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Comment by phyller | Hacker News Reader

Ha, I didn't know about him before. Sounds really interesting. Reminds me a lot of Socrates. I have recently been reading the classics about Socrates and was surprised to realize that

a) his main mission seemed to be to show people they didn't know as much as they thought

b) he was basically a huge troll, even if he was usually correct

c) he was such a huge troll that the Athenians actually put him to death for it via a public trial

If our culture didn't have certain moral qualms that the Athenians didn't have too much trouble brushing aside, I imagine Karl's career would have been cut a lot shorter, along with quite a few other philosophers.

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Popper is immensely influential in science, well worth a closer study. Agree there are some similarities with Socrates but as far as I know there was no drive to have Popper drink poison (a tribute to the imprint of that ancient Athenian on modern society maybe). Except perhaps in communist countries, the expressed antithesis of Popper's "open society".

> Popper is immensely influential in science, well worth a closer study

Yep, pretty much invented the falsification principle. Imagine a time when scientists often tried to prove things true. That was science before Popper. This makes him the greatest contributor to science that I know of since Francis Bacon.

>Imagine a time when scientists often tried to prove things true

The philosophers of science that Popper was criticizing didn't think that scientists should try to prove that theories were true. They thought that scientists should try to show that theories were likely to be true given the available evidence. Popper was a radical skeptic regarding epistemic probability, and thought that it was impossible to probabilistically confirm scientific theories.

Well, yes, fair enough. But the main point is that scientific progress was greatly accelerated thereafter. In that sense there is a before and after him, and anyone who would choose to be anti-Popper (nowadays) is generally an epistemic relativist who doesn't believe in the idea of progress, or sometimes even the scientific enterprise, at all.

Most philosophers of science think that Popper was fundamentally wrong about induction and demarcation, but few of them are epistemic relativists.

After some research, I understand that falsification is not seen as a sufficient criteria for demarcation as Popper probably saw it. But do you not agree that the idea of falsification as a bare minimum was revolutionary? That was the main point of my original comment.

Apologies to anyone I might have offended by accidentally bundling them with relativists.

> Except perhaps in communist countries, the expressed antithesis of Popper's "open society".

I see your point, and I agree, but lest we address the wrong concept, the term you're looking for is 'dictatorial'. Capitalism, just like Communism, produced bloody repressive regimes that were no ground to 'open societies' (e.g. almost every South American country from the 60's to 80's). History teaches us that we should keep our eyes open, for living in capitalist and oh-so-free countries today is simply no guarantee of 'open societies' tomorrow.

OK, my bad. The expressed antithesis of Popper's open society was dictatorship, not communism. There is little doubt that Popper saw communism (and even marxism) as expressions of that antithesis (i.e. by necessity leading to dictatorship), based on his own hard-earned experiences (and by no means questioned by Marxist-Leninists). But agree, capitalism is by convention the counterpart to communism in that habitually dichotomous concept of possible economic models, but does not guarantee freedom from dictatorship as you correctly point out.

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