Political punditry: A carnival of charlatans
This is precisely why we consider Albert Einstein’s General and Special Relativity theories as scientific masterpieces while dismissing, say the blog posting of Raja Petra Kamarudin, as a work of fiction by a deluded and frustrated old man.
From Calvin Sankaran, Free Malaysia Today
The brilliant contrarian commentator of the financial markets and mathematics professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb observed that, “doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of absence”.
The same charge can be leveled upon the legions of self proclaimed experts on Malaysian political scene, including (and especially) those academics with PhDs and holding impressive sounding positions with foreign universities and think-tanks.
Their inglorious achievements could be seen most recently before, during and after the Hulu Selangor by-election. Many of these analysts, high on academic qualifications but low on neutral objectivity, hardly covered themselves in glory with their most unacademic and one-sided commentaries on that closely fought by-election.
The fundamental tenet of science dictates that scientific knowledge should based on empirical data that are obtained from controlled experiments and/or rigorous statistical/mathematical analysis. Karl Popper, perhaps the most influential philosophers of science of all time, defined a scientific theory as statement that is testable and falsifiable.
This is precisely why we consider Albert Einstein’s General and Special Relativity theories as scientific masterpieces while dismissing, say the blog posting of Raja Petra Kamarudin, as a work of fiction by a deluded and frustrated old man.
As such it was of no great surprise that these political pundits ended up with eggs on their faces on the Sunday night when the result was officially announced. Incredibly, instead of owning up to their mistakes when their predictions blew up on their collective faces, these academic quacks actually penned further “analyses” that were, incredibly, even less grounded in reality, commonsense and rational thinking.
