Sublime

By physics, I mean approximation, compression, mechanism, optimization. Data science is not that. Data science is not science. I think it’s important that we make that statement.

unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.

science is not an enterprise that takes place on some superior moral or spiritual plane above the rest of human activity. Like all other parts of our culture, it is shaped by economic, political and religious interests.

Science is a method that oscillates between induction and deduction—we observe patterns, propose explanations, and test them to see how well they predict things we do not yet know. We thus generate models of the world that, when we do the scientific work correctly, achieve three things: they predict more than what came before, assume less, and come

Science, it struck me then, is a guide to thinking, not a thought: an endless process of becoming.

Stands for Experiment The e and final letter of DOPAMINE stands for experiment. This is where patients go back out into the world armed with a new dopamine set point (a level pleasure-pain balance) and a plan for how to maintain it. Whether the goal is continued abstinence or moderation, like Delilah’s, we strategize together for how to achieve it.

A science is any organized body of knowledge that is possessed of first principles. The first principles of any science are those fundamental truths upon which the science is founded and by which all its activities are informed.