Scientific method (thinking) and the 4th estate.

[Paul Haese]

Whilst an aging publication now, try reading Keith Windshuttles "The Media". Worth a read on how media organisation influence public perception and in particular Rupert Murdocks influence of all things. In particular the ability to influence the outcome of elections.

I would suggest all are false statements, it would from a syllogistic logic point of view seem to follow the correct analysis. Though it would depend your individual point of view I suppose; I don't know if a couple of statements are false, however logic says they would be (ownership and award of contracts). Murdoch does nothing in the public interest and only in his own interests. We are merely pawns in the game in which he is playing. It's all about the biggest pile of money and power it attains and who he can elect to power to attain those ends. He is well documented as being a king maker not only here but in other parts of the world.

Interesting idea to demonstrate a mode of thinking. Are you aware you have been using a syllogism to make your point Clive? Us lawyers equate it to pure logic or if you like Vulcan logic.

[clive milne]

Originally Posted by DarkKnight

OK, I'll be a dill.

The only definitives I see are prime numbers and a progressive doubling sequence.

The only other numbers that fit these parameters are 1,2 & 4

Or did I miss the trees for the forest. ?

No, it isn't prime numbers...

fwiw) 16, 32 & 64 also fit the rule.

128, 256 & 512 do as well.

[Eratosthenes (Peter)]

Originally Posted by Paul Haese

Whilst an aging publication now, try reading Keith Windshuttles "The Media". Worth a read on how media organisation influence public perception and in particular Rupert Murdocks influence of all things. In particular the ability to influence the outcome of elections.

I would suggest all are false statements, it would from a syllogistic logic point of view seem to follow the correct analysis. Though it would depend your individual point of view I suppose; I don't know if a couple of statements are false, however logic says they would be (ownership and award of contracts). Murdoch does nothing in the public interest and only in his own interests. We are merely pawns in the game in which he is playing. It's all about the biggest pile of money and power it attains and who he can elect to power to attain those ends. He is well documented as being a king maker not only here but in other parts of the world.

Interesting idea to demonstrate a mode of thinking. Are you aware you have been using a syllogism to make your point Clive? Us lawyers equate it to pure logic or if you like Vulcan logic.

In late 2013, after the Abbott government was voted in, the ATO refunded Murdoch's Newscorp business in Australia a healthy 882 million dollars. This amount was refunded despite the healthy profits posted by Newscorp.

When Joe Hockey was cornered in a door stop interview after the 882 million dollar refund decision was made, he said he had no comment on the matter, and the government will not be appealing the ATO decision to the Federal Court....

I dont think there were too many questions on this matter in the Australian parliament and the Herald Sun in Melbourne didnt run many front page articles or get the honourable Andrew Bolt to do relentless unbiased editorial articles week after week after week.

[AndrewJ]

In the spirit of this thread, the following

In late 2013, after the Abbott government was voted in,

could also be represented as
"after the other mob got chucked out, and we were left with...."
We describe the same end result, but via totally different ways of looking at the process to get there.

Andrew

[clive milne]

Originally Posted by Paul Haese

Whilst an aging publication now, try reading Keith Windshuttles "The Media". Worth a read on how media organisation influence public perception and in particular Rupert Murdocks influence of all things. In particular the ability to influence the outcome of elections.

I would suggest all are false statements, it would from a syllogistic logic point of view seem to follow the correct analysis. Though it would depend your individual point of view I suppose; I don't know if a couple of statements are false, however logic says they would be (ownership and award of contracts). Murdoch does nothing in the public interest and only in his own interests. We are merely pawns in the game in which he is playing. It's all about the biggest pile of money and power it attains and who he can elect to power to attain those ends. He is well documented as being a king maker not only here but in other parts of the world.

Interesting idea to demonstrate a mode of thinking. Are you aware you have been using a syllogism to make your point Clive? Us lawyers equate it to pure logic or if you like Vulcan logic.

Hi Paul,
I'm not sure I agree with the syllogism statement.

Incidentally, Keith Windshuttle is a fascinating choice.


