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Comment by lidHanteyk | Hacker News Reader

The author would do well to read more philosophy of science. Popper's over a century old; Quine's only just recently closer to Popper than to us! And the author doesn't even know about Quine.

Edit: In particular, while Popper was very concerned with falsifiability and how to reject pseudoscience, Quine was concerned with compatibility and how well different theories fit together. Quine's view is useful for physics because it immediately highlights that relativity and QM work very well within themselves, but not with each other; therefore we know exactly where the interesting scientific discoveries ought to be found.

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Popper led us astray into a reductive outlook on science that led us directly to the replication crisis in the social sciences, Amy Cuddy and power poses and much more. People act like this is a mathematical problem and it can be fixed moving beyond p-values but it isn't.

Quine had the better thesis, if only for the word "confirmational holism". Science must be holistic -- it must be one across all fields or at least hope to -- or it's a credentials game. As it stands now you can get credit for social science that contradicts physical anthropology directly and doesn't apologize for it.

None of the truly great achievements of science were done through atomized conjectures and refutations. Newton, Lavoisier, Mendeleyev, Darwin -- they all posited entire worldviews that were supported by a patchwork accumulation of evidence. The challenges to Newtonian or Darwinian theory couldn't be merely empirical, they had to embody a whole philosophical attack on this worldview (preferably with evidence of its own -- but challenges to the evidence would never be enough to bring down Darwin in his time).

Quine's confirmational holism might have highlighted the dissonance between GR and QM, but it might also have highlighted the differences between mid-19th century geology (which was beginning to discover deep time) and taxonomic biology. OTOH literally no experiment could be set up to evidence the importance of deep time in biology. Not without the fundamental insights of Darwin (and likeminded, less-accomplished contemporaries).

We need to bury Popper.

"None of the truly great achievements of science were done through atomized conjectures and refutations." - that is kind of tautology - only the big steps are called truly great - the small steps are just small steps.

I don't think it's a tautology. The question is whether those "small steps" ever add up to anything "great." When many people think of scientific progress or "the scientific method," they imagine innumerable scientists working across the world, each making incremental contributions to a shared body of knowledge, one peer reviewed article at a time. There's something that seems even virtuous about this picture, which I imagine is part of its appeal.

The question is what do you call "great" and my hunch is that "great" means "impressive" or "surprising" - and when you see lots of small steps they don't seem impressive and they don't surprise.

I don't think this is correct. It wasn't Popper who came up with that bizarre misunderstanding of statistical testing theory that haunts social sciences.

I myself had reservations towards Popper for quite some time (for similar reasons you mentioned) but recently I came around thinking that he was actually a quite interesting person. Today I also think that his stance towards science and society is very called-for.

BTW Popper died several years ago and thus already is buried. :-) You should actually start reading his books.

> Popper led us astray into a reductive outlook on science that led us directly to the replication crisis in the social sciences

I don't think that's the issue. Popper's falsifiability works fine, assuming you prioritize negative results and replication studies in equal measure to publishing new results. That's the real problem with the replication crisis. The so-called "harder sciences" are better on all of these measures.

> replication crisis in the social sciences

There is no replication crisis, just tons of crap studies with bogus results.

Replication is not the problem, but bogus results cannot be replicated.

> Popper led us astray into a reductive outlook on science that led us directly to the replication crisis in the social sciences, Amy Cuddy and power poses and much more. People act like this is a mathematical problem and it can be fixed moving beyond p-values but it isn't.

Popper's philosophy is baked into how physics is taught, possibly more so than any other field. The great majority of physicists wouldn't recognize the name, but would agree completely with the ideas. And we don't have a replication crisis.

> Popper's philosophy is baked into how physics is taught, possibly more so than any other field.

Sounds ad-hoc. Please explain.

Physics is a subject where for almost every topic (be it classical mechanics, optics, quantum physics, etc) there are several different frameworks (which are equivalent but distinct), and none of which can be "falsified" because they are all right, and deal with the same reality in different ways.

As Sidney Coleman said: "The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction.”

Physics is also the subject where one is forced to realize that reality is nuanced enough that you cannot ascribe a single value to measurable quantities (repudiation of local realism) and measurements need not always return the same value. While it's true that physics has had experienced some key falsification/discovery events (most notably Michelson-Morley and the repudiation of ether), physics also has a rich history of approximate "effective theories" which are not wrong, but just limited in their domain of applicability, and might often be more useful than exact models. This idea has also been put on firmer footing over the last half century, with the concept of renormalization group flow.

So I don't see any simplistic tie-up between Popperian falsification and physics.

> Physics is a subject where for almost every topic (be it classical mechanics, optics, quantum physics, etc) there are several different frameworks (which are equivalent but distinct), and none of which can be "falsified" because they are all right, and deal with the same reality in different ways.

Precisely. It is exactly to the degree that we accept Popperian philosophy more than other fields that we are happy with this state of affairs -- we don't care about which theory is "metaphysically true", it's fine as long as the predictions of a theory work where the theory is supposed to apply. To put it another way, the criterion of falsifiability cuts both ways. It means we should test what we can test, and not agonize too much over things we can't.

It is true that there is a simplistic, hardline reading of Popper which rejects effective theories, but I don't think that's a fair way to treat him. The limitations of the hardline view were well known in Popper's time.

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