I think that rather than diluting their creative vision, the approach that they have taken will give them an opportunity to strengthen it and make it more comprehensible, perhaps allowing them to include ideas that were cut due to time constraints imposed by the original release schedule. The ending might become what they originally intended, which I suspect was supposed to be a “Doh! Everything I thought I knew was wrong!” moment instead of the “WTF just happened?” that they finished up with…

Had they decided to make a totally new and different set of endings then I’d agree with Declan’s point, but that doesn’t actually seem to be the case which I think is a good thing.

I should point out, however, that I’m not saying that it’s definitely all wrong and shouldn’t have gone ahead. I do think it’s a difficult balance to strike, and if a properly constituted ethics committee came down on the side of the UK Biobank project as it’s currently been designed, after careful discussion of the pros and cons, then I wouldn’t really have a problem with that (although it’s not necessarily the decision that would have been reached if I’d been the one with the casting vote on the ethics committee). My main objection is that that careful discussion, which I think is essential for the ethical legitimacy of the project, just didn’t happen. It got approved pretty much by default by an ethics committee that didn’t seem to be up to the job. That’s what I object to.

I think you also misunderstood one of my other concerns. You said that I objected to UK Biobank because it was a private company, and not a government organisation. That wasn’t really my point. In fact, UK Biobank arguably is a government organisation. It’s actually constituted as a registered charity, but with most of its funding coming from taxpayer-funded sources. My point was that it’s separate from the NHS. Whether it’s a separate organ of government or a private company is immaterial here: the point is that since it’s a separate organisation from the NHS, the NHS has no right to share my data with it without my consent.

In general, I’d rather trust a private company than the government with my personal data. My bank looks after my personal data pretty well. The Royal Navy left a laptop with my personal details on it in the back of a car for it to get stolen. But that’s probably not that relevant to the current discussion.

Anyway, apart from that, an interesting piece with some great points, and I enjoyed listening to it.

But see, that doesnt give the state to take away people’s right to make daft choices. The unfortunate thing is that motivation for the ‘ban the burqa’ seems to be more about being ‘self righteous’ trangressive moral crusaders, rather than any willingness to actually gather some evidence on the ground. And in the process arguing for the ‘state infantalisation’ of these women – and VERY EXPLICITLY SO at that. You’r basically saying, that they cant be trusted to make their own decision like a child or mentally handicapped individual. The post you linked, does not even begin to attempt to address that.

Part of being rational person is subjecting the ideas that we prefer, to the most scrutiny/criticism. And this something I never find with the ban the burqa crowd. Everytime someone raises concerns whether that is even practical, you get this reactionary sentimentality from ban the burqa crowd, which I find a bit offensive. The idea, that anybody who is not a fan of “banning the burqa” is basically too cowardly in the face of Clerical patriarchy. Its old rehashed and unoriginal.

Demonstrate with good (not cherry-picked) evidence, that banning the burqa will have positive outcomes for women in Immigrant Muslim communities, (and there are myriad ways to evaluate that, performance in employment, university, health) and I will take it seriously. Appeals to emotion and sentimentality and self-righteousness do not impress me that much I’m afraid

Nort surprisingly, Ophelia Benson says it better and more succinctly!

But if I had to pick one to nominate as “contribution of the week”, then I think I’d go for Steve’s piece on neuroethics. Absolutely fascinating. Some really tricky ethical issues there, and chock full of grey areas. I thought Steve did a fantastic job of getting the subtlety of some of the dilemmas across.

One thing is pretty clear to me: anyone who tells you they have easy answers to any of the questions Steve raised is bullshitting.

@55:10 Steve Page said “… but my fear is that if the government gets to rule over one item of clothing that a large enough number of people find offensive, then they will not stop at the burkha!”

Wheeeeee! what a ride!

How would a ban work? If a woman wearing a burqa is stopped in the street, how is fault established and to whom is it attributed. What is the punishment? Would a ban not be harmful to such women?

I suggest that what we are trying to get at is the misogynistic attitudes that we are widely told the burqa represents. A ban on the wearing of the burqa would go no little way to address these attitudes and may well be counter-productive. Perhaps a better approach would be to engage all our country’s children, inclusing those brought up in muslim culture, expose them to the broad range of cultural and philosophical ideas and provide an informed basis from which traditional ideas can be challenged. This is obviously a difficult and time-consuming process, requiring sustained and careful effort from those interested in furthering a liberal society.

Let’s not lash out in frustration with a ban because it is an easy thing to do.

I should start by saying that the quest for women’s equality is a fundamental challenge of our time; one which is ultimately beneficial to all of society (including us men); one with which we’v had varying degrees of success at, though certainly, some countries/cultures have more equality for women than others (without a doubt). But still I think its fair to say that Women unfortunately – as a whole – don’t enjoy the same level of equality as men do – and it would be an astonishing lack of curiosity about the world we inhabit, to deny that. Moreover, the burqa itself is definitely a symbol of that inequality, & frankly I find the idea of equating piety/modesty with invisibility a bit repulsive. Calling it a mobile prison is tad hysterical imo. Though I do understand the sentiment behind it and I dont really have a problem with that either.

Ok so with that bit out of the way (partly cos I dont want to be strawmanned myself) I wanted to address some of the points Clio raised in her support for ‘banning the burqa’. And lets not fanny around about semantics here. Banning the burqa means, essentially to outlaw people’s right to put a piece of cloth over themselves. That is what is being proposed here and I think people should be clear and own up to that, instead than try to conflate with other things and issues/battles.

She proceeded to pronounce that basically (paraphrasing) “all these burqa-clad women are coerced by these conservative Muslim menfolk to wear it. And if they claim otherwise… Well they are being COERCED/FORCED, so therefore must be overruled”. Rather like you would in the case of a child if he/she was being abused. The only evidence she cited were anecdotes from Maryam Namazie…. Which is fine… I suppose. But I would have liked to have seen a bit more skepticism on that point, rather than the blanket (& slightly gullable) acceptance of all of Namazie’s assertions on the matter. Though the individual testimonies that Namazie was pointing to may well be true (and definitely compelling in their own right, not to be dismissed lightly), it is problematic to proclaim that that is are representative experience of the every woman who dons the burqa.

This matter is a bit more complicated than that. And I’m sure, the words “Cultural- Relativism” – “Apoligetics for Oppression” (as Clio mentioned in the report) are probably pinging in people’s brains right now. But for all intents and purposes , all I’m asking for is better evidence for this specific claim (really a pronouncement) that ‘all women who wear the burqa, wear it incontrovertibly because of the coercion from Men’

I grew up in Pakistan, lived in Egypt, England (& now Canada), Througout my life, I’v had interactions with various people families where the women wore the burqa. And I accept that this is the experience of one person (though I’m not sure Maryam Namazie would be forthcoming in offering that caveat) But alot of the times, I found, that the primary enforcers of the burqa were the mother/mother-in-law/matriarchal figures.

Now this doesnt in any way make the oppressive ‘symbol of the burqa’ any less oppressive. But it does confound the view held by middle-class people who never bother to interact with the people whose behaivourism they are making confident pronouncements on that ‘Men are coercing these women to do it’. I think these are details which are important, and it certainly makes the case for banning it harder, because, what of these conservative matriarchal figures who are enforcers of the burqa, Are we now saving them from themselves? Clio was right that it is a cultural phenomenon, but is normally a cue for people to explore or gather more evidence (or possibly look at confounders) beyond Maryam Namazie who gleefully provided the confirmation to her preconceptions – sadly she seemed to exonerate herself from that exercise

And again, Im not saying coercion doesnt happen, but initiate a ban you have to say that every case is one of coercion, which is daft. At some point we have to take the word of these women themselves at face value. If they are saying that they want to wear it, than it should be good enough for the rest of us. (Ofcourse its a completely different story in places like Pakistan and Egypt, but we should conflate what happens there with what happens in the West)
We should ofcourse provide them with support mechanisms/ councilling/legal/ psychological support. Make it easier for them to register their grievances, or to allow them to interact with the rest of society. Should they find the courage to speak out against it, we as a society should offer them ever support possible.
But ultimately,. Banning the burqa as a response, comes out mostly, from a desire to pander to people who basically cant be bothered to talk/interact with these women, yet want to have decisive say in how the lives ought to be ru.. That is the very definition of their infantalization, and people should have convictions and fortitude to own up to the implication of what they are suggesting. It is after all about the welfare of these women – and that should be paramount. If posh, uni educated well off people want be self-congratulatory, judgemental and transgressive..fine, all Im asking for is critical appraisal of the arguments of your positions and more honest appreciation of confounding factors which don’t fit into you’r neat little narrative. It no wonder that this is such a popular idea among the bonkers anti-immigrant right wing of europe.

Cheers,

Is this the story you were thinking of?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16021240

I imagine that you could find the evidence to support your conclusions if you went looking – and I would be a bit surprised if it hasn’t already been investigated, although I don’t know enough to know where to look. Political science journals maybe?

I was wondering if you could point out any inaccuracies in the video above? I’d be happy to make any corrections if we’ve made any mistakes.

With regard to your second point – I understand that BPAS was closed on the day of the protest. Whilst I don’t think it’s terribly appropriate for anyone to protest outside of there – if 40 Days For Life are going to persist in harassing women who use BPAS’s services, I’m not sure what else we can do about it aside from provide a counter demostration – to show that there are people who support their rights.

How do you think the ladies in the ‘clinic’ felt when they heard your obnoxious wailing, jeering and drum rolling? Comforted? Helped? Loved?

Shocking!

Yes, I think you’re right that my “people wouldn’t donate large sums of money if they didn’t get anything in return” isn’t logically bullet-proof. I agree that they would donate if they thought it bought influence, even if they were actually wrong about that. However, I wonder if they would keep on doing it?

But anyway, even if that part of my argument is flawed (and I think you’re right: it is), it doesn’t mean that the conclusions are necessarily wrong. Are you suggesting that people who donate large sums of money to political parties don’t get influence in return?

Good point about the political advertising. I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re right, it certainly does complicate things.

Having said all that, I honestly think that rules about funding, advertising, etc are a bit of a side show. Whatever rules you have, politicians will find ways round them. The only way to solve that problem is to have an engaged electorate who turn out in large numbers and vote after carefully considering all the issues (rather than just voting for the same party each time out of habit). That’s the only way I can think of to guarantee politicians are kept honest.

And sadly, I suspect it’s also something that’s nigh on impossible to achieve in practice.

This is a disguised appeal to popularity. Compare “people wouldn’t spend money on alternative medicine if it didn’t work!”. “People wouldn’t send spam email if it didn’t make money”.

There are obvious alternate explanations for the same data. The most obvious is that people spend money on political parties because they _believe_ it buys influence. More benign (but contra-indicated) is that people spend money so that the party closest to their own position has a better chance of winning. It could even be a form of charity giving – people spend money on political parties to support the work of an organisation they support philosophically. This last explanation could apply even to people who give to both parties. (“I don’t agree with your policies, but your existence makes the world a better place”).

The consequence of any sort of electoral funding control in the USA has been donors spending directly instead of giving the money to the parties. This works because most political spending is on advertising. Important topic overlooked in the report is that you can only control donations if you also limit political advertising by _anyone_. This is a dangerous and complicated road …

Thanks for coming along, guys!

The second of the Space Shuttle TSS missions to deploy a tether managed to deploy most of its length: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-75 – It did break, but it was a *partial* success.

For the undergraduate journal at Leicester University, I wrote a paper about a more modest tether scheme than a full space elevator:

https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/article/view/335

Technically, it is peer reviewed – but my peers were other undergrads

For the first one, I’d point to the large number of risk assessments published outside the health sector without any consequent increase in public understanding of what they actually are. It’s like no one notices them except to suddenly point every now and then and say “gotcha!”. You’d hope to see over time journalists asking “why was such and such risk not considered and managed in the risk register?”.

