Anti-Ahmavaara

There are surprising connections between philosophy of science, the Finnish Broadcasting Company, and a mathematician/physicist/social scientist called Ahmavaara (alias Arvid Aulin). These are explained Heikki Maki-Kulmala's inspiring but critical account Anti-Ahmavaara (currectly availbale only in Finnish). Dr. Ahmavaara first studied statistical methods for "exact sciences" and then wanted to apply his ideas to social sciences using information and control theory (cybernetics) as a proxy. His ideas became espaceially popular during the leftist era in Finnish broadcasting. The basic idea of social information theory is of course the same as in Karl Popper's philosophy of science: if you utter something unexpected, it has greater value as information than something trivial. This, combined with "education for the masses" ideal of the broadcasting company, lead to rather surprising radio programs.

Later Prof. Ahmavaara abandoned the leftist ideals and became incresingly critical towards non-statistical methods in science in general. He seems to think science and scientific thinking is either pure and mathematical, or impure and ideological. Most of social sciences seem to fall in the latter category. It must have been controversial that Prof. Ahmavaara was the head of the Research Center of Social Sciences at the University of Tampere. The Center housed for instance Gender Studies.