Category: Social Science

• Blind Power Circus had to Trump!

  What’s this liberal media’s hullabaloo and condemnation of Donald Trump all about? And lo and behold , even political saints like David Cameron, Ben Carson, Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton and other angels and honest men in the media and intellectual culture, have combined to condemn poor old Trump. Actually, it’s quite hypocritical of mainstream media, intellectual culture and…

  rrameez

  December 13, 2015

  Modeling, Political Science, Social Science

• 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

• I ♥ Game Theory; Let’s all be irrational, shall we?

  

  Some nights back, my flight from Karachi to Islamabad couldn’t land due to bad weather in Islamabad and instead it had to land at Lahore airport. We waited and waited, with no official intimation of takeoff plans. Hours passed. I started feeling very hungry and so I went ahead and bought something to eat in…

  rrameez

  February 14, 2013

  Modeling, Social Science

  Cooperation, Dissident Journalists Dilemma, Game Theory, Games, Irrationality, Poor Man’s Dilemma, Prisoner’s Dilemma, Rationality, Tragedy of the Commons

• Thrasymachus vs Socrates or: How I learned to stop worrying and love oppression!

  One of the most important tenets of a rational outlook is to change one’s model of the world in light of new evidence, or persistent failure. I was watching the Oscar nominated flick, Zero Dark Thirty last night and was appalled by the implicit racism towards brown folks in general, and “Paks” in particular, as the…

  rrameez

  January 20, 2013

  Modeling, Social Science

  israel, Might is right, Pakistan, palestine, Socrates, Thrasymachus, US, Vietnam, Zero Dark Thirty