Darrin Durant

If we imagined a CCA w/ legal (binding targets) & financial autonomy + transparency & accountability structures, most of us would say ‘good’. The trouble is political insulation, which is in tension with Westminster norms and might pose ironic political capture risks (adverse selection problems).

@matthewkearnes.bsky.social brought this thread to my attention (don’t know why). Before further replying, I just want to ensure I have Prof. Glabau’s thesis right: Collins, Evans & Reyes-Galindo are racists, favour elitism and should depart the field of STS?

One complete cycle of a waveform?

The detailed answers from the panel seem to agree with you here, as they queried some extensions of claims.

Though IF they’re making inductive risk judgements, the values are not (super)imposed on the evidence, but playing indirect roles given uncertainties. Yes?

You would think the sparky would have built up a resistance to that one?

Maybe one thing in Question A & B is they’re similar. Maybe designed to test a latent feature? Does the lack of statistical variability in ‘Agree’ & ‘Completely Agree’ suggest reliability?

A smartphone before age 12 could carry health risks, US study says Parents should think twice before letting younger children have a smartphone because of risks to long-term health and wellbeing, one of the largest-ever US studies on child brain development suggests.

FYI just reading an article reporting on a recent study that advises caution re: < 16’s and phone use.

My curiosity is still about what empirical claims the panelists mobilized, not whether the questions were perfect.
www.smh.com.au/world/north-...

Maybe. Loaded questions forcing binary responses are not mitigated if the responses are not binary. Is that your claim here?

Also, I can see why you might think Q)a and Q)b are loaded. But do you think they’re egregious assumption traps? Is loading mitigated by a) the Likert scale, plus b) the detailed responses showing an unpacking of clauses in the queries?

Not optimism about value awareness, as self-awareness is so contingent. I just mean we, the analysts, could assess for inductive risk by treating the ‘agents’ articulations (A & B earlier) as markers of inductive risk judgments?

PS: seems doubtful that panelists are unaware of decision-making power asymmetry. I can’t see how that claim would stand empirically?

Might SocSci work on online engagement (good & bad) be a proxy for awareness that kid’s perspectives matter? We’ve called a similar thing virtual diversity

But the degree of realizing an inductive risk judgment is being made could at least be known in a preliminary way (sans ethnography) by looking at the cases offered for a) claims about social risks, and b) discussion of uncertainties in evidence?

I do not know if the panel thinks they are answering factual questions versus making inductive risk judgements. That itself seems an empirical question about which you might be making a value judgement about?

I think overconfidence in a technological, free-market and autopilot energy transition also inspires a follow-on dismissiveness around governments approving, supporting or encouraging fossil fuel infrastructure (on the grounds that it won't compete with cheap renewables and therefore isn't a worry)

Let’s grant your claim that value judgments are present in both the statements & the evidence offered to support them. So? If values are baked into these inductive risk judgements, it’s their substantive nature we need to unpack not their mere presence?

Elon Musk’s Worthless, Poisoned Hall of Mirrors How X blew up its own platform with a new location feature

The ‘About this Account’ feature on X reveals 1/2 of online MAGA = foreign trolls/bots & that X is:
- a “worthless, poisoned hall of mirrors”?
- “Post-truthification [where] nothing is true and everything is possible”?
- it’s a “Russian nesting doll of bullshit”?
www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Australia’s social media ban for > 16’s starts 10 Dec ‘25. Does algorithmic opacity, inferential profiling & information asymmetry (@frankpasquale.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy) render ‘we can fix it’ (@crikey.com.au) unicorn thinking?
www.crikey.com.au/2025/11/10/f...

We can all imagine the disdain the recipient of the remark felt, but I do wonder whether the audience had enough sense to collectively groan and push back at such gaslighting?

Are Honest Brokers Good for Democracy? In Roger Pielke Jr.’s The Honest Broker (2007) he discusses different roles a scientist can adopt when giving advice to policymakers. The honest broker role focuses on clarifying and expanding the ...

Pielke’s ’honest broker’ ideal is nice rhetoric but basically smuggles in a non-reflexive account of scientific advice. Perfect for enabling the muzzling of scientists.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

How did Australian universities go from free education to $50,000 arts degrees in 50 years? Thanks to the Job Ready Graduates scheme, an arts degree today will cost over $50,000. How have five decades of government policy taken us from free education to this?

Australia’s university system has somehow managed to devolve: from a free to an affordable education, but recently toward an inequitable and unfair funding scheme based on poor assumptions about both students and jobs.
theconversation.com/how-did-aust...

I reckon the most interesting subset of discourse here is when presumed [good] factors are actually either actually bad, or there to downplay or dismiss the bad even if the amount of good is way smaller than the bad.

A short thread to explain: on "training for electrification" + "demand response"

Name a single human frontier we didn’t pollute. It’s almost like (ignoring) environmental externalities is baked into the species, at least when commercial activity is involved.

Space is next?

Seems a Pyrrhic victory to want Republicans, who failed to stop Trump & MAGA taking over the Republican Party, aim to take over the Democratic Party.

Nuclear power is a poor fit with renewables.
montelnews.com/news/1ea628e...

Nuclear power is a poor fit with renewables.
montelnews.com/news/1ea628e...

If the Blue Jays win the World Series in Game 7 vs two north-American teams does that mean Australia does not exist?

There’s a sort of Dunning-Kruger effect happening where people who read widely, consider various perspectives, and put in effort to understand views they disagree with worry that they don’t do that enough, while people who don’t do any of that accuse others of being in a bubble and call it a day.

When Buzz Aldrin replied “it never happened” in response to whether “anything scary” happened during his moon landing, Kim Kardashian thought he was referring to the growth of her brain.
#moonlanding
#nasa

When Trump refers to resuming nuclear weapons testing ‘on an equal basis’, he just means the USA, Russia & China are already the big outliers vis-a-vis the Comprehensive Nuclear-Ban-Treaty and he is committed to keeping it that way.

Yes, without ever bluntly chasing out the absurdity of MAD, the writers captured the absurd spirit of “may as well commit to wiping us all out just in case they’re committed to wiping us all out”.