Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
3people
2016–2018years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Alan Sokal's 'Beyond The Hoax' and 'Intellectual Impostures' are good reads about the subject.
- In the book 'Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture', author Alan Sokal, Math Professor at University College London, writes under the heading 'Hindu nationalism and Vedic-Science' in 'Pseudoscience and Postmodernism' chapter:
On February 23, 2001, the University Grants Commission (UGC) — the central government body overseeing the funding of higher education in India — announced that
"there is an urgent need to rejuvenate the science of Vedic Astrology in India, to allow this scientific knowledge to reach to the society at large and to provide opportunities to get this important science even exported to the world ... [Accordingly,] the Commission decided to approve in principle [the] setting up of a few departments of Vedic Astrology in Indian universities ... leading to certificate diploma, under-graduate, post-graduate and Ph.D. degrees."
The plan provoked a storm of protest from Indian scientists and rationalist intellectuals. But what on earth prompted such a bizarre decision in the first place? The answer, not surprisingly, is politics: more precisely, the Hindu nationalist politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which governed India between March 1998 and May 2004. The BJP is the political expression of a multifaceted mass movement for Hindutva, or “Hindu-ness”, “an ultranationalist and chauvinistic movement that seeks to modernize India by recovering the supposedly pristine Vedic-Hindu roots of Indian culture”.As part of its program for the Hinduization of Indian education, the BJP rewrote school history textbooks to excise the contributions of Muslims and other non-Hindus, and promoted university-level courses not only in Vedic Astrology (Jyotir Vigyari) but also in karmakanda (Hindu priestly rituals), vastu shastra (sacred architectural rules), “human consciousness and Yogic science”, and “Vedic mathematics”
... Contemporary Hindu-nationalist intellectuals, many of whom are trained scientists and engineers, have brought this art to an even higher level of refinement. For instance, Subhash Kak, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Louisiana State University and one of the leading intellectual luminaries of the Hindu-nationalist diaspora, claims to find “astronomical codes” in the Rig Veda's descriptions of ritual fire altars, using a method that, as Nanda wryly observes, “is breathtakingly ad hoc and reads like numerology 101”.Even more ludicrously, #Raja Ram Mohan Roy asserts that “the Vedas are a coded book ... of particle physics and cosmology”: thus, verses referring to wild and domestic animals are really alluding to fermions and bosons, respectively; passages recounting the destruction of black-skinned people are in fact “about annihilation of anti-matter”; and the phrase “ten-finger form” in the Purusa hymn gives us “compelling evidence of [the] universe being considered ten-dimensional in Vedic cosmology”, just as in modem superstring theory.
#A contemporary author, not to be confused with the early-nineteenth-century Indian reformer of the same name.
- Sure but what if it was never a fact. 'Fat makes you fat' or similar falsification that have real impact to society[0]
We shouldn't attribute everything to malice, but there are clear issues in science:
'Too many of the findings that fill the academic either are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis
Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.
Careerism also encourages exaggeration and the cherry-picking of results. In order to safeguard their exclusivity, the leading journals impose high rejection rates: in excess of 90% of submitted manuscripts. The most striking findings have the greatest chance of making it onto the page.
Conversely, failures to prove a hypothesis are rarely even offered for publication, let alone accepted. “Negative results” now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990. Yet knowing what is false is as important to science as knowing what is true. The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already investigated by other scientists.'[1]
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Sugar-Fat-Giants-Hooked/dp/08129... [1] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-re...
[2] Alan Sokal - Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Hoax-Science-Philosophy-Cultur... [3] How to Lie with Statistics - https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/03... [4] Nassim Taleb 'Incerto', twitter.com/nntaleb
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