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The Quest to Tell Science from Pseudoscience

• jfengel 6y ago
  Techies often take falsificationism as the touchstone of truth, and it turns out it's actually not a very good epistemological measure. It's impossible to rigorously tell the difference between the goalpost-moving of pseudoscientists and the theory revision of actual scientists. That's been known for a very long time, and nothing in this article is news. But it's striking how firmly it's held, given how poorly it describes the work of science. A lot of work has been done since. None of that work is as satisfying as Popper's; it's the epitome of "neat, simple, and wrong". One major line of work is literally called "epistemological anarchism", and it's very sound, incredibly ugly, and utterly useless. I don't have answers, either. But I really think more HNers should read this article, because every time I see one trot out "falsificationism" to rebuke pseudoscience I quietly bang my head into the wall. It's not that they're wrong about the pseudoscience; it's that the mechanism they use to prove it is itself no better than pseudoscience.