http://www.theaustralian.com.au/busi...-1111118495607

Justine Ferrari


Sydney



THE man who accused fellow historians of fabricating accounts of colonial settlers massacring indigenous Australians has unwittingly published scientific nonsense in the respected right-wing journal Quadrant. Unrepentant Quadrant editor Keith Windschuttle, a leading antagonist against the cultural Left and black armband brigade in the history wars, yesterday admitted being "tricked" into publishing an article on biotechnology scares.
A blog titled "Diary of a Hoax", with entries dating back to November 2007, details a plan to target Windschuttle with a pseudoscience article that agreed with his ideological views.
The mystery hoaxer - published under the fictional author's name of Sharon Gould - was revealed in the internet newsletter Crikey, which has been a merciless Windschuttle critic. Crikey admits it has been aware of the plot for the past three weeks but agreed to stay silent until Quadrant went to print.
Windschuttle yesterday said the Sharon Gould article in Quadrant was not a "genuine hoax" but an example of "fraudulent journalism submitted under false pretences".
"There's only a very small number of untruths in it," he said. "The great majority of what the article says, 85 per cent of what it says, is perfectly legitimate points based on real footnotes, real sources and factual information."
But Mr Windschuttle admitted the article was unsolicited and from an unknown author, and that he had failed to even Google the author's name or check easily validated facts, such as the claim that the paper was first presented at the 19th International Conference on Genome Informatics in Brisbane last year.
A check of the program on the internet by The Australian yesterday revealed there was no such paper or author listed.
Windschuttle said his practices were the same as any editor of a publication and that checking every fact and quotation in an article was impractical.
"I guess I could have done more to investigate the author but the content was something I did investigate because I was interested in some of the sources," he said.
The latest entry on the hoax blog says: "So neatly did my essay conform with reactionary ideology that Quadrant, it seems, didn't evencheck the putative author's credentials".
"Nor it seems did they get the piece peer-reviewed. Nor did they check the facts; nor the footnotes. Nor were they alerted by the clues.
"I'm almost embarrassed for you, Windschuttle. Just look at you above, a pea in a pod alongside those other culture warriors."
The clues in the Quadrant article to which Gould refers are in the first paragraph, which refers to the Sokal hoax perpetrated by New York University physics professor Alan Sokal against postmodernist cultural studies magazine Social Text to reveal the absurdity of postmodernist views on science.
Professor Sokal said he wanted to see if a journal in that field would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions".
The Quadrant article, entitled "Scare Campaigns and Science Reporting", says the CSIRO had been experimenting with engineering human genes in wheat crops to fight cancer, modify dairy cattle to produce milk suited to lactose-intolerant babies and modify malaria mosquitoes to carry genes that produced human antibodies to render their bite less dangerous.
Former chief scientist Jim Peacock, who was unknowingly quoted in the article, said yesterday it was possible, albeit difficult, to transfer human genes into plants but he was unaware of any research to do so. He described the modified cows and mosquitoes referred to as "absolute nonsense" and said the hoax was "despicable". "It's very difficult for a non-scientist to acquire the balanced information you really need to assess a particular topic," he said.
In revealing the fraud, Crikey's Margaret Simons refers to one of the great hoaxes in Australian history, the Ern Malley affair in 1945, in which a fictitious poet and body of work was created. One of the people behind the hoax was one of the founders of Quadrant, James McAuley. The victim was Max Harris, avant-garde poet and editor of the modernist magazine Angry Penguins.
Simons yesterday denied she was responsible for the scam, and said the identity of the hoaxer was beside the point. She conceded she knew of the hoax before Quadrant published the article, but agreed to stay silent.
"They approached me about three weeks ago, after Keith Windschuttle had accepted the article," Simons said.
"In other words, the hoax had already achieved its aim in the sense it had been accepted.
"It was before Quadrant was published.
"It's a good story. The condition on which I accepted the information was that I wouldn't publish the information until Quadrant was out."
Crikey editor Jonathan Green defended the newsletter's role in the story and the writer's decision not to warn Quadrant. "It was a good story and it's not my job to save Keith Windschuttle from himself," he said.

[clive milne]

With respect to Keith Windshuttle

Here are the articles on the front page of Quadrant online which are relevant to the environment:

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/...ishing-frugal-

pleasuring-greens/
No pact with the party bent on hobbling the economy, dismantling border protection and preaching the nebulous doctrine of sustainability can come to any good, and the government's pension reforms fit that mould to a tee. Retirees, if you have built a nice nest egg, start blowing it right this minute

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doom...f-buys-bridge/

No doubt inspired by the loftiest motives, Pope Francis appears poised to emblazon a document of blithering climate-change nonsense with the authority and endorsement of the Vatican seal. If only he had taken a moment to remind himself of those warnings about false prophets

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doom...left-high-dry/

A New Zealand court has rejected the argument that one can claim asylum from the alleged ravages of climate change. For the plaintiff, it is back to teeming Kiribati, where the real problem is a booming population

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doom...2013/12/26217/

If a slick video and the IPCC's latest inaccurate and untruthful arguments are the best it can do to demonstrate a dangerous warming problem, its advice should be ignored and funding withdrawn

And...

