Irregular Prose 4.. Nirmal bhattacharya
I am as much science-fearing a guy as God-fearing. For me, whether God exists or not, he has still been driving our affairs through tradition. And science pervades our affairs like when a no-alternative dictator rules their subjects. So if the North pole of my existence is God, the South pole is Science. And I have been living like a shuttle cock between two poles, with the huge magnetic force keeping my east and west conditioned.
My country is often referred to as being among the third world ones. Since coming to understand human affairs little by little, I have always wondered how God's world can be ranked as first, second, third etc. Much later, not from God but from one branch of science known as economics, I learnt that this ranking is based on who has accumulated by force or otherwise how much wealth by exploiting the land, forests, water bodies and rivers , the labour of the great masses of active human bodies and even the vast blue sky above us all. Though my level of education has remained unchanged like Plato's ' Form ', this knowledge one night in my sleep produced a question: how can God- Wealth-Exploitation stand in an egalitarian row? My intuition hums in my mind that no mathematician--- global, national or local---- would ever be able to break this mystery.
I cannot remember the day since when I have been a science-fearing guy. I scared of mathematics more than being caned for neglecting studies or for wrong-doing. So mathematics glaring at me with red hot eyes could have been the reason for the fear of science. But I doubt that this alone played this dirty game for me growing up to be a science-fearing guy. There must have been atleast one scientist in the modern world who didn't know mathematics and who was not a science-fearing man. I have never been to a doctor for that. But I am sure that a psychologist of the calibre of Freud or Lacan could have diagnosed the cause of my fear of science.
Let me tell now about the day when I got confirmed in the belief that I would have to carry my fear of science through many more births to come. It was in 2020. The world was, like it is doing now, reeling under Covid-19. By sheer luck, I must put it that way, a strange book fell into my hand. Written by Stuart Ritchie, the book is named Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth. With surprises in almost every page, the book debunks the 'underworld' nature of the world of present-day science. I am not going to expand on the book. I will just restrict myself to telling you that how I got cheated of a good amount of money by buying a book written by a noble laureate economist.
They say that in the study of man's (ir ) rational behaviour researchers have to depend on ' priming studies ' conducted by themselves or others. Our economist , perhaps unbeknownst to himself, used unreliable ' priming studies ' and, therefore drew unreliable conclusions. The result was those who used his ( the economist's ) book were deprived of desired results. To give him his due, that economist admitted to his negligence after six years of the publication of the book. Here I thank God that I did not have to undergo professional hazards because I was a general reader not an economist. Examples from the field of medicine, as given in Stuart's book, are simply horrible, enough to give goose bumps. So you see that I grew up to be God-fearing through tradition, and I am sure that through a different kind of tradition hinted at by Stuart's book my grand-children are not going to be smarter than me.
©️ 2021
My country is often referred to as being among the third world ones. Since coming to understand human affairs little by little, I have always wondered how God's world can be ranked as first, second, third etc. Much later, not from God but from one branch of science known as economics, I learnt that this ranking is based on who has accumulated by force or otherwise how much wealth by exploiting the land, forests, water bodies and rivers , the labour of the great masses of active human bodies and even the vast blue sky above us all. Though my level of education has remained unchanged like Plato's ' Form ', this knowledge one night in my sleep produced a question: how can God- Wealth-Exploitation stand in an egalitarian row? My intuition hums in my mind that no mathematician--- global, national or local---- would ever be able to break this mystery.
I cannot remember the day since when I have been a science-fearing guy. I scared of mathematics more than being caned for neglecting studies or for wrong-doing. So mathematics glaring at me with red hot eyes could have been the reason for the fear of science. But I doubt that this alone played this dirty game for me growing up to be a science-fearing guy. There must have been atleast one scientist in the modern world who didn't know mathematics and who was not a science-fearing man. I have never been to a doctor for that. But I am sure that a psychologist of the calibre of Freud or Lacan could have diagnosed the cause of my fear of science.
Let me tell now about the day when I got confirmed in the belief that I would have to carry my fear of science through many more births to come. It was in 2020. The world was, like it is doing now, reeling under Covid-19. By sheer luck, I must put it that way, a strange book fell into my hand. Written by Stuart Ritchie, the book is named Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth. With surprises in almost every page, the book debunks the 'underworld' nature of the world of present-day science. I am not going to expand on the book. I will just restrict myself to telling you that how I got cheated of a good amount of money by buying a book written by a noble laureate economist.
They say that in the study of man's (ir ) rational behaviour researchers have to depend on ' priming studies ' conducted by themselves or others. Our economist , perhaps unbeknownst to himself, used unreliable ' priming studies ' and, therefore drew unreliable conclusions. The result was those who used his ( the economist's ) book were deprived of desired results. To give him his due, that economist admitted to his negligence after six years of the publication of the book. Here I thank God that I did not have to undergo professional hazards because I was a general reader not an economist. Examples from the field of medicine, as given in Stuart's book, are simply horrible, enough to give goose bumps. So you see that I grew up to be God-fearing through tradition, and I am sure that through a different kind of tradition hinted at by Stuart's book my grand-children are not going to be smarter than me.
©️ 2021
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