6 ms·

How Popperian falsification enabled the rise of neoliberalism

14 points by AndrewBissell 5y ago

aww_dang 5y ago
>To suppose a situation in which a potential parent will exercise a perfect and unencumbered liberal choice lends unwarranted impartiality to the scientific facts. In reality, economics or politics might force that parent’s hand. A more extreme example makes the case clear: if a scientist explains nuclear technology to a bellicose despot, but leaves the ethical choice of deployment to the despot, we wouldn’t say that the scientist had acted responsibly. Odd smells preceded this passage and I was unsure of their origin. This is where the article went fully off the rails in my reading. The author conflates the individual economic actions of parents with the collective coercion of a despot. Next, she labels Hayek as neoliberal. It is hard to take an article seriously if it cannot distinguish between laissez-faire capitalism and neoliberalism. This is a surprisingly common inaccurate generalization. I cannot help but wonder if the author is sincere. >Popper’s appointment to a fellowship at the Royal Society marked the demise of a powerful strand of socialist leadership in British science... Having played her cards, one can expect to read the rest of the article as a lamentation of a lack of socialism. She delivers by pivoting immediately to climate change and identity politics. >Many of the same scientists went on to work for fossil fuel lobbyists, casting doubt on the science of anthropogenic climate change. It doesn’t take much time on a search engine to find examples of Popperianism wielded by deniers. Here we touch on one of my favorites. Yes, incentives matter. Are there no incentives for the climate change agenda? What is a carbon credit, if not monetized debt? Putting aside the veracity of the climate apocalypse, we should be able to agree that the climate agenda involves centralizing control over energy consumption. We are supposed to believe that incentives of petroleum companies exist, but those who would establish a new paradigm for international currency have no ulterior motives? Simply put, who exactly will be printing these carbon credits, what is their historical background and why should we trust them? Pure nonsense. Academic socialist declares that the sciences are not yet socialist enough, while the mainstream narrative is dominated by green socialism. If critiques of lockdowns, mass vaccinations, climate apocalypse or other political goals utilize falsifiability, she concludes falsifiability is the problem. Her favored political agendas remain infallible.
- Veen 5y ago
  Yes, after having read this article I’m none the wiser about why Popper was wrong or even if he was wrong about falsificationism. It starts with an interesting thesis, takes a detour which seems intended to smear Popper’s ideas by associating them with people who had some affinity for eugenics, and then degenerates into a lament about how neoliberals aren’t socialists and that somehow means falsificationism is responsible for the ills of the world. I share the author’s concerns about the supposed ethical neutrality of the application of scientific discoveries, but that has to do with politics and ethics and not the methods scientists use to make those discoveries. It’s like blaming theoretical computer science for the developing the techniques later programmers use in missile guidance systems. The theory isn’t the problem, the application is.
  - aww_dang 5y ago
    Meanwhile, if we were inclined to go there, there is a nexus between the population control movement, the Rockefeller Foundation(s), positive eugenics and the green agenda.
  - routerl 5y ago
    > Yes, after having read this article I’m none the wiser about why Popper was wrong or even if he was wrong about falsificationism. "While all this was going on, three philosophers were pulling[0] the rug away beneath the Popperians’ feet. They argued[1] that[2], when an experiment fails to prove a hypothesis, any element of the physical or theoretical set-up could be to blame. Nor can any single disproof ever count against a theory, since we can always put in a good-faith auxiliary hypothesis to protect it: perhaps the lab mice weren’t sufficiently inbred to produce genetic consistency; perhaps the chemical reaction occurs only in the presence of a particular catalyst. Moreover, we have to protect some theories for the sake of getting on at all. Generally, we don’t conclude that we have disproved well-established laws of physics – rather, that our experiment was faulty." The basic argument is that falsificationism isn't actually how science is carried out. [0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2181906?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2181906?seq=1 [1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-010-1863-0_14 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-010-1863-0_... [2] https://philarchive.org/archive/THOPBS https://philarchive.org/archive/THOPBS
rthomas6 5y ago
What is neoliberalism, and why is it bad?
- jfengel 5y ago
  It's basically the modern version of laissez-faire capitalism, for the last 40 years or so. "Liberal" still means something closer to "libertarian" in Europe and Canada. The term is used pretty much solely by people who think it's bad. They cite basically all of the downsides to capitalism: shrinking safety nets, loss of jobs and job security from globalization, financial panics like 2007, increasing wealth concentration, etc.
MikeBVaughn 5y ago
This specific part of the article falls flat for me, and I think its presence makes the article worse: "It doesn’t take much time on a search engine to find examples of Popperianism wielded by deniers." If you accept the author's internal logic that groups like e.g. the Clear Energy Alliance are fundamentally acting in bad faith, then it should be abundantly clear that that a group making that sort of denialist argument by definition does not actually care one iota about whatever philosophy is being invoked. Philosophers have a long, time-honored tradition of producing bodies of work with the intent of destabilizing "naive" epistemology. If it wasn't Popper, it'd be Kuhn or Feyeraband or Derrida or Lacan or, or, or, ad infinitum. (Honestly based on my deeply informal and decidedly non-academic use of social media over the past decade, I always found Kuhn's work to be the more popular plaything for people engaging in most forms of science denialism). Fundamentally, consider any case where a person believes that a.) some proposition P about reality holds, like "cigarette smoke causes cancer" and b.) there is a preponderance of scientific evidence in favor of P, and c.) there exist well-funded entities intentionally producing bad-faith/dishonest/equivocal work that either implies the negation of P or that the evidence in favor of P is flawed. If a person accepts (a), (b), and (c), then it seems most reasonable to also accept that the denialists in (c) probably don't genuinely care about things like "intellectual rigor" or "identifying a useful epistemological model for science." The thin philosophical veneer is just a disposable bauble intended to give a sense of academic respectability to bad work.