For the second, there’s good evidence that the USA environment (where talking about “acceptable risk” is a practical legal no-no) does result in divergence between how risk is actually thought about and managed and how it is recorded. The shuttle program is a good example. Quantitative risk assessment was explicitly discarded because the results it gave were politically unacceptable. Read some of the satellite re-entry analyses for really good examples of quantitative double-think.

As with your report – there are nuonces I didn’t go into. Always a balancing act between clarity and over-simplification. I did have a couple of extra minutes though, so I don’t have your excuse. I should have at least pointed to the parts of the discussion I was leaving out.

Is it really the best idea to attack your reviewers themselves, rather than respond to their reviews? It seem to be an ad-hominem. This is probably not what you intend, but it does come across as defensive, and not especially rational. This is a shame considering how you’ve positioned yourself in the skeptical community.

Surely anybody is entitled to criticise your work (which I haven’t read and have no opinion on by the way), and have their criticisms acknowledged or addressed rather than being dismissed as unsuitable to comment on your book?

Can I blame jet lag?

You’re right of course that there were many issues I didn’t have time to explore, and the one you raise is one of them. That ties in nicely with another ethical theory known as “rule utilitarianism”. I would hope that euthanasia, were it to become legal, would still be incredibly rare, and effects on society of regularly allowing it would be minimal. But it’s certainly worth thinking about.

Now, on to your piece.

I think you’re right to point out that if the risk register were to be published it would be taken massively out of context by people trying to make a political point. That’s unfortunate, but is it a good enough reason to keep it secret? I’m not sure I’m convinced by that. I would argue that if such things are routinely made public, then the media and the general public would gradually get better and interpreting them in context. Sure, it would take time, but the sooner you start, the sooner you get there.

I’m also not sure I’m convinced by the argument that knowing that such documents would be published would inhibit civil servants from writing useful stuff in the first place. Is there any evidence that that actually happens? It’s an argument I’ve heard before from people arguing for keeping things secret, but on the whole it seems to be made by people who want to say daft an indefensible things. I suspect it is true that knowing what you say is going to be published may well inhibit you from talking bollocks, but is it true that it would inhibit you from a realistic assessment of the risks in something like the NHS reforms?

Compare with criminal justice – you could make a strong case on both deontological and utilitarian grounds for not punishing a particular criminal. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t punish criminals, and it may mean that the particular case gets subsumed in a wider need for fairness and certainty.

Not a criticism though – there’s only so much you can put in eight minutes, and the report was pushing length anyway.

And yes, Drew, I totally agree with your analysis about drawing lines. And in addition to that, there’s probably an equally difficult line to draw about what level of disability is a good enough justification for an abortion after whatever time you draw the line or even infanticide. If I’d had a bit more time in the piece, I’d have talked about the situation in the Netherlands, where infanticide is actually legal under some very tightly controlled circumstances. It was made legal in 2005, and I think there have been about 20 or so babies who have been euthanised since then. As far as I know, they have all been really very severely disabled, and not expected to live for very long.

That’s a very far cry from something like Down’s syndrome, where those affected can live for many decades and enjoy a reasonably good quality of life. And yet we do seem to accept 3rd-trimester abortions for Down’s syndrome.

It’s really all very tricky.

Also, what’s bad about trashing Hilter?

Personally, I don’t see anything intellectually dishonest about my piece. Over the top, sure, but I’m a comic and that’s what I do, witness an FB page I created called “Stop Hyperbole This Very Instant Or We Will All Die ”

And, thanks, Chris!

I mean, I’m not a fan of hers myself (though I’ve read her books), but frankly, it was like listening to an ex-Nazi defacing a portrait of Hitler while sneering at him for being an artist, having a stupid moustache and, oh yes, being a bit racist too. I’d have preferred a critique of the actual ideas, rather than someone burning an effigy of their author.

Sorry to be so blunt, but I found that item rather out of character in the context of what is normally a considered and intellectually honest podcast.

I think Adam managed to pin down what I was struggling with in that Medical Ethics article. The arguments comparing tests of morality for late-term abortions and newborns are limited but sound – the real problem is the implied equivalence for all abortions. All they’ve actually shown is that there is no compelling argument to draw a hard line at “birth”.

It’s probably also the case that there’s no compelling argument drawing the line at “26 weeks” or “26 weeks and four days” or even the current “24 weeks”. That doesn’t actually provide a counter argument to drawing the line somewhere, particularly if, as Adam suggests, the line doesn’t have to be applied in the same way to all cases.

I hesitate to criticise Dean, because I thought he made some excellent points (I particularly liked the well-thought-out arguments about “political correctness”), but I do wonder if maybe he’s broken the first law of arguing with people on the internet: don’t feed the trolls.

Would be interested in what others think.

It’s important that we keep challenging that the glossy message of “reform” and “efficiency savings” is a mask over funding cuts directly hurting people. If you’re serious about efficiency, you invest in improvement programs. Cutting funding just causes less of what’s currently happening – there’s no resource or room during times of cutback to focus on effective and innovative delivery of services.

http://www.kenanmalik.com/lectures/beyond_the_sacred.html

Firstly (cos I’m a chemist) conflating nicotine with Neonicotinoids is a little bit tabloid. But only a little bit, so I’ll let it lie

There is, to me, a slightly bizarre argument at play that says the problem with this insecticide is not that it is killing insects and bugs, but is killing some of the ones we like. We don’t care about the nasty bugs only the happy friendly ones like smiley bees. A bit like saying that antibiotics are bad because they kill good bacteria and not just bad bacteria.

If you use an insecticide then you kill things, that’s the point. Of course there is an environmental argument for how much impact interventions have, but if you decide some bugs are worth keeping and some bugs you are happy to let die, then I think you also have to accept that it may not be exactly as you want. finding that point of acceptable impact is where the debate should be.

The research into Neonicotinoids is not clear but there is isn’t really much evidence to show it’s a huge problem, when it is used correctly (which is becoming more the major issue). However, I’m still wary of them and when I kept my bees on a rapeseed farm, the farmer would let me know when he was spraying, I’d close up the bees for a few days, in the hope of reducing any risk. The plight of the bees seems to be an excuse for every crank to hang their preferred doomsday reason on their decline -pesticides, mobile phones, power lines yadda yadda yadda , although pesticides (as mentioned in the piece) are a more likely part of a the multivariate issue – varroa mites appear to be the biggest issue tho.

There is often a argument put forward about big nasty chemical company lobbying the gov to make sure they don’t get banned. There’s probably some truth in it, but it’s also worth mentioning that one of the Eastern EU countries (Slovenia?) banned Neonicotinoids after heavy lobbying by Monsanto as they had a GM product they wanted to flog. Muddy waters indeed.

To suggest that people might want to buy organic as a result is I think an odd suggestion, but that’s maybe just me.

Anyway, maybe I’m being over harsh, I thought Matt spoke fairly even-handedly, although I can’t understand why he’s ok with one bug being vaporised but is getting animated about preserving a different one!

T

The church flyers quest is in Riften by the way if your wife wants to seek it out and then not do it!

Its true that the method being fallacious doesn’t in itself make the conclusion wrong; but they were not talking about safety – they were talking about cost.

In any case only four people have ever been killed by wind turbines, then even if this is a higher per GWh rate than nuclear, its still a very small number. The numbers are similarly small for nuclear – and both wind and nuclear are safer than coal (largely because of mining rather than generation). With such a small number of lethal accidents, safety shouldn’t be the deciding factor.

You are right to point the holes in this report, but it’s important to remember that just because a report or investigation is badly done and may well be biased, does not, in itself mean that the reverse conclusion is true.

I found it very uncomfortable listening to climate skeptics rant ‘but wind turbines don’t work’ but the more I look into it, the more true that seems.

For example four people have been killed by wind turbines to date, which makes wind power far more deadly per gigawatt hour than say, nuclear, but no one wants to talk about “we will never overcome the wind power safety issue’

This is of course due, more to the fact that nuclear is a vastly more energy dense source than wind, but isn’t that the whole point?

Well, that piece is making me think. I accept the arguments for assisted dying for the terminally ill, so should I accept that assisted dying is OK for lifelong prisoners? Good point. I agree with Quackonomics in that autonomy is key. I wonder how easy it would be to be sure that a person in prison is free of external influences in making that decision and so could truly be said to be acting with autonomy? I suspect it would be very difficult in practice, but what if it could be done? Not sure about that, but it’s certainly an interesting question.

I’d also like to add something to your description of the “pushing a fat guy onto the tram tracks” problem. It’s not just a matter of active-passive equivalence. The big problem I have with that particular ethical dilemma is that it’s presented in terms of knowing in advance what the consequences of our actions will be. In practice, if you were really standing on a bridge next to a fat guy as the runaway tram approaches, it would be impossible to know, in the few seconds you have to make the decision, whether pushing him onto the tracks would save the other lives. Maybe he wouldn’t derail the train after all. Maybe the people down the track would see the tram coming in time and get out of the way. So I wouldn’t push him onto the track, but that’s simply because I’d be unwilling to trade the highly uncertain benefits of doings so for the very high probability of killing him.

This is actually a problem I have with many of the thought experiments that ethicists sometimes indulge in. If they are too hypothetical, I think they lose their validity.

Great piece! I feel rather proud that I inspired you to contribute it.

Anyway, it seems that you make 2 main points to counter the argument I made last week:

1. Basic research is valuable because we simply don’t know where it will lead, and there is a chance it may lead to a fantastically useful discovery

2. Even if the research itself goes nowhere, the spin-off technologies developed along the way are often valuable.

Taking point 1 first, I agree with that in the main. My point was about the specific subset of high-energy particle physics, as exemplified by the LHC. While I agree that blue-sky research in general is valuable and worthwhile, I think the chances of anything of practical value coming out of LHC-type research itself (as opposed to the spin-off benefits) are small (although admittedly non-zero). There are 2 reasons for this: first, I think we’ve agreed (haven’t we?) that no direct practical uses have come of this research in the last half century. Given the pace at which technology moves, that suggests that in terms of direct practical benefits, this is not a fruitful area of research. Second, as I said in my piece last week, the energies involved make it unlikely that it’s going to be practical. I acknowledge that neither of those things proves that we will never get practical applications; I’m just saying it looks unlikely to me. I’ll come back to that point later.

Your second point about the spin-off technologies is well made. I admit you’re right about the discoveries made incidentally along the way being very valuable. What I question, however, is whether this is the most efficient way of making those discoveries. That’s a tricky one, of course, because perhaps we don’t know what discoveries we should be making until we see what they can be used for. After all, Henry Ford once famously said “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse”. I feel that there perhaps ought to be a more efficient way of making the spin-off type discoveries if research efforts were directed solely to the spin-offs, but perhaps the uncertain aims of such a programme would make it impossible. I really don’t know. Perhaps the spin-off argument invalidates the points I made in my piece last week, and perhaps it doesn’t.

Anyway, coming back to the question of practical uses of LHC-type research. You will no doubt remember that it was suggested on Twitter that we settle this with either fisticuffs, protons to the head within the LHC tunnel, or (my personal favourite) ray guns. I’d like to suggest a much more old-fashioned and gentlemanly way of settling it: a little wager.

