Some of his comments are very good on the face of it. It’s a bit annoying that, in some fields of science at least, the more esoteric and wild, the better, and that if you can’t do 11-dimensional calculus, then you’re not “qualified” to tell them that they don’t make sense. I don’t understand, personally, how string theory has been able to survive and avoid a great deal of criticism. Good science can be dragged out for qualitative explanations of the world. Better science has practical applications (even if only to feed back into science).

I take a little bit of exception to his denigration of the psychological and biological theories, though. There are certain underlying points that are solid. Many of the aforementioned list he has are radical simplifications promulgated by psychiatrists, drug companies and sound-bite journalism. The last three he mentions are rather related to one another, and don’t constitute a paradigm shift so much as a refinement, and are still overbroad. And, unlike Freud’s wack-job Oedipal complex, actually useful.

That, and alleging that brain chemistry is at least partially responsible for moods angers Tom Cruise, making it even more useful :)