Interesting Links for 22-07-2017

[andrewducker]

Unaccompanied child taken off overbooked easyJet flight at Gatwick

(tags: OhForFucksSake children airplanes )

Everyone Hates Neoliberals, So We Talked to Some

(tags: liberal )

Critical thinking is 38% correlated with IQ

(tags: Intelligence thought )

Why we need to build more homes

(tags: housing uk )

The BBC responds to complaints about the Doctor Who casting announcement

(tags: drwho bbc )

Mario Kart director philosophical about need for the blue shell

(tags: Mario games design )

Britons travelling to Europe offered just 88 euro cents for £1

(tags: Europe uk money )

In Australia, non payment of a sex worker will get you convicted of rape

(tags: rape sexwork australia )

Hillary Clinton is more unpopular than Donald Trump.

(tags: politics usa )

Your state pension in Dorset: £124,000. In Glasgow? £38,000

(tags: pensions UK LifeExpectancy inequality )

Norway, where no salaries are secret

(tags: norway money transparentsociety )

Redditors discuss "What's the most pointless argument you've been passionately involved in?"

(tags: argument fail )

UK to bring in drone registration

(tags: UK drone law )

Comments

Redditors discuss "What's the most pointless argument you've been passionately involved in?"

[doug]

I recall once - as a student - having one of those pointless half-real half-joking arguments that roams all over the place, and I ended up backed in to a corner where rhetorically I needed to argue against the proposition that the sky is blue.

From memory, I think I had claimed that pretty much any proposition could be debated, and my interlocutor seized on "the sky is blue" as an example of an obviously incontrovertible fact that couldn't be argued.

I set to with some vigour arguing that it was not blue, which increasingly wound them up. Turns out there aren't a lot of good, thought-through arguments for why the sky is blue, and I was starting to run rings round them. They demanded that we go outside to resolve the argument. I was somewhat reluctant (it wasn't going to help my actual argument about debatability) but I was starting to worry that my friend was getting genuinely upset, and on general principle I can't resist an appeal to empirical evidence. As we walked towards the door, I marshalled in my head all my arguments about the unreliability of sense data, and all that murky stuff about qualia, shared experience, consciousness, and what it is like to be a bat. You can say it looks blue to you, I was ready to argue, but that's a very long way from proof that it looks blue to me, and never mind proving that it is blue in some absolute, generalisable and unqualified sense. We burst outside and my friend angrily pointed heavenwards.

The sky was utterly grey.

Re: Redditors discuss "What's the most pointless argument you've been passionately involved in?"

[andrewducker]

Yeah, you totally should have thought of that earlier ;-)

Re: Redditors discuss "What's the most pointless argument you've been passionately involved in?"

[danieldwilliam]

My brother once had a long stand up argument with his teacher about whether snakes were venonmous or poisonous. He had not realised that they were often considered the same thing.

To this day after hearing about it I find myself applying a distinction between things that use venom, like snakes and spiders, and things that have poison inside them, like caterpillars and cane toads.

[calimac]

My favorite pointless childhood argument was over whether the road sign abbreviation "Blvd" was pronounced "bullv'd" or "blivid."

[andrewducker]

Clearly "Beloved".

[danieldwilliam]

It pronounced Cholmondley.

[andrewducker]

Which is spelled "ghoti".

[andrewducker]

Although when I try to pronounce it I get "Bluv'd".