£1000 says that, X years from now, no new practical uses of direct discoveries (excluding spin-offs) made by particle physicists looking at matter at a level more sophisticated than protons, neutrons, and electrons have been developed. We will revisit this argument after X years, and if there are new practical applications you win, and if there aren’t, I win. You get to choose X. Choose wisely. If you choose 1 week, I am very likely to win. If you choose 100 years, your chances of winning are obviously much greater, but you will experience 3 downsides: 1) £1000 will probably leave with you barely any change after buying a pint of bitter in 2112; 2) Your chances of being around to collect on the bet are not good; and 3) The chances that I’m around to pay up are even less good.

Do we have a bet?

And by definition, someone in Jail, is deprived of that autonomy of Choice – even if he is incarcerated for life. I think the argument that you brought of costs of keeping people in prison (or allowing them the option of euthanasia) is shoveling in an entirely different debate of social and (legal) norms for penalizing/dealing with crime into this. And I don’t think it has anything meaningful to contribute to the debate of Assisted Dying. I think you came close to addressing the issue of autonomy but – to my slight disappointment, you didn’t.

And if I may be so presumptuous as to suggest that had you considered the autonomy argument in your report, the particular dilemma that you brought to our attention wouldn’t be as compelling.

@Kash:
Glad I’m making you think. That was really the entire aim of the piece, so that makes it all worthwhile!

@Alun
You make some worthwhile points, but I don’t think anything you say contradicts my assertion that knowledge of particle physics at the level of things more sophisticated than protons, neutrons, and electrons is yet to find a practical use.

You are, however, completely right to pick me up for my inappropriate use of the phrase “simple economics”. Economics is rarely simple, and in this case it revolves around many uncertainties, assumptions, and value judgement.

@Michael
Oh yes, completely agree!

I’d like to nominate Dave Landon Cole for “contribution of the week”, as he made some fantastically important points. I’m a bit of a political geek, and Hungary is a country I take a passing interest in, so I was rather ashamed that I wasn’t aware of the stuff that Dave talked about. I was vaguely aware that they had a new constitution and that it was a bit controversial, but that was really the limit of what I knew about it until I heard Dave’s piece.

What’s going on in Hungary is clearly very scary, and it’s pretty scandalous that I didn’t hear anything about it from our mainstream media.

Likewise, the ISIS neutron source uses a lot of energy, but in the past month work done there has revealed new way to tackle E.Coli. This might lead to lower carpet cleaning bills due to less projectile vomiting, though the scientists seem more interested in the saving lives applications of their work.

In the past three months the Diamond Light Synchrotron has contributed to studies on heart valves, palaeoclimatology, Huntingdon’s Disease, reading ancient documents and nanotoxicology. I’ll concede it uses electrons, and these were discovered in 1897, but it wasn’t a case of Thompson finding them and everything after that being a footnote. It takes incremental steps in knowledge to be able to build modern synchrotrons. Here’s three papers from 2011 on current research in imaging. It’s not yet a solved problem. The only reason for rejecting discoveries made about electrons or neutrons is that they’re not true Scotsmen.

The argument based on ‘simple economics’ is worse because it’s not based on simple economics. There is no cost/benefit analysis. It’s a moral argument that expensive is bad and it applies to any expensive project. The LHC subscription is £34m a year, In contrast the operating costs for Diamond Light and ISIS were £75m in 2008. There’s no economic comparison between the two projects, so it’s not clear why Adam decided the LHC was the problem. Shutting the Harwell facilities would, beside deal a catastrophic blow to UK science, save more money. Or would it? Do we need to know the economic output to make that kind of judgement?

Adam’s argument is based on what he believes which is further justified by other things he believes or assumptions he makes. It’s not a fact based argument. We just have to take his word for it that shutting the LHC is a good idea.

Is that good enough for a sceptic?

Here is my latest blog post as a direct result of a sentence in your last comment: I don’t think that any practical use has come of any particle physics discoveries made in the last 50 years

Yes, I deliberately used the word “appears”, as I can’t be 100% confident that I’m right about it. However, my reasons for believing it to be true are that I don’t think that any practical use has come of any particle physics discoveries made in the last 50 years, and anything that needs the sort of energies available in the LHC before it does anything is really not likely to be practical for use in your living room.

But that is, as you say, an assumption, which could turn out to be wrong.

This is a statements that I definitely have a problem with:
” appears to have a lower probability than many other areas of producing anything of practical value.”

Where are you getting this idea from? Do you have a source? Do you know that this is the case? Or is this an assumption?

This could be a “Factoid Propagation” logical fallacy, which is:

“The advocate advances or states a mere proposition as though it is either:
(a) an objectively established fact; or
(b) so taken-for-granted by ‘reasonable people’ that it is ‘beyond question’.”

Though you did use the word “appears”, which might be a get-out-jail-free card.

It sounds like we agree about more things than we disagree about. It’s certainly true that the fruits of scientific research are uncertain, and I’m certainly not arguing against academic blue-sky research in general. What I’m arguing against is only a small subset of that which is a) very expensive and b) appears to have a lower probability than many other areas of producing anything of practical value.

And as for what you say about political & economic institutions, I agree 100%. While I do think we might be able to make more money available for what I consider the “worthy stuff” if we spent less on things like the LHC, I certainly agree that it’s pretty small beer compared with all the other problems we face in getting our political institutions to take such problems seriously.

and I appreciate you took the time to read my response (shows intellectual honesty) however – and maybe its a failure of articulation on my part – the main point was actually that the impediments of the problems of poverty, disease eradication, climate change are not Science, but Economic and Political institutions because they always have the final say in what happens policy-wise. In fact in many developing countries, even the easier low-hanging fruits of primary education/improving immunizations are not plucked because of the failure of Politicians/Economists/Policy makers to understand empirical evidence.

May I recommend reading “Poor Economics” by Ester Duflo & Abijhit Banerjee, they deal with these issue quite vividly and lucidly. And perhaps that may prove useful in informing your thinking on Science and evidenced based public policy. Here is the amazon link http://www.amazon.ca/Poor-Economics-Radical-Rethinking-Poverty/dp/1586487981

RE: PET scanners.
Yes, they are based on radioactive decay which was established outside of particle physics. But I thought the detectors were perfected in particle physics labs. Every time I read about uses of particle physics research, the PET scanner example comes up.

Thanks for your very detailed blog post. I’ve left a reply there, and suspect that further discussion will be more appropriate on your own blog than here.

@Quackonomics

A thoughtful response to my piece, which deserves a good reply. Let’s see if I can live up to the challenge:

1. PET scans are indeed a useful technology, but I’m not convinced they grew out of “this type of science”. PET scanning is quite an old technology, dating from the 1950s. The important bit of science on which it is based is that of radioactive decay, which we have known about for a long time. Yes, understanding about quarks and neutrinos and things allows us to know exactly why PET scanning works, but I don’t think that understanding is essential to being able to use the technology, is it? The point I made was that refining our understanding of matter to ever more detailed levels was useful up to a point (and discovering radioactive decay was certainly a useful thing), but it’s possible that we may have now passed that point.

2. Well it’s true that I didn’t want to get into a discussion of exactly what we might do for cancer, and it’s also true that there will almost certainly never be any such thing as “a cure for cancer”, but it’s a perfectly worthy goal to discover cures for individual cancers. We’re still a long way off doing that in most cases, but it’s a good thing to aim for and possible in principle, isn’t it?

3. You make a fair point in that, when talking about other things we might spend our money on if we didn’t spend it on particle physics, I failed to make a clear distinction between scientific research and the simple application of existing knowledge. So if we assume that money spent on particle physics would otherwise only be spent on research, then you’re right that it’s not going to eradicate polio, because we already know how to do that. There are, of course, plenty of areas of genuine research that we could choose, such as developing a safe and effective malaria vaccine, or improving solar power technology to the point where it can become completely mainstream. We could also relax the assumption that money not spent on the LHC would necessarily be spent on research and could be available for things like polio eradication, so I think my point still stands. Nonetheless, I concede that I should have made the distinction more clearly in my piece and my failure to do so perhaps made for a slightly confused argument.

4. I didn’t actually claim that science must produce things we can put to use. I acknowledged that knowledge for its own sake has a value. What I do believe, however, is that science that produces only knowledge and no practical applications has less of a value than science that produces practical applications that improve society. My argument is that the knowledge we will gain from high energy particle physics experiments, while it undoubtedly has a value, does not have enough value to justify the billions we’re spending on it.

@Steve

It’s true that many discoveries made along the way by those researching particle physics have been useful, and the WWW is a great example of that. But I would question the assumption that doing particle physics is the most efficient way of making the discoveries that are made along the way. What if CERN had been completely dedicated to improving internet communications? Don’t you think they might have not only invented the WWW, but done far more useful things besides?

Surely the World Wide Web, a by-product of CERN, is a good enough justification for all the expense? Who knows, it may even catch on…

2) and to use words like finding a ‘cure for cancer’ and not say ‘finding ways to improve life expectancy after diagnosis’ is tell-tail sign that you may not have thought this trough (but perhaps you wanted to be brief, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt)

3) Your arguments regarding, the Science of solar power, vaccinations is a bit curious. Because for me the main problem with all those issues is a lack of political and economic will (and intellectual horsepower) which are the fundamental roadblocks. The Science related is well and truly resolved (in as far as it can be)…The problems of world poverty, disease have a political and economic component to it which for me is the stumbling block. Maybe if the Economists and policy makers incorporated the primacy of evidence and rigour of the scientists (which they so overwhelmingly lack at the moment) things would be better on that score
4) Lastly I think there is an inherent contradiction in what you’r saying. Message is Science should produce things which we can put to use. I don’t think it should be that at all. Science should about the most objective investigation into nature (including societies) and the results or the type of results cant be predetermined in that way. And the information generated should be put to use for the good of society – i agree. And in any case, Scientists deal in the extremes of nature, whatever contraptions, tricks they develop in the course of their investigations will likely to help us in our not so extreme daily lives. Our entire edifice (modern world) is a testament to that.

I think there are several logical fallacies in your report and in your comments above.

Sorry Adam. I enjoy your reports. They are well researched and make good, interesting points. But I thought this one was badly researched, full of holes, basic bad logic and plausible sounding factoids.

I don’t normally get into SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET confrontations. But I couldn’t resist this time. The LHC is this generation’s Apollo Moon Landing. It’s that important.

So here is my blog post that covers the logical fallacies I found.

I haven’t been learning logical fallacies for long so I may have got things completely wrong. I’d recommend the excellent free Hunting Humbug guide.

@Chris:
I’ll admit I’m a little bit shaky on the precise details of how much solar power is available, so my figures there may have been wrong, but the point is that whether there’s enough to power everything or not, there is undoubtedly a heck of a lot more solar power available to us than we’re currently using. If the worlds best minds in physics were working on that rather than looking for elusive bosons, we could be a lot less dependent on fossil fuels than we are at the moment.

@Kash:
The argument about being powered by nuclear and therefore being green doesn’t really stack up, because if CERN wasn’t using the energy from the nuclear plants, something else that’s currently using fossil fuels could use it instead. However, your second point about using particle physics to reduce the half life of radioactive waste is the closest anyone’s come yet to making me think I might have been wrong. Do you have more details on that? How’s the research going, and what use does it make of the sort of high-energy stuff I was speaking against?

I think what would be most likely to convince me I was wrong would be if anyone could point to any practical use of the advances we’ve made in particle physics since we learned about protons, neutrons, and electrons. Yes, getting that far was useful, and as PaulJ rightly points out, much of chemistry relies on knowing about fundamental particles at that level.

But what about when we go a level further and start looking at quarks, neutrinos, and stuff like that? We’ve known about those things for about 50 years now, and as far as I’m aware there are no practical uses of any of them yet. It really didn’t take us 50 years to figure out what to do with lasers, for example. Did I miss something? If someone can tell me of a practical application of particle physics at the level of things more sophisticated than protons et al, then I shall happily admit that much of what I said in my piece was wrong.

