The guiding light of KD45
On the subject of belief, I’m instinctively drawn to logical systems that demand consistency, closure, and introspection. And the KD45 system among them exerts a special pull. It consists of the follo…
rationalism
12 posts
Scientists' conduct affects science
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…
The devil's lassi
‘The Devil’s Milkshake’, Tarence Ray in The Baffler, February 23, 2023: You’ve seen it before. An industrial disaster poisons a town’s food or water supply. Residents get angry. Public officials try…
There's a scientistic eclipse
There is a solar eclipse today and news websites are as usual participating in amplifying nonsense. It's prima facie not nonsense in and of itself but because it's not qualified as astrologica…
'Science people'
Two of the most annoying kinds of 'science people' I've come across on social media of late: * Those who perform rationalism – These people seem to know a small subset of things well and…
Slate Star Codex: No time for malice
This post benefited from valuable input and feedback from Thomas Manuel. To the uninitiated: Scott Alexander Siskind is a noted member of the international community of rationalists and wrote the onc…
The real story of 'The Old Guard'
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 J…
The rationalists' eclipse
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 deci…
The alleged politicisation of science
"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 inequitie…
Some notes on empiricism, etc.
The Wire published a story about the 'atoms of Acharya Kanad' (background here; tl;dr: Folks at a university in Gujarat claimed an ancient Indian sage had put forth the theory of atoms centuri…
Dying in a finite universe
In his book Infinite In All Directions (2002), Freeman Dyson, one of the tallest intellectual giants of our times, attempts to rescue eschatology from the specious grip of religion and teleology with a mix of scientific reasoning and informed speculation. During this, when describing the big crunch,…
A latent monadology: An extended revisitation of the mind-body problem
In an earlier post, I'd spoken about a certain class of mind-body interfacing problems (the way I'd identified it): evolution being a continuous process, can psychological changes effected in…