, we are faced with philosophical and moral questions. Even if a person has nil quality of life, who has the right to end their life? Only them? A doctor acting under their pre-prepared instructions? A doctor acting under the instructions of next of kin? No one at all?
Science can tell us a lot about life, but it can't cover the other half - how we feel about it, and in particular, the right to take it away. That's guided by morals, religious or otherwise.
I really couldn't understand why right-to-lifers would argue from a scientific point of view. As a (potential) father, I might grow more attached to my future child as it develops from fertilised egg (at which point I probably don't know about it) to tiny baby to beating heart to 20 week scan to full-sized baby to about-to-be-delivered-sprog. But I don't go no, no, no baby, nothing, no baby... and then suddenly 100% baby at some point in or out of the womb. I get attached to a foetus/baby as soon as I know about it, and probably more so as it grows and develops and appears into my arms. I would imagine a mother would have a similar but differently shaped trajectory.
If there was to be a law or policy etc change on the issue, I'd hope it was informed by science such as the material that Peter has mentioned. But I think only some people will be informed by science (which is the case for all issues, take global warming for example), but that almost all people will inevitably make moral decisions on where they fall on it. That's where the debate is/should be.
Deborah's post was good. I have no response, I'm just guessing that she put a fair bit of herself into writing it.
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This would be the (too late) time to say that I would have preferred my email address to be posted, not my phone number. Ah well.
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Wouldn't want to risk any misunderstandings. Best to have Jo demonstrate, and cell-phone-cam it to youtube.
*pushes Grant forward*