Advertisements

Fooled by Singularities

Source. Its no physics' singularity theory i'm talking about :P
By singularity here i mean a single explanation or a theory about something which is not fully understood to a person. The person fooled is the one who is trying to fully understand something. This problem seems to be most relevant in history, philosophy and like social sciences, and even for mathematical thinking. When presenting our explanations, we can be a victim of confirmation bias. Latter is all about looking at data that fits our narrative, and not looking for what go against it (see The Black Swan). This is what Iqbal protested in his PhD against the singular explanation of scholars of historical events. IT seemed egoistic to me why they'd stick to just their unique proposition, when even in their minds other explanations would be as helpful as theirs.

In econometrics, people have gone madder than that. They take two data set and run tests to see correlation between the two - without thinking about any causal relation between the two. They do so because of their adherence to logical positivism which is nominalistic and denies the study of unseen/unobservable. Hence, they look at data and not what lying beneath it, the 'reality', the unseen. (See Methodological Mistakes and Econometric Consequences.)

Perhaps that's why we say: No god but God. Denying everything else first to confirm the Unity of God.

I just had a flash of intuition that above 2 paras imply in some way the latter.

2 did criticisms:

Unknown said...

Alright! I have to say this. I didn't understand a word you have written in the second paragraph.

M Umer Toor said...

You got read that paper. Just the half of it to get what i was trying to paraphrase here...

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

Advertisement

MuddleHead Signs Off!!

MuddleHead Signs Off!!
free counters