14 points by AndrewBissell 5y ago

>To suppose a situation in which a potential parent will exercise a perfect and unencumbered liberal choice lends unwarranted impartiality to the scientific facts. In reality, economics or politics might force that parent’s hand. A more extreme example makes the case clear: if a scientist explains nuclear technology to a bellicose despot, but leaves the ethical choice of deployment to the despot, we wouldn’t say that the scientist had acted responsibly. Odd smells preceded this passage and I was unsure of their origin. This is where the article went fully off the rails in my reading. The author conflates the individual economic actions of parents with the collective coercion of a despot. Next, she labels Hayek as neoliberal. It is hard to take an article seriously if it cannot distinguish between laissez-faire capitalism and neoliberalism. This is a surprisingly common inaccurate generalization. I cannot help but wonder if the author is sincere. >Popper’s appointment to a fellowship at the Royal Society marked the demise of a powerful strand of socialist leadership in British science... Having played her cards, one can expect to read the rest of the article as a lamentation of a lack of socialism. She delivers by pivoting immediately to climate change and identity politics. >Many of the same scientists went on to work for fossil fuel lobbyists, casting doubt on the science of anthropogenic climate change. It doesn’t take much time on a search engine to find examples of Popperianism wielded by deniers. Here we touch on one of my favorites. Yes, incentives matter. Are there no incentives for the climate change agenda? What is a carbon credit, if not monetized debt? Putting aside the veracity of the climate apocalypse, we should be able to agree that the climate agenda involves centralizing control over energy consumption. We are supposed to believe that incentives of petroleum companies exist, but those who would establish a new paradigm for international currency have no ulterior motives? Simply put, who exactly will be printing these carbon credits, what is their historical background and why should we trust them? Pure nonsense. Academic socialist declares that the sciences are not yet socialist enough, while the mainstream narrative is dominated by green socialism. If critiques of lockdowns, mass vaccinations, climate apocalypse or other political goals utilize falsifiability, she concludes falsifiability is the problem. Her favored political agendas remain infallible.