But even then, I’m still not sure I think it’s a better use of money than some of the other things I talked about. Maybe the next particle physics genius who could figure out everything that’s currently baffling everyone has just been born in sub-Saharan Africa, but will die before her 3rd birthday from an easily preventable disease. Wouldn’t stopping that sort of thing be a better thing to spend our money on?

CERN gets it’s electricity from French nuclear power, so you could argue it’s quite green.

But what about all the nuclear waste hanging around I hear to ask?

Well one of the many things particle physicists research is…using particle physics to deal with nuclear waste by drastically reducing the half-life of waste.

There definitely have to be safeguards to protect those who cannont make the choice, but it is unfair to deny the dignity to those who have made a fully informed decision.

Remember the LASER? It was a neat technological curiosity when it was invented, but practically no-one had any idea what it could be used for. But look at it now. (Or rather, don’t look at it — you’ll damage your eyes…)

I’m actually fairly well aware of what’s involved in retraining in a different branch of science, speaking as a medical statistician who used to be an organic chemist. It’s really not that hard, and I suspect most of the people who do particle physics are a lot smarter than I am. But as I pointed out in the piece, there’s actually plenty of useful stuff for physicists to do anyway.

Of course it’s possible that some discoveries from high-energy physics will turn out to be useful in the future, but it really doesn’t seem likely to me based on progress so far. Have there yet been any practical applications to the physics of things more finely divided than protons, neutrons, and electrons? I’m not aware of any, but will gladly eat my words if I’m wrong about that.

Anyway, it does strike me as socially irresponsible to trade the highly uncertain benefits of playing with toys like the LHC against the very real benefits of working on more pressing problems like sorting out malaria. Higgs bosons will still be there (or not there) for us to play with in the future.

“I’m hope this piece doesn’t come across as anti-science.”

Maybe not, but dangerously close. I’m not even sure where to begin…

…how about the suggestion that scientists would be better off working on other things, and that it wouldn’t be a big deal just to retrain them for that. He utterly underestimates the complexity involved in training in and understanding a completely different branch of science, even for ‘clever people’, who is going to do this retraining, and how much will THAT cost, since we’re so worried about costs here. Not to mention the odd implication that scientists should just be happy that they’re doing science and just get what they’re given rather than following their particular interests (and, indeed, aptitudes – a brilliant particle physicist might turn out to be a rubbish geneticist).

Or how about the idea that the LHC probably won’t turn up anything useful in any way and the dismissal of pure research as a luxury? It strikes me as ludicrously presumptuous of Adam to guess at what may or may not come out of the LHC. They are trying to verify one of the most fundamental aspects of our current understanding of physics. If it turns out our current model is wrong, the new physics that comes out of that could lead to technologies that nobody has even imagined yet, and even if the model turns out to be correct, pinning down the details is also likely to lead to new physics that, who knows, might somewhere down the road assist in the manufacture of medicines, computers and all that important stuff. It’s not as simple as finding a Higgs boson and then having to figure out a use for it, unless you have a simplistic view of the science (which Adam does, by his own admission).

It’s about all the discoveries that go along with that, what they may lead to, and the new things that might come out of understanding the standard model a little better, or even having to replace it – things that are impossible to predict and ridiculous to dismiss with a shrug, doubting anything will come of it. And his reasoning that it takes such high energy to do anything Higgsy reveals the ignorance here – just because it may take a lot of energy and effort to find something out doesn’t mean that the results of those findings can’t be put to excellent uses that are difficult to predict in advance. And of course, the hunt for the Higgs is only the most well-known of projects the LHC is conducting.

I’m sure you’re a lovely chap, Adam, but really this piece was embarrassing in its naivety.

Obviously I just have to pick up on the one point; comparing male circumcision specifically to clitoridectomy (removal of the clitoris) isn’t really a proper comparison. It’s analogous to the removal of the clitoral *hood*, not the whole clitoris. But it’s not right either to say that clitoridectomy is like removal of the entire penis.

Better to compare the whole spectra of genital mutilation of boys and girls, since there’s a massive range applied to both sexes around the world (unfortunately) – it’s just that people tend to downplay male circumcision and think of the absolute worst and most damaging forms of FGM like infibulation – which is also the rarest – but there are ‘lesser’ (but no more excusable) practices as well that are more comparable.

Point being, comparison isn’t really the point – especially when we’re considering babies and children. It’s lifelong damage for stupid reasons and the whole thing will only be stopped if people support the rights of *children* to bodily integrity, not just girls’ (or boys’).

And that is my 2pence.

Hope your all having a great holiday season and a happy New Year
Cheers
Fahad

Perhaps you could highlight all the vile comments being made by religious-types against Hitch and remark how the mighty Hitch would defend their right to say these things. Hitch is the bigger man!

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/12/10/once-again-i-am-embarrassed-to-be-an-american/

I thought David made some great points about NHS data sharing, but was a little surprised he didn’t mention the fact that it’s already been going on for years, seemingly without anything bad happening. That seems quite a relevant fact, which has been largely missed out of all the fuss in the media.

Wait….team Pod Delusion wins

Seriously though. Every week we seem to get a really interesting person to talk about something they are passionate about. Well done everybody.

Good luck!

Peter.

The person responding seemed rather frustrated, because they had previously been criticised for not providing links to papers in science stories, had adopted a policy to always do so, and were now being criticised for the way they did it.

He responded pretty much as I expected; he felt that only writing science stories about papers that were available freely would ‘impoverish’ BBC science reporting. I can’t say I agree with that; there is no shortage of interesting peer reviewed science, with free e prints, that is not mentioned in the media.

> James Firth does have a vested interest in scaremongering here

Perhaps we should turn to independent sources, such as the RIAA and MPAA? Here are some other sources expressing the same concerns as James:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/sopa-hollywood-finally-gets-chance-break-internet

http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/11/sopa-protectip.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/11/congress-weighs-fighting-internet-piracy-like-the-war-on-drugs/248690/

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6134/135/

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111122/04254316872/definitive-post-why-sopa-protect-ip-are-bad-bad-ideas.shtml?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57329001-281/how-sopa-would-affect-you-faq/?part=rss&subj=latest-news&tag=title

> The harm done to small filmmakers and independent musicians by digital piracy is immense,

[citation required]

> perhaps he could suggest some?

Perhaps you could, as you claim to be the party harmed. And while you’re at it, how about measures that preserve your rights *without* trampling over those of the rest of us (i.e. the vast majority) of Internet users.

The creative industry is damaging itself and the internet by fundamentally misunderstanding the market and refusing at adapt to new low-profit, high volume markets which would otherwise be exciting times for all creators.

As advertisers continue to invest in digital, a whole new opportunity to fund creative content will open.

Additionally, the 99c model – selling whole e-novels and albums for 99c – makes far more sense than persevering with a high-cost model based solely on false scarcity. Piracy is making the market honest, and if western studios don’t wise up, developing countries will adapt models that work with the new reality and wipe the floor, leaving our locked-in obsolete model reliant on back catalogues dead in the water.

Read some science on piracy in emerging economies:
http://piracy.ssrc.org/the-report/

And my thoughts on 99c model:
http://www.slightlyrightofcentre.com/2011/11/million-eu-album-downloads-for-adele.html

And my solution to copyright:
http://www.slightlyrightofcentre.com/2011/11/fixing-copyright-solution.html

Then come back and make a cogent argument without accusing people of having vested interests.

James Firth

CEO, Open Digital Policy Organisation
http://www.opendigital.org

The harm done to small filmmakers and independent musicians by digital piracy is immense, and we don’t have the deep pockets that large record companies or Hollywood studios have to pay for their lawyers. While there are certainly better ways of enforcing creator’s digital rights than SOPA – SOPA and worse is what we’ll get in the absence of smarter piracy measures.

casual infringement perhaps he could suggest some?

Noticed this when looking at the Daily Mail website http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2065254/Coins-Jerusalems-Western-Wall-hints-sacred-site-older-Herod.html

“Coins dated 17/18 CE were discovered beneath the Western Wall of Temple Mount, providing scientific confirmation that the Western Wall and Robinsons Arch construction were not completed in King Herods lifetime”

Moore’s law is inexorably linked to features size – because its continuation is dependent not just on transistor count growing exponentially, but on side effects of transistor count not doing so.

So long as you can keep shrinking feature size (we have maybe a decade or two of that before the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle starts being a real bitch, as Michio Kaku pointed out) you can get more computing power without having your electrical power requirements, your heat production, or the mass or volume of chip increasing exponentially as well. Once feature size stops shrinking, you have maybe another doubling or two from clever component design, but then you are faced with future doublings leading you inexorably to a unwieldy solid brick of silicon that puts out more heat than a car engine, or home computers the size of filing cabinets with thousands of cores.

I have no doubt that very smart people at ARM, and other chip designers, will think of innovative ways to squeeze the last drops of exponential growth out of semiconductor technology – but the fact that people are having to be so clever with component design instead of just saying “more of them, and smaller” indicates an approaching limit.

This is a problem with going for exponential growth of any kind; geometric advancements only buy you linear amounts of time to continue growing. Its not even a matter of science or technology, just one of maths.

While I agree that there must, eventually, be fundamental limits to Moore’s law, I disagree that we are near them. There won’t be a hard stop – things will get harder for a while, then there will be breakthroughs that give us more compute power, and the process will repeat.

The thing is, it’s not just feature size scaling that gives us more compute power. Other possible technologies that we didn’t go into (because I wanted to focus on the manufacturing process) include 3D, parallelism, and optical interconnect.

As Greg said, it’s an interesting time to be in the industry – there are big changes coming and it’s up to us to shape how they are used.

Finally, just to clarify my position, I work for ARM but I’m primarily a software person. I’m not associated with the actual design of fabrication of logic gates – I’m about three levels of abstraction away from that world. In any case, ARM does not actually manufacture chips, instead we design them, then these designs are incorporated into system designs by our design partners, and then they are manufactured by our manufacturing partners. Greg, as he says in the longer interview, works with those manufacturing partners to ensure that our chip designs will work efficiently on their processes as they evolve.

For things in the extra feed, I can get them with my regular podcatching software, but I haven’t figured out how to do it for things included as subsidiary links.

My first batch is ruined now.

And just for clarification, when making the connections on the chip, it’s the aluminium layer that goes on first, then the photoresist, then it’s exposed, then it’s etched. Apologies – the order wasn’t as clear in the edit as in the original inverview.

To begin with, no: intentionality does not operate “against causation”. Now, I realize I am no scientist or philosopher, but I think I am standing on pretty firm ground saying that. In fact, as far as I could tell Ray pretty much laid out why that is in the lecture. If he has an actual argument against the notion I must have missed it when I stopped to torment some Mormon missionaries in the middle of the lecture (I was walking along with my iPod).

Also, Ray seems to be a great critic of an incredibly naive, reductionist view of neuroscience that I’d be very surprised if any neuroscientist worth his salt actually held. I particularly take issue with his point about not being able to localize certain functions of the mind to specific areas of the brain. Okay, that’s true, but so what? Why would one expect to be able to? That doesn’t take the matter out of the realms of neuroscience, and although we don’t yet know the exact details of how these things do, Ray seemed to be implying that there was some deep and profound mystery at work here that frankly escapes me. It’s a bit like looking at a computer program, seeing that on a very basic, line-by-line level it consists of simple statements, and then declaring that because no single one of these statements encapsulates the behaviour of the entire program then there’s some mysterious force at work. (Hint: in programming it’s good to learn about higher-level abstractions). I could even make a similar argument about a transistor radio. If you examine each component individually then the functioning of the radio starts to seem pretty “non-local”, does it not? What’s that then, magic?

