Last week, America’s Boyfriend Nate Silver made meta-analysis cool beyond belief. The image of a lone geek, sitting at the end of a vast pipeline of data, and turning it into something everyone wants to hear about, is a certain breed of scientist’s deepest fantasy. … Read More →
Tag Archives: reductionism
The stereotax and the tachistiscope (Reductionism, part II)
There is something pleasantly upside-down about the fact that I have spent the first part of this summer flying around the world by invitation to various scientific conferences undermining the methodological assumptions I was so keen to defend before my career had even begun. The … Read More →
Defending reductionism, then not so much (Part I)
Paris in the winter of 1995/96 — the city was chaos because of strikes prompted by a set of neoliberal “reforms.” I am a little embarrassed, in retrospect, by how little I engaged with or understood the enormity of what was going on around me. … Read More →
What’s it like to be a brain?
I started reading Elizabeth Costello because the premise was irresistible to me: an academic who, when invited to give talks about her literary work, gives herself over to impassioned sermons on vegetarianism. I have often had the impulse, just before giving a talk, to just … Read More →