The Paradox of Karl Popper
blogs.scientificamerican.com
The Paradox of Karl Popper
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Re: The Paradox of Karl Popper
#2can someone plz give a summary ?
Re: The Paradox of Karl Popper
#3Popper sounds like a dude. We shouldn't confuse this apparent irascibility with dogmatism. He was passionate about his ideas: he published them and read criticism of them. He changed his mind about the testability of evolution, and other things.
Intellectual humility is not the same quality as personal meekness and geniuses have always had difficult personalities. Philosophers doubly so. How could it be otherwise? How can one create new stuff if one is too agreeable and too susceptible to groupthink?
Btw, the reason falsifiability doesn't have to be falsifiable (by experiment) is that it isn't a scientific idea; it's a philosophical one. It is potentially 'falsifiable' by criticism, however.
The best modern Popper proponent is David Deutsch. See his books The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. They're both packed with interesting ideas and arguments. He says that Popper did indeed solve the problem of induction. And here's a recent paper of his on the logic of experimental testing: https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.02048
Re: The Paradox of Karl Popper
#4TIL proving something is not true is not proving the negative to be true. Not.
Re: The Paradox of Karl Popper
#5> pseudo-scientific theories, like astrology and Freudian psychoanalysis
Kind of a bold take from SciAm.
Re: The Paradox of Karl Popper
#6> pseudo-scientific theories, like astrology and Freudian psychoanalysis Kind of a bold take from SciAm.
I gather Popper criticized those theories himself, so you could read this as simply a description of his arguments, rather than an endorsement.
Re: The Paradox of Karl Popper
#7Nassim Taleb, the author of Fooled by Randomness and the Black Swan, is a fan of Popper.
Re: The Paradox of Karl Popper
#8TIL proving something is not true is not proving the negative to be true. Not.
For the fun of it, try an embedded factoid: 'blueprint' is happy to have committed some atrocity X (without negating X)
Re: The Paradox of Karl Popper
#9> pseudo-scientific theories, like astrology and Freudian psychoanalysis Kind of a bold take from SciAm.
No, it's not. You're inappropriately cutting off the sentence: "He is best-known for the principle of falsification, a means of distinguishing pseudo-scientific theories, like astrology and Freudian psychoanalysis, from genuine ones, like quantum mechanics and general relativity."
Falsification is critical to 'real' science, as otherwise the value of what is said rests solely on how it is said rather than what is said. For instance I could say that there's an invisible massless gremlin resting on your shoulder, but you can't tell it's there as it only interacts with other invisible massless gremlins and gravity. Obviously nobody would believe this, because it sounds absurd. But that's not why you shouldn't believe it. The reason you shouldn't believe it is believe it is because it's not falsifiable. You're left trying to prove that there is no invisible massless gremlin on your shoulder, which is something you cannot do.
Predictiveness is of course also critical, but predictions that cannot be falsified are irrelevant. For instance 100 wrong astrology predictions in a row does not falsify astrology. It just means 100 predictions ended up being not true for some individual or another. But because we can happily ignore the times when predictions of astrology are wrong means you ought also be happy to ignore all of the times that it's right - as it's saying nothing where accuracy matters.
Re: The Paradox of Karl Popper
#10Popper sounds like a dude. We shouldn't confuse this apparent irascibility with dogmatism. He was passionate about his ideas: he published them and read criticism of them. He changed his mind about the testability of evolution, and other things. Intellectual humility is not the same quality as personal meekness and geniuses have always had difficult personalities. Philosophers doubly so. How could it be otherwise? Ho…
> it's a philosophical one. It is potentially 'falsifiable' by criticism, however
Agreed. I think the main issue is not with the idea itself of the scientific method, rather than the practical implications and its limitations.
- The main idea is a qualitative one. It doesn't consider all the statistical can of worms about reproducibility.
- Real world experiments rarely reproduce perfectly/exactly. The more the experiment involves more variables (or unknown variables) you can detect an effect but its magnitude might vary.
- Not everything can be reproduced, not everything can be measured perfectly, hence the "study of knowledge" needs to be able to handle those cases, and not just bury their head in the sand and go "la la la this is not scientific let's ignore it"