131–140 of 151 posts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_D._Holt
Are you from 12th district as well? Glad someone pointed this out. I have a lot of pride that this man is a representative - literally a rocket scientist.
Are there scientists to vote for in the US? I would love to vote for one, but they're are no scientist candidates in my country. And virtually every academic I know, openly hates politics and wants to stay away from it. "The largest punishment for those who are not interested in politics, is that they'll be governed by those who are." Maybe the best solution would be to teach politics to scientists, and not the other…
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You're probably not a scientist. Mathematics mostly traffics in things which are right or wrong; science rarely does. That's one of the criticisms that the peanut gallery often lobs at it: that it's just based on theories . When ideas are actually being trafficked -- that is when they're new and struggling for breathing room, they're rarely clearly right or wrong. Consensus forms over a fairly long amount of time. Wi…
"That's one of the criticisms that the peanut gallery often lobs at it: that it's just based on theories." Speaking from the peanut gallery, more specifically, it's much more Bayesian than people would have you believe. Popular literature and most science instructors are not a very good source of context. The hype does not equal the delivery.
I've tried having conversations explaining Bayes, general probability, and its relationship to scientific theories. Almost always falls on deaf ears. People are incredibly horrible at math--and I don't even consider myself to be that great at it. Their failures at being good with understanding maths flows into being horrible at understanding science, especially that which involves mathematics as integral part of its probabilistic standing in relation to alternatives.
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"not good liars" does not mean "can tell no lies"; in this case it means "has not had years of professional training and experience in debating/argument tactics and how to manipulate irrational audiences".
You obviously never attended graduate school :)
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So to follow your argument, being a lawyer does not make one "law". Shouldn't people other than lawyers have input on laws? :) Also: Godwin's law.
> So to follow your argument, being a lawyer does not make one "law". ...is this supposed to be a point of some kind? Of course being a lawyer doesn't make you "the law". > Shouldn't people other than lawyers have input on laws? Why? People should be familiar with law for the same reason people should be familiar with science. It's important; it's relevant; it contributes to society in a positive and melioristic way.…
No, it's not. I'm just poking fun at the parent post, specifically the "practicing science does not make you science" line. It just sounded like some bizarre variation of "you are (or not) what you eat" to me.
> Why? People should be familiar with law for the same reason people should be familiar with science.
I agree with this. Unfortunately, all too often people making laws about science know nothing about it, and end up setting discovery back. Ideally there would be someone in government whose critical thinking could balance out all the rhetoric. I'm not saying all lawyers should be replaced with scientists.
> Do you actually know what Godwin's Law states?
I have not yet been banned from Wikipedia. Re-read the comment I am replying to. He is arguing against putting scientists in government because the Nazis had scientists. It was a good trolling attempt though - look at us two go on about it :)
I think a more interesting question is: why do Americans elect Lawyers? It's the most common profession in Congress (not including the self-referential "politics" answer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_111th_United_Sta... ). Both presidential candidates are Harvard Law students as well. I understand why Lawyers would want to become Lawmakers. I don't understand however such an unpopular field manages to g…
For example, here's a paper from Yale:
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
some random blogs:
http://equalitybylot.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/ben-saunders-c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_D._Holt
Are you from 12th district as well? Glad someone pointed this out. I have a lot of pride that this man is a representative - literally a rocket scientist.
Holt really is a great congressman.
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Going by anecdotal evidence[0], there does seem to be some of the tendency ta12121 worries about among engineers , though. [0]See e.g. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineers_and_woo
Not really. Engineers venture out into the grey even more than scientists do - they solve problems of interest to humans - their job requires them to be grounded in reality and be sensitive to human needs and constraints (well, at least the good ones are). I often think that while a purely technical background and education might be really powerful and enable one to analyze and predict well-behaved things better than…
Funnily enough, in our media it was reported that of late, students receiving top-level government scholarships to the US/UK/elsewhere hardly ever choose engineering any more, but study economics instead (probably influenced by the dominance of the financial industry). So the next generation of Singapore leaders may very well be dominated by economics trainees - I wonder what sort of government we'll get, then? Certainly a more diverse one, but also one lacking in engineers and scientists.
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People from Singapore are so ethnically diverse that Singapore has four official languages #1 Language and ethnicity are not the same. #2 Singapore is 74 percent Chinese. Do a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of research before copy-pasting nonsense. Leterally, 10 seconds of research would be plenty. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Singapore
I am a Wikipedian. So I immediately noticed that the Wikipedia article you kindly recommended has been flagged for revision for a year. I dig into its sources and note it largely reflects the official view of the Singapore government, which, as the thread has already noted, is not fully democratic. Anyway, the article SUPPORTS my claim that the generation in Singapore that grew up when I grew up mostly didn't speak t…
This is all to say that it could be argued that Singapore is a Chinese-majority nation, but it doesn't take away from the fact that there are many Malays and Indians here, and many foreigners of all stripes (Indians, Europeans, Americans). Foreigners make up 2m of our 5.2m people (38%), which is pretty shocking really (500k of them have become permanent residents, though).
I'd say that in the context of primary schools here, diversity isn't at a true melting-pot level. Furthermore, education among Chinese families is pursued in the same aggressive way as in other East Asian nations - the majority of students have supplementary tutoring, sometimes from the early grades. The culture of academic emphasis among parents is in line with the government's pedadogical efforts, which results in high achievement levels.
This is not to take away from the success of the Singaporean mathematics curriculum, which is quite outstanding by most measures - probably because it was designed by mathematicians and teachers in tandem, drawing on the best practices in the world known at the time (the late 70s/early 80s). Though even that is changing with our new emphasis on knowledge by construction, collaboration and discovery.