Category: Abuse of Science

• Rational Fools

  

  Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, coined the term “Rational Fools” nearly 35 years ago. In his famous paper, Sen criticized the first principle of economics: “Every agent is actuated by only self-interest”. On top of this axiom of rational self-interest lie rational action and rational expectations, leading all the way up to the efficiency […]

  rrameez

  December 31, 2013

  Abuse of Science, History of Science, Modeling

  Capitalism, Commons, Efficient Markets, Elinor Ostrom, Game Theory, Milton Friedman, Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman, Rational Action, Rational Fools

• Post Adolescent Idealism? Why psychologizing behavior is APSD: Acute Pseudo-Science Disorder

  

  The travesty that was Bradley Manning’s trial is a topic for another forum. Reading about the court proceedings, what immediately struck me was the psychotherapist’s verdict on Manning’s behavior. He was suffering from “Post Adolescent Idealism”, said the therapist. His bashers took this and other psychological judgements that were passed on Manning (narcissism, obsessive compulsive […]

  rrameez

  August 18, 2013

  Abuse of Science, Science Debates, Social Science

  American Psychiatric Association, Bradley Manning, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Dostoevsky, Einstein, Elizabeth Spelke, Galileo, George Miller, Herbert Simon, Human Behavior, Marlon Brando, Passive Aggressive Personality, Post Adolescent Idealism, Psychiatry, Psychology, Susan Carey, Tolstoy

• World Bank and Mother India!

  So I was queued up at the university train-ticket shop. A middle-aged man was sitting on a sofa while his wife was buying tickets to some destination. Bound by my old habit of starting conversations with total strangers, true to form and tradition, I started a conversation with him. After the initial hi-hello, he asked […]

  rrameez

  July 30, 2013

  Abuse of Science, Economics, Social Science

  Farmers Suicide, free markets, IMF, Indian Farmers, Kaushik Basu, Mother India, Nargis, Neoliberalism, World Bank

• Eric Schmidt’s Nightmare

  The night of the happy day when Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google had declared to the world that privacy was not that important and that if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, he had a dream that he had died and had ascended […]

  rrameez

  July 26, 2013

  Abuse of Science, Distributed Systems, Engineering, Science Debates, Social Science

  Ads, Big Octopus, Edward Snowden, Eric Schmidt, Google, Google Glass, NSA, Prism, Privacy

• Hippocratic oath or Hypocritic oath

  I remember around 10 years back, a friend who is a doctor, went to an impoverished locality in Karachi with a team to vaccinate children against some disease(s). Their team was harassed by some ignorant and mostly illiterate people who felt that such vaccination campaigns are part of a “western conspiracy” to harm them. “Why […]

  rrameez

  July 14, 2013

  Abuse of Science, Social Science

  Abbottabad, CIA, Hippocratic oath, Hypocritic oath, Osama bin Laden, Pakistan, polio, St. Augustine

• Abdus Salam and Galileo: The separation of science from religion (and philosophy)

  Dr Abdus Salam, the late Pakistani particle physicist is the only Muslim physicist till date to have been awarded the Nobel Prize. Dr Salam was rare among modern day scientists in that he was a devout Muslim. While most modern scientists are not concerned with religious matters, Dr Salam found his inspiration for science in religion.

  rrameez

  July 6, 2013

  Abuse of Science, History of Science, Philosophy, Science Debates

  Abdus Salam, Copernicus, Galileo, Inquisition, Lawrence Krauss, Philosophy, Ptolemy, Separation of science and religion, St. Augustine, The Assayer

• The Evolution of Human Behavior?

  

  On why scientists should not make unsubstantiated claims in popular science works especially where human beings are concerned It is quite fashionable these days to try and explain human behavior as a result of evolution through natural selection. Just as a small example, I quote the following from an article by the renowned evolutionary psychologist […]

  rrameez

  March 25, 2013

  Abuse of Science, Modeling, Science Debates

  Darwin, Evolution, Evolution of Behavior, Evolution of Competition, Evolution of Cooperation, Kin Selection, Natural Selection, Reciprocal Altruism, Richard Dawkins, Robert Trivers, Steven Pinker, Storytelling, tit for tat, W.D. Hamilton

• 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:

  rrameez

  December 8, 2012

  Abuse of Science

  derrida, edinburgh, intellectuals, lacan, latour, opium, paris, postmodernism