Not so long ago, before news organisations came to be infested with journalism-school graduates and activists posing as reporters, every editor faced the same occasional and uncomfortable dilemma: a great man (or woman, no sexism here!) would pen an opinion piece so irredeemable inept, so profoundly stupid, that charity alone demanded it be consigned to the spike. After that, the editor's quandry was how best to ease the author's disappointment without giving offence. Fortunately for the sake of carbon-phobic Ross Garnaut's ego, if not his reputation for insight and acuity, those days are gone, so his latest thoughts on what Australia must do to avert climate catastrophe have been published by The Age as written. Equally fortunately, very few adults now bother to read Melbourne's shrunken broadsheet, so the embarrassment accruing to his latest attempt at coherent thought will be limited, which is almost a pity.
As the world's rent seekers prepare to pack their bags for the upcoming Paris doom fest, Garnaut's column -- available via the link below -- reminds us that whatever form and shape the delegates' final statement takes, it will be no more than the latest shuffle of standard, dog-eared cliches.

Without getting in to a debate with respect to the accuracy of these articles, I think it a fair statement to say that they represent a fairly specific ideology. Being that Windschuttle was lecturer in Australian history and in journalism at the New South Wales Institute of Technology (now the University of Technology, Sydney) it is also probably a reasonable statement that this is neither arbitrary nor accidental.

ie) He knows exactly what he is doing.

[Paul Haese]

Originally Posted by clive milne

Hi Paul,
I'm not sure I agree with the syllogism statement.

Incidentally, Keith Windshuttle is a fascinating choice.


http://www.theaustralian.com.au/busi...-1111118495607

Keith's book to which I refer postulates that Murdoch has manipulated Australian political paradigms for many years.

I am not advocating this other odd commentary. Just his observations on Murdoch only. The other comments are highly hilarious. Keith's book was required reading in 93 at Uni in Politics 1 for me. Schuttle demonstrated that media outlet often set agenda as you said via confirmation bias.

Anyway like I said an interesting idea, to use scientific method as a means to demonstrate that something that is said in the media often enough must become fact. The sheep might well read that as truth. The critical thinkers might reserve their judgement. How much of the reported truth is in fact the truth? Hence my statement about syllogisms. Perhaps I was wrong in thinking that was the thrust of your argument.

[Paul Haese]

Originally Posted by clive milne

With respect to Keith Windshuttle

Here are the articles on the front page of Quadrant online which are relevant to the environment:

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/...ishing-frugal-https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doom...f-buys-bridge/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doom...left-high-dry/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doom...2013/12/26217/
And...
Without getting in to a debate with respect to the accuracy of these articles, I think it a fair statement to say that they represent a fairly specific ideology. Being that Windschuttle was lecturer in Australian history and in journalism at the New South Wales Institute of Technology (now the University of Technology, Sydney) it is also probably a reasonable statement that this is neither arbitrary nor accidental.

ie) He knows exactly what he is doing.

Certainly quite right wing. He should have stuck to political theory and lecturing on Journalism.

[nebulosity. (Jo)]

Could the law be that the numbers must be even?

Thought I'd just give it a try.

Cheers
Jo

EDIT, after reading the rest of the thread that doesn't seem like and answer anymore.

[rustigsmed (Russell)]

Originally Posted by clive milne

Ok.... here it is...

The purpose of the exercise is to demonstrate the scientific method.
The law is not discovered by proposing numbers that are consistent with your expectations, but by proposing experimental conditions that give you a negative.
It is a process of exclusion.

Originally Posted by clive milne

If you were asked whether you employ the practice of critical thinking in formulating your world view, how many of you would answer; 'yes'?

Do you think you would be correct?

Here is a small thought experiment that I found very informative and interesting, and incidentally, when I tried it I failed (but learned something valuable)

(if you have seen this before, please don't spill the beans)

The nature of the situation is this:
You are tasked with trying to determine or uncover 'the law' or 'the rule' I have in mind.
You start with 1 free observation, that being: I provide a sequence of numbers. They are 2, 4 and 8
These three numbers obey the law.
In order to test your theory (of what this law might be) you can if you wish, experiment by submitting three numbers.
My response will be to either acknowledge that they are consistent with my law, or not.

So here we go...
2,4 & 8 obey the law.

when you think you understand it,
what is 'the law'.... ?

Hi Clive,

While not pertinent to the actual point of the thought experiment.
I like to pick on things so I've decided to add a few points.

The three numbers given do not obey or make up a part of the law at all (sorry more of a language issue).

Giving one option in conjunction with opting for affirmation or exclusion are still equally incomplete / inadequate.

In the end you received a number of responses that obeyed and didn't obey the law which means that the law is not really a law at all at best a guide

Cheers

Russ

[RB (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by clive milne

No, it isn't prime numbers...

fwiw) 16, 32 & 64 also fit the rule.

128, 256 & 512 do as well.

17,990 (for a very brief time) is now part of this mathematical discussion!

[clive milne]

Now watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyIOQhnciGA

Cui Bono?

To answer that, it might be better to consider the converse question... ie) who benefits least?
and then;
who benefits from that?