Veen 5y ago
Yes, after having read this article I’m none the wiser about why Popper was wrong or even if he was wrong about falsificationism. It starts with an interesting thesis, takes a detour which seems intended to smear Popper’s ideas by associating them with people who had some affinity for eugenics, and then degenerates into a lament about how neoliberals aren’t socialists and that somehow means falsificationism is responsible for the ills of the world. I share the author’s concerns about the supposed ethical neutrality of the application of scientific discoveries, but that has to do with politics and ethics and not the methods scientists use to make those discoveries. It’s like blaming theoretical computer science for the developing the techniques later programmers use in missile guidance systems. The theory isn’t the problem, the application is.
- aww_dang 5y ago
  Meanwhile, if we were inclined to go there, there is a nexus between the population control movement, the Rockefeller Foundation(s), positive eugenics and the green agenda.
- routerl 5y ago
  > Yes, after having read this article I’m none the wiser about why Popper was wrong or even if he was wrong about falsificationism. "While all this was going on, three philosophers were pulling[0] the rug away beneath the Popperians’ feet. They argued[1] that[2], when an experiment fails to prove a hypothesis, any element of the physical or theoretical set-up could be to blame. Nor can any single disproof ever count against a theory, since we can always put in a good-faith auxiliary hypothesis to protect it: perhaps the lab mice weren’t sufficiently inbred to produce genetic consistency; perhaps the chemical reaction occurs only in the presence of a particular catalyst. Moreover, we have to protect some theories for the sake of getting on at all. Generally, we don’t conclude that we have disproved well-established laws of physics – rather, that our experiment was faulty." The basic argument is that falsificationism isn't actually how science is carried out. [0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2181906?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2181906?seq=1 [1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-010-1863-0_14 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-010-1863-0_... [2] https://philarchive.org/archive/THOPBS https://philarchive.org/archive/THOPBS

rthomas6 5y ago

What is neoliberalism, and why is it bad?

jfengel 5y ago
It's basically the modern version of laissez-faire capitalism, for the last 40 years or so. "Liberal" still means something closer to "libertarian" in Europe and Canada. The term is used pretty much solely by people who think it's bad. They cite basically all of the downsides to capitalism: shrinking safety nets, loss of jobs and job security from globalization, financial panics like 2007, increasing wealth concentration, etc.

MikeBVaughn 5y ago

This specific part of the article falls flat for me, and I think its presence makes the article worse: "It doesn’t take much time on a search engine to find examples of Popperianism wielded by deniers." If you accept the author's internal logic that groups like e.g. the Clear Energy Alliance are fundamentally acting in bad faith, then it should be abundantly clear that that a group making that sort of denialist argument by definition does not actually care one iota about whatever philosophy is being invoked. Philosophers have a long, time-honored tradition of producing bodies of work with the intent of destabilizing "naive" epistemology. If it wasn't Popper, it'd be Kuhn or Feyeraband or Derrida or Lacan or, or, or, ad infinitum. (Honestly based on my deeply informal and decidedly non-academic use of social media over the past decade, I always found Kuhn's work to be the more popular plaything for people engaging in most forms of science denialism). Fundamentally, consider any case where a person believes that a.) some proposition P about reality holds, like "cigarette smoke causes cancer" and b.) there is a preponderance of scientific evidence in favor of P, and c.) there exist well-funded entities intentionally producing bad-faith/dishonest/equivocal work that either implies the negation of P or that the evidence in favor of P is flawed. If a person accepts (a), (b), and (c), then it seems most reasonable to also accept that the denialists in (c) probably don't genuinely care about things like "intellectual rigor" or "identifying a useful epistemological model for science." The thin philosophical veneer is just a disposable bauble intended to give a sense of academic respectability to bad work.