Category: Science Debates

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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 […]

  rrameez

  December 14, 2012

  Modeling, Science, Science Debates

  Big data, Correlations, Frictionless plane, Galileo, Models, Peter Norvig, Pig data, Probability, Statistics