Why I’m sticking up for science
spectator.co.uk
spectator.co.uk
> To grasp government intentions requires a little work, because every third word of the relevant documents is in Māori.
I would be totally on board with proclaiming how harmful this is, but let’s be precise about it!
I’m having some trouble tracking down actual materials for students that espouse this. Has anyone found anything? Closest I came to a government “thing” was this student encyclopedia [0] managed by a university with funding from the NZ government. It doesn’t seem too bad to me, learning about fungus and different names for stars.
A headline and lead proclaiming some school has done something outrageous, such as for example telling people to stop using terms like "white paper" or "submit" because they're supposedly offensive. It details some of the most outrageous parts of it, but you get the strong impression there's a lot they're leaving out. They never, ever have any kind of sources or hyperlinks to let you see the documents for yourself. If you do manage to find them on your own, you find some critical context (in this example, that the list of offensive words was not a school policy, but a fully optional document created by the IT department) that undermines the point the article was making -- a point they strongly imply, but never quite state, so it's not technically lying, you see.
https://ncea.education.govt.nz/mana-orite-mo-te-matauranga-m...
https://ncea.education.govt.nz/explaining-new-ncea-materials
NCEA is New Zealands main secondary school qualification.
First link talks about 'equal status' of Māori knowledge, but it talks about that in context of pathways to passing the NCEA, i.e. my reading of it is, its like a different curriculum for getting the qualification. That isn't the same as saying 'Māori knowledge has equal status with western science full stop'. It seems to be more like 'theres a path to this qualification that is based more on Māori knowledge'. Also a lot of it is about values rather than knowledge. But I've only skimmed it, thats just the impression I got.
That second link has quite a bit of information sorted under those “toolkit” tabs. I think your intuition is correct: that this is opening up a different way to be accredited, not optionally supplementing “western science”. Teaching under the correct cultural context for a student to get that most value from a lesson seems good. I’m also seeing a lot of values like you’re saying, which also seems like a good thing.
We could probably collaborate effectively, but the mere suggestion that those ideas be subjected to the scientific method is denounced as prejudiced.
But Big Pharma is doing that. They love to find new drugs, make a synthetic version, improve it and then sell it.
> If you think a traditional way of managing land is better than whatever is currently being used, let's run a test.
There are many methods to reduce fertilizers and other farming cost. In most place farm land is not replaceable and you have to keep it working for many years. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation Farmers are trying many methods.
It is this colonial attitude that our society is the best and everyone elses is wrong that needs to be changed. Dawkins isn't standing up for science he is standing up for an attitude that has plagued western civilisation for years.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81ori_people
> Māori originated with settlers from East Polynesia, who arrived in New Zealand in several waves of canoe voyages between roughly 1320 and 1350.
> No credible evidence exists of pre-Māori settlement of New Zealand; on the other hand, compelling evidence from archaeology, linguistics, and physical anthropology indicates that the first settlers migrated from Polynesia and became the Māori.
Most of here in the Austral-Asian region are aware of the history of Polynesian expansion and Māori settlement .. so it's pretty clear they're not referring to New Zealand.
I made a quick search in the previous comments of richardjam73 and I see no location, so my second guess is that richardjam73 is from USA like 50% people here. Also, my guess is people not from NZ nor USA would say which country they were talking about.
The problem is that migration to America was like 16000 years ago, no tens of thousands of years ago. (And there was also a quite simultaneous megafauna extinction.) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Early_mi...
Thinking about it again, Australia may be a good third guess.
I don't know how people can acknowledge that there is problems around the act of performing science, like suppression of results, P hacking, poor sample sizes, poor sampling, not correctly blinding trials, not handling other conflicting factors correctly, the replication crisis, having to note conflict of interest, etc, bringing into question a far chunk of conclusions. But as soon as one says that that might cause an issue with areas that modern forms of science rarely touch on, (e.g. race), suddenly science is pure, 100% factual, based completely on indisputable evidence, and only idiots ever question the science!
The policy the article talks about addresses none of these issues.