The mention of evolutionary psychology was interesting, since a lot of it is evidently pseudoscience. Despite that, I am not sure that the basic idea itself is a bad one so long as the actual research is carried out in a sensible and scientific manner. That is, unless anyone is stupid enough to make puffed-up and exaggerated claims about it’s explanatory power, but then, does anybody actually do that outside of Daily Mail “science” articles? And if they do, are any of them actual scientists?

It was good that Ray mentioned Wilson’s consilience and the idea of “theories-of-everything”, but if he wanted to argue against the practice of exaggerating the explanatory power of certain scientific ideas (in this case, neuroscience and evolution by natural selection) then I am surprised he did not mention the idea of model-dependent realism as discussed in Hawking and Mlodinov’s latest book “The Grand Design”. It suggests that reality may be best described with a patchwork of overlapping models, rather than in one grand theory-of-everything. It seems to me that it should be a good antidote to the kind of thinking that leads to things like Darwinyitis or Neurothingiology (or whatever it was they were called).

Now, I know this is not what you might call a “rigorous logical argument ™”, and I’m really not trying to take a cheap pot-shot here, but when Ray started to talk about the the work of philosopher Daniel Dennett, I felt it was a bit of a bad sign that he didn’t seem to know how to say his name properly. I guess this means little enough in itself, but since Ray is a philosopher, presumably working in a philosophy department and not entirely out of touch with his academic peers, one would think he would have heard Dennett’s name spoken aloud often enough to have picked up on how to pronounce it. This must be another one of those profound mysteries!

Also, I feel I should mention the BBC radio adaptation of Solaris by Hattie Naylor, starring Ron Cook and Joanne Froggatt. It is, in my opinion, a true masterpiece of radio drama, and like both film adaptations I found it so moving that it made me cry.

That said, I’m so happy to now have the new translation which is read by Alessandro Juliani, Mr. Gaeta from Ron Moore’s Battelstar Galactica. I have read the old translation and despite it’s flaws I consider it one of the best SF novels I have read. I’m very much looking forward to hearing this new one.

However…

Maybe it’s just me, but I found her final song (about the boyfriend in a coma) way below the standard of the others, relying on some crude sexist stereotypes. To me, that song was just offensive rather than funny. Am I being oversensitive here?

I’m not sure where that £1.8 million figure comes from: the link you give is a bit light on detail. I was simplifying a bit in my piece, and obviously the costs of a fatal RTC are going to be greater than simply the human cost of the life that’s lost (however you choose to value it), including things like the loss of the car, the resources deployed by the emergency services, the cost of delays caused to other motorists, etc. Obviously that would all need to be taken account of in any economic evaluation of the effect of increasing the speed limit.

I’m not a Philosophy Bites listener, but it looks interesting. Many thanks for pointing it out!

@Emir:

You may well be right that a reduction in the speed limit could be beneficial, but I’m not necessarily arguing that that’s definitely true. Clearly my arguments would work just as well in reverse: reducing the speed limit would save lives, but also cost the economy in terms of longer journeys.

I think that determining the “ideal” speed limit is actually very simple in theory, but fantastically difficult in practice. Clearly a zero speed limit is not sensible. Sure, we’d save many lives, but the cost to the economy of nobody being able to get anywhere would be huge, and I think it’s self evident that a zero speed limit would be too slow.

So, to determine the ideal speed limit, you calculate the incremental benefits of increasing the speed limit to a slightly higher speed limit (reduced journey times) and the incremental costs of the same increase (more RTCs). At the point where the two balance out, you have reached the ideal speed limit. If in fact you never reach that point, then we could do away with speed limits altogether.

Sounds simple in theory, doesn’t it? But of course calculating those costs is hugely complex, and requires, among other things, deciding how much we value human life, which of course is a value judgement and a matter for intense debate (which was the main point of my piece).

If you forced me to guess where the optimum speed limit is, I’d guess a little slower than it is now: maybe 50 or 60 mph sounds about right. But that is a wild guess. Maybe increasing the speed limit to 80 or even 90 mph would actually have a net benefit. I’d need to see how the calculations were done to form a more informed judgement, and I doubt that anyone has ever done them sufficiently carefully.

The sad fact is that it won’t be these kinds of calculations that will drive the decision. It will be politicians, simply making a judgement about what they think will get them more votes.

Re: the 80mph

Without going into the details of your argumentation I think you could agree that it would tend to support a “reduction” in speed limits. Why not drop the speed limit to 60 or 50mph? Lives will inevitably be saved.

Rather argue in relative terms: how would you go about determining the “ideal” speed limit?

One technical point is that road traffic collisions have far greater economic cost than ‘normal’ deaths (sounds harsh, but it’s true). a death on the roads is estimated to cost £1.8 million.

Sorry you didn’t like my piece, but happy to respond to the point you make.

“It started badly with an un-sourced suggestion that raising speed limits will increase road deaths”

Well, sorry about the lack of sources: it’s not always as easy to put references in a podcast piece as it is in a piece of writing. But there is plenty of evidence to that effect, which I really don’t think is controversial among serious commentators. Obviously I’m making a distinction here between “serious commentators” and “the Jeremy Clarkson brigade”. There’s certainly an appearance of controversy, but most of it manufactured by speedophiles on the basis of what they would like to be true, rather than evidence. A bit like the controversy over whether man made global warming is a problem.

See, for example, Baum et al 1989 and Pilkington and Kinra 2004. There’s plenty more stuff like that out there.

Granted, the evidence isn’t as robust as we’d ideally like it to be, as there is a lack of randomised trials, but given the consistency of the evidence from multiple studies with different designs, plus the obvious scientific plausibility and the lack of serious disconfirming evidence, I don’t think anyone could reasonably doubt the hypothesis that increasing the speed limit would mean more road deaths. Do you disagree? If so, why?

“got even worse when the author suggested that putting *a* monetary value (as opposed to what that value should be) on someone’s life was uncontroversial”

Do you really think that’s controversial? Sure, the value is controversial, but do you think there are any serious commentators who dispute that there is *a* value? If it cost 250 trillion pounds to save one life from a particular disease with a particular treatment, do you think anyone would want it funded on the NHS? Seriously? Can you point to anyone who’s making that kind of argument?

then sunk into despair when the author engages in rather daft and pointless thought experiments”

The point of the thought experiment was to explore whether we think there is a moral difference between killing a specific individual and killing an unknown individual. I freely admit that the answer to that question is likely to be controversial, but I do think it’s a question worth asking. Why do you think it’s pointless?

“The only good part is his little “aside” with a tiny amount of actual science/logic in it.”

Why, thank you!

“Now I feel like a Daily Mail commenter!”

Oh, don’t worry, you have a loooooong way to go before you sink to those depths!

Adam

Please, no more features like this.

(Now I feel like a Daily Mail commenter! Grumble grumble)

Computer programming is very much about problem solving. As part of it, you learn how to break complicated, difficult problems into smaller issues that you can deal with issue by issue. This is a skill that many people could do with learning in regards to their general life. Computer programming also opens up a whole new world of creativity that children who don’t have a flair for music, art or drama can engage in. As a child, I was forced to learn all of those things. I found them immensely dull and I was not good at any of them. I would have loved to have learned how to program computers as a child but I never had that option.

Yes, computers are often a tool. But they can also be a playground of creativity and expression.

So, in summary: Teaching children to learn programming also teaches them an effective mechanism for real world problem solving and offers them a new way to express creativity.

- Andrew

I’m a big believer in people doing what they enjoy, children (and adults) should be given a wide range of subjects to choose from, and be given just that, a choice.

There’s not much point in me learning to program, I’d never be any good at it, but there are some things I can do and enjoy, I do these, mostly

(Oh dear, I appear to have used the cover of “praise” to basically talk about myself)

PS. Loved the facebook Dave skit too

Finished up with a toe curling moment when Cameron goes “Disco Dad” sitting next to P J Harvey about to play from her remarkable Let England Shake

So my question: what should supporters of Troy Davis have done, concretely?

You’ve looked at the studies, and they say that claiming that he may not be guilty does little to promote a change in attitude about an execution, but this was the only handle available.

You say the best way to proceed would have been to call for his death sentence to be commuted to life without parole: but on what grounds? The only grounds for any particular action on his case (outside the general case against capital punishment) is his innocence, or grave doubts as to his guilt. If that’s your handle, then the only reasonable demand to make is for him to be freed, not to have his sentence changed.

The fact is, not everyone wants to be a programmer.

I was a jet lagged at the time so please be kind.

He seemed to conflate “Dawkins doesn’t debate in a certain forum” with “Dawkins doesn’t debate”. Which is nonsense, having myself heard him on Radio4 this week.

Dawkins debates all the time, but choses not to debate in the forum that Justin wants him to, and so he “doesn’t debate”?

The whole segment as I understood it, was based on this conflation, so it seemed empty of validity. Have I missed the point?

T

As a response to the solicitation that some atheist debate him it is notable that Dr. Craig himself has been repeatedly refusing to debate one of those elusive atheist debaters: John W. Loftus.

For more information, see the extremely explicit:

John W. Loftus: I want to debate William Lane Craig

If you look through some of the various other archived messages and posts, you will see other explicit calls that reiterate the invitation by Mr. Loftus to Dr. Craig for a debate. One of them even describes a recent event (within the recent several years, notably after Mr. Loftus studied under Dr. Craig) where Mr. Loftus delivered the invitation personally to Dr. Craig only to receive the usual rejection of the offer.

Given your request for such a debate, perhaps you might have more luck with Dr. Craig to see if he truly desires the debate he is so loudly claiming to invite.

a) Time begins to exist at t=0.

b) A being G is the cause of time, and exists temporally at t=0.

c) The concept of timelessness is coherent.

d) The world contains a state of affairs S at which G exists timelessly.

Let E(1) be the event “G changes from being timeless, to being temporal”.

Then, E(1) is an event that ends at t=0. And events take time.

Let e>0 be the duration of E(1).

Then then there is an interval of time [-e,0], or at least a nonempty open interval (-e,0], which ends at t=0.

Either way, time exists before t=0, contradicting the assumption that time begins at t=0.

1. Apologists don’t have to prove the existence of a god – they have to prove the existance of a particular God with the properties they claim.

2. You can’t build a logical argument on contradictory arguments. If “everything must have a cause” then you don’t get to make exceptions part way through the argument.

3. You can’t magically stop a regression by saying “Goddidit”. If you can’t handle the concept of a universe that existed forever, believing that God existed forever isn’t any easier.

The trick is not to get caught up in Craig’s bullying tactics, where he fires off 200 ridiculous notions before breakfast; analysing the flaws in each and every one would take forever. Instead, expose them for the word-conjurers they are.

Also, who else in the theist world are we going to debate that doesn’t either A. use the same tactics or B. pull out the same old rubbish that has been shot down repeatedly for 2 millennia?

I am a bit worried that Justin claimed some of Craig’s arguments were ‘powerful’ though. Is he sure he is thinking of the same person?

It isn’t particularly surprising Toynbee would pull out after seeing him. When told he was one of the foremost defenders of Christianity, she probably thought it would be an honest open debate, where both sides present their facts and draw a conclusion. After seeing him, she would have realised it wouldn’t be and that he would just offer a quickfire string of false assertions and logical fallacies that shw would not have time to adequately address.

For Bethany to clarify her position by distancing herself from a perception of homophobia attached to Christianity is entirely legitimate. How else is she to express her views except by making statements of this kind?

There is no need to take this personally, Bemmie, since I doubt that Bethany knows you or your partner; she is not making a judgement about your life choice, and would no doubt not presume to make such a judgement if she did know you both.

