The Bent Spoon Award, named after spoonbending charlatan Uri Geller, is won this year by Steve Maharey's brainchild (I use the word with caution) the Tertiary Education Commission for their decision to fund Bay of Plenty Homeopathy College's diploma in animal health. The reason for TEAC, you will recall, is to increase the quality of tertiary education.
Previous winners, including Phil Goff and Jeanette Fitzsimons, were not apparently available for comment. The Herald story also has the first winners of the Bravo Awards for "critical thinking in a public arena."
If you're in Rotorua this weekend, you could do worse than head to the Skeptics conference for a session or three. It includes sessions on:
- misleading language and jargon
- the fascination with reading human influence in geological features (did anyone say Ark?)
- the "intelligent design" debate
- a skeptical look at genealogical research.
2 comments:
Looks like a much needed conference.
Do you now anything about that ID debate? If it is just ID bashing without anyone ever having read a book from its proponents, I'm wasting my time.
Usually the critique is: there is no designer, therefore evolution must be true. Oops, wrong side of the debate, shouldn't try to imitate an evolutions. Try again: there is a designer, therefore evolution must be wrong.
The Skeptics society looks like a Science Cargo Cult to me.
Wearing their double-blind testing blinkers they throw out the baby with the bathwater with a cultural version of "Not Invented Here" syndrome.
Most of their findings are very useful, but when they make statements about acupuncture such as "questions remain about whether [acupuncture] actually does any good", it is easy to tell that they are simply ignoring reality.
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