Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: An interview with Ben Goldacre, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I’d bet most MDs are royally pissed off with folks who come in saying “I saw this drug on TV – maybe you should prescribe it to me …”
I'm sure they are.
Otoh, I do enjoy the fact that my doctor takes me seriously when I tell him I've read up on something.
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Southerly: I Fell Down, in reply to David Haywood,
And also I’d hate to turn Public Address into TV3. I’m still mulling over this as a possibility, though…
Just give it a go – embed a YouTube video in a post.
If it works out we could look for a sponsor for you ...
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Hard News: An interview with Ben Goldacre, in reply to izogi,
Sometimes it’s just easier to gravitate towards the information you’re more interested in finding.
Man, I’ve had some discussions with Bernie Sanders fans in the past two weeks …
But more seriously, yes, zombie facts are a thing. There's stuff that never dies.
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Hard News: Ali, in reply to Chrys Berryman,
On the 22nd November 1965 a group of us left our 3 hour School Certificate maths exam after 20 minutes [you couldn’t leave any earlier] and raced to the main street and the Farmers front window and watched Ali fight Floyd Patterson……live on T.V!
…….my mark for the exam was 11/100……but hey well worth it,Ye gods! Did you get in any trouble?
But are you sure it was live? The first live satellite broadcast to New Zealand was Princess Anne's wedding in 1973. The four regional stations weren't even networked till 1969.
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Access: Fighting seclusion with…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Kevin Hague gets it, in this blog post. He would be an excellent Minister of Health.
I read that post earlier. It's really, really good.
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Access: Fighting seclusion with…, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
Sometimes methinks he’s used as a kind of sacrificial lamb.
He is. Kevin Hague referred to him (I paraphrase) as Minister for Getting Thrown Under Buses.
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Hard News: An interview with Ben Goldacre, in reply to izogi,
Do schools do much in this area in modern times?
In the 1990s I remember that parts of the curriculum I was subjected to for social studies, or whatever it was called, involved stuff like going through newspapers and identifying fact versus opinion.
I’m not exactly sure how it plays out in schools these days, but I’ve banged on quite a bit over the years about how assessing information should be part of the curriculum. I think most people now can do the things Dr Ben describes when looking at claims on a website – like noting the tone, the nature of the site and the ads on it.
And what he says about journalists assigning authority to dubious commentators is bang on. That’s what we’ve seen right through the “meth house” panic – interested parties quoted like experts. Because if you quoted, say, Leo Schep of the National Poisons Centre he might fuck up your story.
Otoh, when Schep wrote a column citing a particular case to argue that MDMA was too dangerous to contemplate regulating, I felt confident in writing a post examining his claims and pointing out what he’d missed. It was critical that I was able to go and read original reports. Like Dr Ben says, we live in a miraculous age.
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Hard News: An interview with Ben Goldacre, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Personally I would much rather help people to get an understanding of things themselves so they can make a decision of their own rather than ask them to trust me*
As a journalist, I think I've developed decent practices for working out who not to trust, and in many ways that's easier. I had a really strange argument with some climate-denial people once, and pointed out that although I could hardly pretend to understand climate science, I could confidently doubt the young-earth creationist, the conspiracy crackpot and the former tobacco shill they were citing.
No, they said, that's the amazing thing – this time they're right!
Mmmm.
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Access: Fighting seclusion with…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
This is an great example of how Parliamentary questions work. Green MP Kevin Hague, who knows his stuff
Kevin Hague would know his stuff anyway, it's the kind of politician he is, but I'm sure the fact that he has an adult Asperger son himself makes the issue more acute for him.
But, oh my, what a woeful performance by Sam Lotu-Iiga.
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Southerly: I Fell Down, in reply to Lilith __,
As an early subscriber to Bob’s channel,
I'd watch it more if it didn't make me feel so parentally inadequate.
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