Root Privileges

Tag: Paul Feyerabend

  • Scientists’ conduct affects science

    Scientists’ conduct affects science

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    Nature News has published an excellent feature by Edwin Cartlidge on the “wall of scepticism” that arose in response to the latest superconductivity claim from Ranga Dias et al., purportedly in a compound called nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride. It seems the new paper has earned a note of concern as well, after various independent research groups…

  • Defending philosophy of science

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    From Carl Bergstrom’s Twitter thread about a new book called How Irrationality Created Modern Science, by Michael Strevens: The Iron Rule from the book is, in Bergstrom’s retelling, “no use of philosophical reasoning in the mode of Aristotle; no leveraging theological or scriptural understanding in the mode of Descartes. Formal scientific arguments must be sterilised,…

  • Good luck with your Maggi

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    You know when you’re cooking a packet of Maggi noodles in a saucepan, and you haven’t used enough water or don’t move the stuff soon enough from the pan to a plate once it’s done cooking, and you’re basically left with a hot lump of maida stuck to the bottom? That’s 2020. When you cook…

  • Ayurveda is not a science – but what does that mean?

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    This post has benefited immensely with inputs from Om Prasad. Calling something ‘not a science’ has become a pejorative, an insult. You say Ayurveda is not a science and suddenly, its loudest supporters demand to know what the problem is, what your problem is, and that you can go fuck yourself. But Ayurveda is not…

  • The real story of ‘The Old Guard’

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    Spoiler alert: Don’t read this post if you intend to watch The Old Guard but haven’t done so yet. The Old Guard, an action film starring Charlize Theron among others, released on Netflix on July 10. In a scene in the film, Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) delivers two undying men to the CEO of a pharmaceutical…

  • The rationalists’ eclipse

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    The annular solar eclipse over South India on December 26 provided sufficient cause for casual and/or inchoate rationalism to make a rare public appearance – rarer than the average person who had decided to stay indoors for the duration of the event thanks to superstitious beliefs. Scientists and science communicators organised or participated in public…

  • The calculus of creative discipline

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    Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building. World-building is dull. World-building literalises the urge to invent. World-building gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). World-building numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it…

  • The alleged politicisation of science

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    “Don’t politicise X” has become the defence of choice for a class of scientists and public intellectuals in India whose class and caste privilege utterly blinds them to various inequities in the practice of science – as privilege is wont to do – and who labour with the presumption that these inequities, should they miraculously…

  • Some thoughts on the Mack/Dorigo Twitter exchange, and Zivkovic, Feyerabend, etc.

    Some thoughts on the Mack/Dorigo Twitter exchange, and Zivkovic, Feyerabend, etc.

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    Aspirants flock to role models. The ‘underlying human’ must not jeopardise their conversation by being a dick.

  • Can science and philosophy mix constructively?

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    Quantum mechanics can sometimes be very hard to understand, so much so that even thinking about it becomes difficult. This could be because its foundations lay in the action-centric depiction of reality that slowly rejected its origins and assumed a thought-centric one garb. In his 1925 paper on the topic, physicist Werner Heisenberg used only observable quantities…