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Big Data or Pig Data?
(A fable on huge amounts of data and why we don’t need models) There was a pig who wanted to be a scientist. He was not interested in models. When asked how he planned on making sense of the world, the pig would say in a deep mysterious voice, “I don’t do models: the world…
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Galileo and Economics
Or ‘Why we can’t blame Galileo for the latest financial crisis!’ 🙂 Modern science can be roughly said to begin with Galileo Galilei. One of the commonly used methods in science is sometimes referred to as the Galilean Style. This style refers to, among other things, the idealizations and abstractions that scientists use in modeling…
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Postmodernism: The Opium of the Intellectuals
What follows is a post-modernist defense of Agha Waqar Ahmad’s water-car. The postmodernist author is Derridalacanlatour, a famous French intellectual specializing in, and battling against, the “Hegemony of the transcendental claims of science over the ontology of world concepts” Here it is:
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Fiction as Simulation
Studies by neuroscientists have shown that while reading fiction, our brains simulate the action narrated in the text. The information from the text is taken, integrated with the reader’s personal experience, and often those areas of the brain are activated which would also be involved if the reader was actually performing or observing comparable real…
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Alan Turing in a society of machines
I am usually not at a loss for words (at least while writing). But what can one possibly write about that bird, that song; that tragedy, that ecstasy; that lamb, that lion; that beautiful genius called Alan Turing—that hasn’t already been written? What can I add? Don’t forget what Iqbal said: ‘A particle in its place…
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The Chomskyan Style
Chomsky’s review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior There are two quotes about Chomsky the scientist that I think best describe him. First is by a person whom I normally wouldn’t quote, Daniel Dennett. Dennett says about Chomsky: “Not many scientists are great scientists, and not many great scientists get to found a whole new field,…
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Popper’s falsification
The Black Swan? Popper’s falsification approach might be a good logical exercise but that’s not how science is done. We often can’t know if a phenomenon falsifies a theory. There are way too many factors. Since I am not a philosopher, I will narrate a personal anecdote that might illuminate matters. This happened during the…
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Herbert Simon: Sciences of the Artificial
Herbert Simon: Sciences of the Artificial. This is a review of Herbert Simon’s “Sciences of the Artificial” that I just finished reading. Let me first say a few words about the writing style. Simon’s writing style is quite lackluster. He isn’t a great writer like say Bertrand Russell, or George Orwell for that matter. But…
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Descartes mindless animals: Wrong conclusion but right science!
Cartesians had an idea about animals. They believed that animals were machines without minds. Here’s the story:
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Why Einstein was both wrong and right in being so stubborn
Einstein’s stubbornness Based on my limited study of some notable epochs in the history of science, chiefly Newton’s demolition of the mechanical philosophy, I have to say I am rather amazed at times by Einstein’s refusal to go along with Quantum mechanics. Perhaps, it would be instructive to draw parallels with an earlier era in the sciences…
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Realm of the SCENSCI 