From yesterday
Windschuttle isn’t accountable for quality of science. He doesn’t even pretend to be a scientist.
I am a scientist and have serious problems with professionals purporting to have scientific ability who have so little that they are guided by the wisdom that tells them my claims are ‘to good to be true’ ‘no one like me could be so far ahead of the game’ (I have been used to being way far ahead of the game since I was 14) that they call me a hoax with the comfort of that wisdom.
Even these horrible experiences contribute quality and dimension to my wisdom.
Wisdom is what Windschuttle could demonstrate and for which he could be accountable if he claims such. If babbling nonsense makes him popular he is no more accountable than the sexy teenage girl in a mini-skirt believing she is ‘hot’ or others believing she must be an easy poke.
Wisdom belongs to the wise we should stop trying to give it away to anybody that stands in-line with their hand out.

In school, those that were to become journalists were off in the english and history departments, the future engineers and medicos etc in the science and maths departments. With few notable exceptions (Robin Williams and Karl Kruzelnicki for example) journalists do NOT understand science. I cringe at the frequent misuse and interchangeability of m (milli) and M (mega). I despair at the misunderstanding of the basics of thermodynamics. And don’t get me started on the misuse of surveys and statistics of doubtful provenance. Good on you , Sharon, for letting the hot air out of a pompous balloon.

Google Australia: Katherine Wilson Overland

Result: “Voices from the edge - Books - http://www.theage.com.au
Nathan Hollier and Katherine Wilson, the joint editors of Overland, the left- wing literary and cultural magazine,”

3rd entry from top etc etc. She’s got the skills, the history on GMO, the wit and flair. She’s my candidate until I’m told otherwise.

Move on, nothing has happened here.

Katherine Wilson (and Bernard Keane, subbing?) meet Sharon Gould? Sharon Gould meet Katherine Wilson?

Exhibit 1, 21 July 2008

“CSIRO scientist’s GM letter campaign ‘backfires’ “

http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/20080721-CSIRO-scientist-campaign.html

OLD MAN STEVENS FROM THE ABANDONED THEME PARK!

Edward James has a point about indulgent gotcha, only the time and effort put into this one suggests a more serious objective which I can respect. I well accept the Overland editorial reaction, live by die by publicly asserted standards. Poor form to complain, he should wear it up front. He possibly should resign.

Certainly the guy needs to be taken down a peg. He has done great harm to a lot of very good people and good causes, for reasons which do not seem to me to be honourable. Hence my immediate reaction to the hoax was schadenfreude. But was this justified?

The contrast between this and the Sokal hoax could not be more extreme.

Sokal’s paper was a classic piece of obscurantism, a parody of the style of the people whose intellectual honesty he was testing.

The Sharon Gould piece is essentially a clear, well-constructed statement of a self-evident truth: that complex scientific arguments tend to be simplified and trivialised in public debate. This was not a hoax argument, it was a pretty commonplace observation. This observation was illustrated with a range of true examples. It was then extended by quoting some hoax examples, but this did not invalidate the core argument of the piece.

The main purpose of the hoax was to show that Windschuttle was less critical of ‘evidence’ in favour of his own position than he would have been of ‘evidence’ the other way. This is neither surprising nor shocking: it only says that Windschuttle is in this respect an ordinary fallible mortal. He is like me, for example.

As an editor, maybe I ought to be equally sceptical of every new piece of ‘evidence’, whether it supports of opposes my preconceptions, In practice, I have to believe that people are speaking the truth UNLESS my nose for falsehood twitches.

In the present case, despite knowing that the article was a hoax, my nose for falsehood only twitched a couple of times. By contrast, my nose for a good common-sense argument twitched several times. I would not have picked it as a hoax.

I suspect that our schadenfreude is in fact itself an example of the same phenomenon. Because we want Windschuttle to be taken down a peg, we are happy to believe that he was. But he took himself down a peg by his response.

“Live by the footnote, die by the footnote”