I too support gay relationships, in the same way that I support free speech, the freedom of artistic expression, civil liberties, human rights and many other things. It is the aggregate of these things, amongst many, many others that define who I am, and makes no comment whatsoever about the kind of person you are.

Surely you don’t deny me the right to define myself, or Bethany the right to define herself.

Thank you for supporting my straight relationship, I’m grateful for that!

Looks like someone has suggested VAT on everything:
http://www.citywire.co.uk/money/vat-on-everything-they-must-be-joking/a524045

Now that would be a bit mad.

Call me a pedant if you like! I quite like it when people do.

03:09 – 13:27 Discussion about the background of the Guardian’s Science Weekly Podcast

13:28 – 17:44 How much science literacy can you assume in your audience when reporting on science?

17:55 – 32:07 Churnalism.What is it and how common is it in terms of Journalism and Blogging?

32:10 – 36:10 Including links to Science Manuscripts in online news articles

36:11 – 42:15 George Monbiot’s Guardian article “Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist”

42:16 – 52:01 The change in the landscape/ecosystem of science blogging over the last 12 months or so

52:07 – 52:44 The use of social media during the recent riots in London and elsewhere

52:50 – 58:37 World’s first clinical trial of stem cells to treat strokes is set to move to its next phase

58:43 – end Outro

http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Audacity_Wiki_Home_Page

… has pretty good and clear instructions on what all the various tools do, but the better your source recording, the less you need them.

Choice of microphone is *very* important. I made the mistake of using a headset microphone for recording my interview with Kirk (ep. 94 ;-0 ) it took ages to edit out all my loud gobbing and breathing into the microphone. .

‘Rehearsal Assistant’ is a free open source android app with lets you record maximum quality uncompressed, it’s pretty good. http://urbanstew.org/rehearsalassistant/

Indeed, a commons select committee predating the appointments of Hammond & Baker (in 2001) concluded that pedestrians were treated with contempt by planners (reported here http://menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/news/s/28150_pedestrians_risking_their_lives_ )

Public transport and cycling fare little better, so far as I can see – a more vigorous occupant of Mr. Baker’s post may well make a difference here, and transform our streets and cities for the better as a result.

VAT should not disproportionately affect lower-imcome households if applied, – as intended – only to luxury items. But there’s a blurring of the lines, with many examples of non-luxury items being taxed. Tampons is a classic case campaigners targeted back in the 90s, leading to a cut – but not a complete removal – of VAT on female sanitary products in 2000. It’s been at 5% since then.

Obviously even 5% is morally questionable. Another campaign IIRC from my student days was VAT on female razors but not shavers targeted at men. Maybe someone else will check this and pick up the ball for a later episode?!

But in summary, UK VAT is pretty much on a par with many developed countries. And at least price tags include sales tax, unlike e.g. the US, where your’re left doing the math(s) in your head before buying! then.

As I understand it, Sales taxes, such as VAT, disproportionately affect the poor. Is this true, and if so, does our very high VAT mean that we’re actually more unjust than most economies?

Whether this is worthy of a ministerial position is debatable, but I would say that someone needs to do it.

I’m a car driver myself, but I walk when I can. When I visit places like the USA, where you have to take a car to get to the corner store 200m away because there is literally zero pedestrian access, I see what can happen if you take things too far. We need to have someone on the side of the pedestrians.

The combination of poor diction, poor recording and fast speech have marred several PD episodes for me.

This time I would like to wildly speculate! I think that the people who’s feelings you are trying to protect would probably prefer to be told how and when they are wrong, so they can update their understanding. I know I would.

To much fawning not enough finking (comedy “f”) is a serious accusation but not if you can’t prove it. I just can’t take it, or any of the other similar points raised in the last couple of weeks seriously until I have the faintest evidence of even one infraction. Isn’t that exactly what you are calling for? (and failing so badly to provide yourself) Surely you would agree?

To imagine that Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris or any other celebrity skeptic could not take being told they are wrong again seems to miss the point about being a skeptic. I certainly can’t say they couldn’t take it AND I’m skeptical that you can! Correction – I’m not skeptical you don’t know the minds of celebrity skeptics, I’m 100% sure you don’t know.

I prefer the take on it the the SGU had this week – Skeptics like being corrected. We revel in having our understanding (not beliefs, we don’t have any) being challenged. Like when we found out the universe was expanding, postulated after thorough research, checked and falsified, agreed upon and accepted into mainstrean understanding.

I’m not sure how else we get there? Peer review isn’t a pleasant process, so they are used to it, go ahead get an argument out for the love of science!

It has occurred to me that this is an orchestrated plot to slip some poe into the skeptic community (some like “movement”) but it’s too subtle to be the creation of a creationist.

I was of course only joking about you being a celebrity but maybe one day if you have a cogent thought, with evidence and back-up, not just tall tales? So it is true that my disagreeing is not proving the point but only because your not famous, I’m still disagreeing about everything else. Just saying “it doesn’t” again seems like a poor way for someone criticising lack of criticism to criticise.

What I meant when I said “I’ve heard too much” was that all you gave me was anecdotes while complaining about lack of evidence and too many anecdotes! Correct me if I’m wrong, please. Read slowly, without any grumpiness this is pretty clear in my mind anyway, clearer than your next paragraph even.

So when you finish with “I could have added evidence and anecdotes to the piece – but those would have been subjective and drawn from first hand, second hand and third hand experience” looks like you have no evidence and you should have done exactly what you said in your piece – do the hard work.

Rest assured no one who I have responded to with this weak and fallacious argument has had anything more to add when challenged. Please as I have said, if this is true it’s serious, so put your cards on the table or stop using special pleading!

Thank you for you great podcast.

It doesn’t.

“I’ve heard too much “the plural of anecdotes is not data” and then all you give me is a couple of anecdotes! I do not understand, even if you have “a slightly expanded version” why have you nothing more that an anecdote in this one! You’ve just contradicted everything you said?”

You are either complaining about the lack of anecdotes in my report or that my report is entirely founded on them. Please select which so I may respond.

“Another abuse of position by a celebrity skeptic?”

If a horde of my “fans” appear to shout you down and I do bugger all than yes that would constitute an abuse of position. Advancing an argument you disagree with and replying civilly does not to my mind fall into this category.

You do much to show up the flaws in my argument and highlight some of the irony inherent in making it. However I disagree with the substantive points above.

I could have added evidence and anecdotes to the piece – but those would have been subjective and drawn from first hand, second hand and third hand experience.

I think the value of the point can be debated without examples. Either people agree this sometimes occurs or they don’t.

I remain reluctant (and I understand this is frustrating for those who might want to more fully engage with the line of argument being advanced) to list examples and name names because then it inevitably becomes personal and I only wanted to advance a general idea.

Not start mud slinging.

I have put everything in quotation marks because it’s just your piece thrown back at you…

Thanks for your report but I was wondering what happened to “evidence and sources” that you seem to think are so important. This seems to be a weird trend claiming that skeptics aren’t skeptical enough and then failing completely to be skeptical about it. A self fulfilling prophesy? Although my disagreeing with you also proves you wrong too. You’re like a little photon – all particles and waves.

I’ve heard too much “the plural of anecdotes is not data” and then all you give me is a couple of anecdotes! I do not understand, even if you have “a slightly expanded version” why have you nothing more that an anecdote in this one! You’ve just contradicted everything you said?

Lip service paid, nothing achieved. The weight of your argument was feld by itself.

Another abuse of position by a celebrity skeptic? It’s not the biggest issue because it’s still not an issue unless you can give us proof – please take the time to research instead of a couple of minutes of polemic. This is not the way to go about skepticism.”

As I said all your words and you seemed to miss all of them, like some one standing in a quiet library shouting “everyone be quiet”.

The discussion could get interesting…

That’s actually beside the point though, because as soon as anyone says “I fully support gay relationships” I am thrown into the same sense of indignation.

It doesn’t matter if you support us or not, it really doesn’t. We exist and don’t need your approval.

Were I to proclaim that I believe that Bethany’s choice of life partner is okay by me and I have no problem with who she seeks to find happiness with, surely she and every other right thinking person in the world would pause and think… hang on, it’s none of your business who she chooses as a partner and the mere suggestion that you “support” her is completely offensive.

The thing is Bethany is defending her faith against her faith. She shouldn’t have to defend herself against the worst of Christianity because if Christianity was good, they would have at least spared a moment of thought for homos like me. Instead we have to wait until we get the nod of approval from from the Bethany’s of the world (who have obviously never read the Bible, for if they had they would realise God has no time for us man-on-man types) and of course, even she believes she has to give us the nod of approval too(“I completely support gay relationships”)

Next time someone is asking me for my opinion on YOUR relationship, I’ll make sure I answer the same, regardless of whether or not it’s appropriate. I FULLY SUPPORT STRAIGHT RELATIONSHIPS.

It takes only the arrogance of a Christian to imagine the rest of us care what you think of us.

@Ian Thanks for that. We’ll pose that one to them. Ta.

I mean, Elsevier could probably afford several podcasts with only Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners on them with their 800M€ profit per year. But I always thought newspapers in general were struggling?

Listening again to your “Poppies” piece and hearing that your were in the Air Cadets for a number of years I have good news! After almost 6 years of hard begging I finally managed to have a Daycare and Preschool AND Air Cadets building built! I am awesome.

It’s design is based on a historical railway roundhouse that was once in our town, Canmore, when we were used to add an engine to trains making the journey over the Rockies to Revelstoke and beyond. The building is taking shape, but the Air Cadet part is separate and will be built last. The Air Cadets web site is http://www.878squadron.ca/ They’re still a few bucks short but a worthy organisation, I think you’ll agree. Love the Pod cast keep up the good work, alasdair

PS I put some great big fake “hanger doors” to make them feel like they were in an aircraft hanger NOT an engine shed!

Listening to your segment on free beer, I was amazed at your comment that you almost couldn’t believe anyone didn’t like beer. I’ve always been equally amazed that anyone actually DOES like beer, let alone a majority of people. I think it’s an acquired taste, but considering it’s as bitter as all hell when you first try it, I can’t believe there are so many people that manage to acquire a taste for it. Obviously it doesn’t taste like the disgusting swill to most people as it does to me! I’ve never had a whole one. I got through most of one once and felt sick. I have too much of a sweet tooth I guess.

I recently watched a series of twelve half-hour lectures by the man on YouTube (uploaded by steeltable218) titled “The Universe“. Well worth a look.

Are you a skeptic? See my blog post from June this year where I addressed similar issues.
http://somethingsurprising.blogspot.com/2011/06/are-you-skeptic.html

Just a moment ago I had to stop myself from responding to a question about where to hire a TENS machine from (dubious evidence) as I know the ensuing argument isn’t worth it, and maybe there are placebo benefits

(To be clear, I wasn’t going to say “don’t get one”, merely “out of interest, why do you think they work?”)

And last weekend I had to endure my mother-in-law (there was a brief mention of her and her beliefs in episode 37) wave two dowsing rods in front of my wife’s huge belly, before declaring to anyone who would listen that it is a girl.

She hasn’t got a good track record. She declared that my son was going to be a girl too, although that time she used her wedding ring on a piece of chain. Then again, maybe the dowsing rods are more accurate?

I would strongly recommend this talk by someone who, I imagine, was more religious than you and has now ‘found Dawkin’s’ so to speak. He used to preach on US TV for over ten years, so he know’s what he’s talking about!

http://richarddawkins.net/videos/642625-oklahoma-freethought-convention-2011-speech-3-of-5-the-thinking-atheist

Aw, thanks for that! That’s made my day!

