Popper
Article
Popper is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 18, 2021 and February 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Popper wrote that scientists should be allowed to write things up however they liked”; “People need to stop using Popper as a crutch”. It most often appears alongside Kenny Easwaran, Scott, /r/slatestarcodex.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: November 18, 2021
- Last seen: February 21, 2025
Appears In
- Highlights From The Comments On Great Families
- Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe
Related Pages
-
- Kenny Easwaran (2 shared issues)
-
- Scott (2 shared issues)
-
- slatestarcodex (1 shared issues)
-
- 23andme (1 shared issues)
-
- AB (1 shared issues)
-
- Abraham Mendelssohn (1 shared issues)
-
- ACX (1 shared issues)
-
- Adrian (1 shared issues)
-
- Albert Baez (1 shared issues)
-
- Aldous Huxley (1 shared issues)
-
- Alfred Russel Wallace (1 shared issues)
-
- Alice James (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
One reason that a single person rarely accomplishes anything important anymore in science is the adoption of Karl Popper's structure for research papers. He insisted, because of his fondness for good-old rationalist metaphysics, that the essence of science is rational theory, not experimentation. He dwells on this with a fanatic obsessiveness in "The Myth of the Framework". It's the only subject I know on which Popper held an obviously stupid and ideological opinion: that scientific work never, ever, EVER begins with observation. Odd, since he understood (from comparing science with philosophy) the necessity of experiment.
Anyway, Popper proposed today's research article format, which begins with a statement of some theoretical problem, does a lit survey of the problem, states a hypothesis, posits an experiment to test a hypothesis, comes up with an experimental setup and methodology, runs the experiment, draws a conclusion, and lists new theoretical problems the results have suggested. This format begins and ends in theory, thus maintaining the supremacy of theory over experiment.
The trouble is that this isn't how science worked, back when it worked. One person would notice something funny--not necessarily a theoretical problem; often a pure disinterested observation of just the type Popper claims is impossible, such as when Robert Brown published a paper basically saying "Microscopic particles in my tea keep jostling around as if they were alive". Another person might propose a hypothesis, as when Einstein proposed that this Brownian motion resulted from the random movements of atoms. Then a third person might propose a test, and a fourth might conduct the proposed experiment and report the results. This entire process sometimes took a century or more.
People need to stop using Popper as a crutch, and genuinely think about how knowledge works.