I don’t want to tell anyone what they ‘must’ believe. I think a lot of people, myself included, understand well that if you wish to make an exception from skepticism in the case of your faith, doing it with eyes open and fully aware that you cannot rationally justify it, then that’s not something we should interfere with. But it IS a puzzle – you have to admit that much.

I think you understand skepticism, from what you were saying. But if you’d asked me yesterday then I would have said: anyone who claims to know what skepticism is but thinks that it’s fine to apply it to things you want and not to others, doesn’t REALLY understand what skepticism is. I hope the reasons that I think that are fairly obvious. And yet here you are, seeming to contradict that view – and while I don’t want to do anything (and indeed can’t do anything) to dissuade that, I have to admit that I’ve got no idea how you do it.

I can’t drink beer, it makes me feel sick.

I ammm a cider drinkerrr

If I had to choose between saving a baby and a person with a terminal illness from the fire, I’d choose the baby because if has more life to live, more “potential” if you like. These two are both from the same species.

If I had to choose between saving a cat or a mouse from the fire, I’d probably pick the cat. Again, it will live longer.

Although, it is not just about how long the mice/baby/cat can live, but more abut their “potential” (for want of a better word). Human beings can generally plan for the future, undertake projects and responsibilities, etc, in a way that animals cannot. Do these mean that most humans can live a more fulfilled life than animals? Not sure, but it is arguable.

Harder cases are where I have to choose between saving a comatose human with little life expectancy and a newly born pair of chimpanzees. Get over the species bias and you may conclude the chimps should be saved.

In short, human lives are generally more valuable than animal lives because of what most humans are like – not by virtue of them being human.

Finally, I am a vegetarian, but I think Morrisey is an arse.

That’s my fault – sorry! I did think about talking a bit about narcolepsy, but kinda thought that it would be understood because of all the “weird lives” type documentaries about it… and the Ben Folds song, of course

Obviously, I judged it wrongly, probably because of my medically skewed view of the world.

Sorry about that, I’ll try hard not to do it again!

Simon

Please slow down! Pause between sentences and paragraphs. Take a breath occasionally!

Once again I’ve found your contribution unintelligible.

I never even considered the time dimension, nice idea

I’d save the baby though, purely because I prefer babies to mice, most of the time

I didn’t mean to cherry pick when focusing on sentience, maybe I’ve misunderstood your argument, but isn’t it based on humans being more sentient/more intelligent/having more complex technology?

Nevertheless the argument still works if you replace the mice with giant turtles, I just mean to indicate that life has a time dimension to it to. And also a sustainability dimension. What it was 1 baby or 2 endangered tigers, the last of their species. Save a baby and make a species extinct or allow that species a chance to continue? Probably most would save the baby, but it’s a harder decision now – and I bet not *all* would save the baby.

If I had a point, I think I lost it.

http://www.thetwentyfirstfloor.com/?p=2582

I for example am happy to indulge in my carniverous nature, but expect the animals I eat to be treated humanely and killed with a minimum of pain, certainly avoiding anything that might be termed abuse.

Despite what Mark has said the point Morrisey makes does not excuse his comments. He is relying on the N-E-M by saying either you never harm a living organism in your life, or you are the same as a callous murderer. That is simply not a valid argument. It ignores any of the millions of shades of grey, inbetween, and assumes that there is a binary morality.

The argument supposing there is a seperation in homo-this and homo-that becomes as flawed if we apply the N-E-M to it (to illustrate why the fallacy is wrong, not to insult your intelligence Mark). Why do you think only animals should be protected? Because they are aware of pain? What about plants? They are living beings. Why should we be allowed to destroy them for their nutrients? Or germs and single cell organisms. What moral right do I have to destroy millions of bacterium when I am ill? Surely if you ever produced anti-bodies you are as bad as… Ah, see?

Falling on a logical fallacy can be more dangerous to your argument than the disagreement that sparks it. Unfortunately I think Morrissey was smart enough to know exactly what he ws doing, and doubt he intended to change the minds of anybody about the ethical treatment of animals.

Looks like my report on Morrissey’s comments has caused a bit of stir, which I was expecting. I know issues around animal rights always invoke passionate debate, and I’ve written about why humans are more important than other animals on my blog.

I must say, I do get a little frustrated when people keep saying “it’s all about sentience”. Why would you only take one view point of an extremely complicated issue and focus on only that? Isn’t that cherry picking? For example, Dan says “The idea that humans are more important than other species simply because we’re more sentient sounds like a religious argument to me”. That completely ignores all the other reasons I gave!

Mark writes “The argument that humans are more important can only be made by humans”. Equally, the idea that all animals are equally important can only be made by humans. I believe that this sort of cognitive ability is only possessed by humans, and it’s one reason that makes us more important. Also, I don’t get this “all or nothing” approach to equality. I don’t believe that non-human animals are equal to other humans, but why does that mean that I would support deliberately inflicting pain on them? I’m aware that animals can feel pain (although most organisms, including plants can detect injury) but why does that make them equal to us? When judging importance, surely you look at the differences and not the similarities?

As for the last paragraph of Mark’s reply, it’s addressing an issues that go further than the establishment of animal equality. Once again, establishing non-equality is not an excuse for abuse.

Completely agree with Dan S. 

The argument that humans are more important can only be made by humans. Yes i’d save the baby, but a chimpanzee would save its baby rather than one of us, even though we are more intelligent. Tom must be able to see this for himself: what if he’s in room in a burning house with a relative and Einstein:  who should he save? Who will he save?

The notion of extending moral laws to other animals can’t rest on intelligence for another reason: let’s say there was someone with a very low intelligence in the burning room? They might not be able to build a rocket or even a house, but stick them with a knife and they’ll cry out. All us animal rights people are saying is: that revulsion is what you SHOULD feel when an a non-human animals squeals in pain unnecessarily too.  If we’re not talking about suffering and morality in these questions then what are we talking about? Since, we’ve no idea how much suffering a whale or chimp experiences when their families are killed, or they undergo pain, we shouldn’t just assume that because we can build things we have a monopoly on suffering. That you care less about creatures you regard as lesser than yourself is a failure of imagination and empathy that we shouldn’t build laws around.

Morrisey’s shoe-horning of this issue into the Norwegian tragedy is crude, but the point he’s making is a very valid one: we submit vast numbers of other sentient creatures to unimaginably horrible lives, early and unnecessary deaths and we scarcely care. Let’s imagine an alternative reality in which there were separate pockets of Homo this and Homo that alive still on the planet, and we weren’t able to communicate with them: should we keep them as slaves? Eat them? Regard their cries as humorous? Let’s imagine a different reality in which slave owners had successfully established that their African slaves were a separate species; that they weren’t Homo sapiens. Would that open the door to a world in which they shouldn’t have rights? Nope, didn’t think so. 

I find I disagree passionately with Tom’s report this week.

I don’t agree with Morrissey’s comments, but also I feel that Tom confuses a personal preference for humans with importance. I would save the baby from the burning house, not because I think its more important than the mice, but because I’m human, and have a stronger emotional connection to humans than mice.

I feel the very idea of one species being more important than another species is extremely subjective and depends upon your measure of importance. The idea that humans are more important than other species simply because we’re more sentient sounds like a religious argument to me.

Is is too late to do a counter piece for the podcast next week?

There is a strange assumption that people should have the right to access certain media for free. It annoys me a little when file sharers claim this, because it something of a non-existant middle argument. Copywrite law needs bringing up to date, true, but we can’t assume that should mean a free sharing of all materials. No, not because I am an uber capitalist who assumes that every big studio should be able to greedily make as much profit as possible. Because it costs money to pay the people who make the films.

When you go to see Captain America and are waiting for the Avengers Teaser after the credits count the names you see, and tell me which of those guys doesn’t deserve their money. Then think about the fact you are sitting in a cinema, that costs money to run. The DVD costs money to buy, and the store needs to take their share. There is no viable model to pay for the production, marketing and distribution of the film that can be done for free.

Then there is the ethical issue. If I was talented enough to write a novel or make a film I would really like to make it free if it were possible (lets assume I didn’t need the money, or like the PD editors I was doing it as a hobby in my spare time) but surely that was my choice. It is something else to have somebody else declare that I should have my work made available for free. The issue is not if the world would be a better place if everybody DID endorse file sharing and piracy of their work, it is the far more important question of if the choice lays in the hands of the producer of the work, be it film, music, books, etc.

I couldn’t remember which report it was in, so didn’t call you by name! But, for me, it’s a term that still gets used but shouldn’t, and the Pod Delusion was not somewhere I’d expect to hear it. In a way, my comment was not only surprise at the use, but also the editorial decision not to remove it. Anyway, very much appreciated the response.
T

Er, I’m the one who used the phrase window-lickers, aren’t I, so I guess that remark was aimed at me.

To be honest, whether that description should be used isn’t something I’d given a great deal of thought to. It’s a phrase in fairly common use in certain parts of the internet.

Anyway, I’ve just googled the phrase, its etymology, and attitudes to it, and have concluded you are absolutely right to pick me up on it. I apologise for using what I see now, on reflection, was an inappropriate and offensive phrase, and also for not giving it a bit more thought before I recorded the piece.

Not so much missed as chose to categorise as complete bollocks.

Ahhhh. How embarrassing.
Guess I was caught between saying “3.5 times more” and a percentage.

Well spotted.

Kash.

PS. My first degree was in maths.
PPS. In my defence, maths is x’s and y’s, not actual numbers.
PPPS. But that’s no excuse.

The simple truth of the matter is…

You missed the whole subjectivity argument then?

Seems surprising to me.

T

If the Murdochs assessed that ex-employees may point the finger at them about their involvement in hacking & cover-ups, they’d need to distance themselves as thoroughly as possible, in preparation for the issuing of denials. It’s a long-game. The personal cost to them could be substantial – harming their reputations & their support structures / businesses. On the other hand, wouldn’t being found guilty of involvement in widespread immoral and illegal acts provoke an even worse backlash?

Incidentally, Angry Birds is shite because it asks the player for extraordinary precision but doesn’t give him/her the tools to achieve that precision. Don’t believe me? Try making the same shot twice.

I’m also lucky that I got in before the massive price hike, of course, but it is indeed a great shame that so many people in the future will be put off studying just for fun. Education is such as wonderful thing, and it’s a shame that it will be more limited in the future.

Bear in mind that courses are still on offer at the old rates, so if anyone has been thinking of studying with the OU, now is the time to do it. You still have time to register for courses starting this autumn. If you leave it another year, it will be massively more expensive.

Which brings me to the issue that, in my opinion, tends to be missed by commentators: context.

It seemed to me, the inquiry was little more than pantomime. As usual, media seemed obsessed by appearances – which were, let’s face it, nothing more than projections of prefabricated public personas. James Murdoch seemed “unprepaired”. Oh really? He couldn’t have been feigning it in order to be evasive? Or to set up a defence of ignorance, rather than active participation in hacking and / or cover-ups? The same goes for his cute little old dad, who obviously was too frail to harm a fly! Such stuff is not terribly difficult to pull off, espcially when it appears to be so easy to lead a predictable media by the nose.

I should add that I felt the quality of much of the questioning was appalling. If Marble’s interruption was an attack upon the sanctity of parliament, then some of the mindlessly trite questions that wasted much of the inquiry’s time ought to be regarded as a subversion of the sanctity of parliamentary democracy.

I did enjoy the rest of the show though.

I am personally eager that Murdoch is held to account properly, light is shone on the corrupt practices of his organisation, and his power taken away or greatly dimished. A pie in his face doesn’t really do it for me. Grow up. This is serious.

“It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before”

Beyond the asinine and thoughtless actions of this poltroon, he cannot even quote Dickens correctly. The words spoken by Sydney Carton, replacing Charles Darnay on the guillotine, were

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”

So, let me say that I will happily buy the self-aggrandising, ignorant, anti-democratic, philistine worrier of old people, Jonnie Marbles, a copy of A Tale of Two Cities at his request.

If you replace the gender qualification with, say, a racial qualification like ‘black’ you can probably see the predjudice inherent in RW’s position. It would not be proper for anyone to pre judge another on the basis of their percieved similarity to a negative stereotype.

As a tall scary looking man I have had to console the nervous and dodge the confrontational all my adult life, perhaps experiencing this has enabled me to spot such prejudice more clearly. Our actions, not the colour of our skin or gender, should be that by which we’re judged.

That said, the action in question here was, I’m told, an unsolicited proposal in private with sexual conotations. The devil is in the detail, but I imagine if the admirer was female, or indeed any individual of a perceived physical power equal to or less than the subject; fear of rape would not have arisen.

The only thing we need do here is apply the logical tools we apply to understand all prejudice.

@Mike – No, I hadn’t seen that, but it’s absolutely great! Thanks for showing me!

@Chris – Nah, they’d all use Google Docs Presentations, doubtless stored in the cloud, to introduce the extra technical complication of needing a working internet connection

@Peter – I agree with your points about note-taking to some extent – like you, I’m more of a ‘concentrate and engage with the concepts’ kind of guy than a hardcore note-taker, but I find that PowerPoint handouts distract me from engaging with lectures in particular. I end up doodling on them, numbering the slides, and making pretty arrows to connect the boxes. But that probably says more about me than it does about anything else…

Needless to say, my piece would have been completely different to yours.

You only fleetingly mentioned that you shouldn’t blame the tool, and that would have been my point. The fact is, very few people in the world get any sort of lesson in how to present information to others. And even worse, practically no-one gets any real, honest, critical feedback on their presentation methods and style.

Even when the opportunity is there to provide real feedback, people don’t take it out of some misguided belief of offending the other person. I’ve sat through many a presentation or training session where feedback forms were handed out. And those people that were moaning next to the vending machine during a break still give top marks for delivery, pace and supporting materials.

Unlike you, I have also witnessed some fantastic presentations, and I’d be surprised if you had too. And funnily enough, those presentations are the ones where the slideshow was a very minor supporting act. But in these cases, people just don’t think of it as “powerpoint”, they think of it as part of the show. There are some great examples in TED talks or when people like Brian Cox speak. They use the visuals, but you treat them as that – visuals.

Now don’t get me wrong, I too have sat through many a gut awful lecture and presentation. Just the other day at work we had a channel partner turn up, make a weak joke about “I won’t keep you six hours”, then spent four hours going through a 120 slide presentation. I’ve been there, I feel your pain. But I think it’s a bit unfair to blame it on Powerpoint.

Actually (and to prove this is just an incoherent rant that I’m thinking of whilst I type), if there’s one thing that I can blame Powerpoint for, it’s having templates. Maybe if you provided a blank canvas… no backgrounds… no slide templates… they’d be a little more creativity.

But the fact is a lack of training, a lack of constructive feedback and the fact that “everyone else does it that way” means that we end up with the yawn inducing slideshows that inevitably occur.

Another rant…. For me, one sign of a rubbish powerpoint presenter is someone who claims they’re an expert at powerpoint. They’re often the worst. They’re the ones who say, almost zen like, “you should limit the text on the slide”, then do that by making all the other bullet points transparent and then bringing them into focus one at a time. End result? Same crap on a slide, only now you can see them one bullet point at a time.

Cripes, it’s like I’m almost taking your side now

But yes, that would have been the sort of angle I argued. There is a purpose for it, it’s just that often people use it inappropriately. And those people are poorly trained and no-one tells them that what they just did was rubbish.

n.b. I have never had any formal powerpoint training. But what I have done over the years is critically evaluate the good stuff that others do, read stuff like “the non-designer’s design book” and sometimes realise that I should use something other than powerpoint for certain purposes.

The man in the elevator did not just ‘approach’ her, he made a sexual proposition.

Much of this debate has got overcomplicated. The fact and manner in which it has done so is clear evidence that yes, sexism and indeed misogyny are real problems in this ‘movement’ and the men who don’t like that being explained will just have to put up with it.
Nice neat summary here:
‘ Hitting on stranger in an elevator–creepy

Criticizing (and vilifying) the woman who says not to creepily hit on strangers in elevator for having the nerve to suggest guys change their behavior–sexist

Defending the prerogative of all men to hit on any woman at any time no matter how it might make women feel, even at the expense of women feeling safe in their environment, because it’s “just how men work”–misogynist’

(I think this came from a comment on a skepchick thread.)

As for Mark Stevenson, he’s a good’un. While I was reading his book he mentioned he lived in New Cross, a short walk from where I live. So I tweeted him so… I don’t know why I felt the need to mention it, I just did. The following week I found myself spending quite a few hours in his local pub chatting about his book, politics, music and about a million other things, while I got embarrassingly drunk from my relative lack of practise with booze.

The thing is, though: ‘what she doesn’t get the right to do is act like party girl then get massively offended when a totally innocent bloke tries his look (or rather, she can but it makes her look like a bit of a tool.)’
That is simply not what happened – or at least , that is not the account she gave and she did not get massively offended, she just said ‘that’s a bit creepy’. The offense comes from the rabidly misogynistic response – and some of the things I’ve read are truly foul. Although the fact that this incident happened right after a speech all about not behaving like a dick in just this manner – like, duh, that guy is absolutely saying ‘I just don’t get it’, and frankly, that would worry me!

I do think that there is a real problem with ‘she doesn’t get to act like a party girl and then…’! What difference does that make? That sounds dangerously like all the wretched ‘she shouldn’t have got drunk/worn that, it’s her own fault’ double standard stuff. It makes zero difference. Women can talk about enjoying alcohol and parties and yes, sex, without being labelled as somehow ‘fair game’.
And if I don’t precede every statement with ‘it’s just my opinion but’ then I am just assuming people are smart enough to get what I mean to be my opinion and what I state as fact, it does not mean that I am trying to be a spokesman for all, er, middle aged perpetual students, or whatever!

As for his being discussed as a possible rapist, the post I’ve linked to deals with that much better than I can. Suffice it to say that’s just not what happened – again, with the proviso that someone somewhere probably did say it, but on the internet someone says everything somewhere.

Dawkins’ intervention was really wretched, by the way, (and of course imho) and he deserves any and all stick he’s getting for it. I am rapidly losing my remaining respect for that man, I wish he’d stick to what he understands.

Just to be clear about one thing – when someone fairly politely says that a particular behaviour is pretty bad manners, and the whole world goes crazy attacking them, it’s not them that is being divisive. When someone (see poster above), decides that not talking about abusive behaviour for ages, then politely mentioning that actually abusive behaviour is, well, not really OK (and I’m talking about the offensive emails etc. as much as elevator dude) is ‘changing the rules’ as if they… actually, this is too much. Women get to say ‘no’ and say ‘actually the way you did that wasn’t very nice’ without getting slagged off for ‘changing the rules’, ffs. Funny the News of The World gets mentioned here – it seems that the assumption that because someone is a woman in the public eye they don’t get to complain about dickish behaviour has rather a lot in common with NOTW’s attitude to people in the public eye…

And finally! All the slagging off of the SGU because you don’t like their manners of speech – honestly, if you don’t like it, don’t listen. What have you done lately? Have a little time for people who are trying to make a difference. Did you listen to Dean Burnett’s piece last week about Johann Hari? You know the bit about not being a dick and slagging off the people who are trying to do good things, because they are also human? He was talking to YOU. I mean, he really was, go listen.

Incidentally, saying “I see what you did there” after someone makes a joke is about as hackneyed as you can get, also see “I’m here all week”. Annoys me almost as must as Jay describing everything as fucking profound.

The point isn’t whether or not the elevator guy was a rapist but that he should have known the anxiety his actions would cause. There was no presumption that he “probably was an attacker” – just that his actions caused Rebecca Watson to enter a state of being defensive and concerned.

Women trying to avoid situations where opportunistic rape may occur is entirely rational.

As for telling people what to feel. Quite right, no one can tell you how to feel or how you should feel. – but i think its reasonable to tell people whether their actions are rational or not. Hardly any men are rapists. Hardly any people get stabbed. Why is it ok to convince ourselves that every lone man is a rapist and that all teenagers are fully armed?

I’m a bloke and I have an analogy some non-feminist blokes might appreciate. I’m variously ill (technically disabled). My consciousness can go crazy with no warning. This being the case – when someone is a dick around me (playing loud music, being gobby, acting up) and demands some kind of response – I am terrified. I might start the confrontation reasonable enough but I might regain consciousness over their bloodied frame and all of a sudden we’re in the papers. Pete Hague would apparently argue “why shouldn’t I play music loud, gob off in a cinema, whatever? Your medical problems aren’t my fault.”

While that is true, a dick move is still a dick move and can cause all kinds of unforeseen consequences. The fact that something has never bothered YOU only means your imagination isn’t broad enough.

You ARE Schroedinger’s rapist and Schrdgr’s Nazi apologist and Schrdgr’s paedophile. Everybody either IS or ISN’T one of these things. That’s how that mental exercise works and Pete should know it.

The intellectual laziness of the whole report made me furious and the irrelevant stats that Britain is slightly “less rapey” than the US only fueled my rage (I say rage – I mean the kind of rage you feel when someone says “Haitch”).

I’m sure Pete Hague isn’t the oppressive “MAN” in charge but he makes a bloody good case for joining the same club. Massive disappointment.

Yes, some feminists go to far when they claim that all men are one way or another, or think one thing or another. But he fact still remains that it is safer for a women to be cautious in situations where she doesn’t know another persons intentions. And if we feel uncomfortable, it should not offend men who don’t have those intentions.

While I could see how Dawkins’ culture could have impacted his response, I still disagree that “putting it in perspective” to the plight of a Muslim women was either appropriate or valid. Especially after Mr. Hague himself put it into the perspective of a women’s chances of sexual assault here in America. It lazy and belittles problems that women face.

Sensible reactions are what people tend to have – like feeling uneasy and perhaps waiting for the next lift, or if someone follows you in… well, feeling uneasy and a polite refusal is all your left with. That’s one of the points against Dawkins, who claimed that ‘well there’s always the emergency stop button’ – what the hell use is that, when if the situation does turn sour you’re likely to have been overpowered anyway? It’s the situation people create for others that Rebecca (and most of us who are arguing along these lines) is asking people to consider.

To consider, not to change your life completely, not to refrain from flirting or asking people out entirely, not to become some caged asexual oppressed former-male. The overreaction is on both sides, as you’ve just demonstrated.

Going back to the Toronto policeman, slutwalks, ‘is clothing to blame for rape’ (no) and so on – is it unreasonable to say to men ‘don’t rape people’? No, it’s not, for obvious reason – one can argue that telling people not to has no effect, but considering the differing rates depending on where you look, I’d argue otherwise; society’s norms do impact on people’s behaviour.

So is it really so unreasonable to *politely* ask men to consider the situations they create with their actions and words (if they really give a shit about women, surely that’s something they want to be doing?) or is it just a sensible reaction to something that happened?

You can’t tell someone else how they feel, or how they should feel – it just happens, so people saying ‘that’s not threatening or scary or inappropriate!’ is just invalid; if someone feels threatened, they do, end of. No one snapped and threw a punch, it’s just discourse – and for some reason an alarming number of people seem to be railing against that, and that worries me a lot.

Sometimes ‘got the time mate’ can be a prelude to assault. The next time someone asks me for the time, would i be justified in striking a preemptive blow to their throat? Or would that be a bit of an over-reaction?