For Popper (if not for some of his later admirers), falsifiability was not a crude bludgeon. Rather, it was the centerpiece of a richly-articulated worldview holding that millennia of human philosophical reflection had gotten it backwards: the question isn’t how to arrive at the Truth, but rather how to eliminate error. Which sounds kind of obvious, until I meet yet another person who rails to me about how empirical positivism can’t provide its own ultimate justification, and should therefore be replaced by the person’s favorite brand of cringe-inducing ugh.
So how does science proceed, if induction is fucked (which it is) and we can’t logically determine how to have new ideas (which we can’t)? Easy—just take a fucking guess. No, I don’t mea- dammit, you asshole, I don’t mean “guess how science works”, I mean guessing just is how science works. Just start guessing shit and go from there. Of course you’re going to make a couple stupid guesses at first. Seriously, some of the shit you’re going to try is going to be genuinely fucked in the head. Remember when we thought heavier objects would fall faster? Boy was that wrong. But we took a guess, tried it out, and it didn’t work. Instead of being whiny babies about it, scientists just took another guess and then tested that out, too. That’s the process: guess, and then you test that guess. And if the test works, you’re like “Huh! That was an even better guess than I thought.” And the more tests it survives, the more people are like, “Great guess! I’ll bet that’s probably it.” And then you get to a test that your guess doesn’t pass, and you’re like, “Welp, close but no cigar. Back to the drawing board.”
We’ll eliminate the fucking stupid guesses pretty quickly—it doesn’t take long to show that we can’t move things with our minds. Eventually, you start to build a pretty cool system of things so you can make better and better guesses. and you can totally use data to make good guesses; you don’t always have to invent something completely new every time. I’m just saying that’s all the data does, helps make good guesses. It doesn’t prove shit.
And look! That method is deductive! What incredibly good news! You don’t have to derive a universal statement from a bunch of single events, which is great because you can’t; instead, you just guess a universal statement and then see if you can’t find an event that breaks it. You can’t get from “the sun keeps rising” to “the sun will always rise” but if one day the sun doesn’t come up, you can be damn sure about “the sun does not always rise.” All you need is one bad apple and you know for sure that not every apple is good, no induction needed. QED, motherfuckers.
And—AND—now we know what is and isn’t science! Holy fuck I am on fire here. Not actually. Just- look, I’m solving lots of things, is my point. Scientific theories are falsifiable—they’re incompatible with certain things we could observe. They predict shit, and then we see if that shit really happens. Back when we thought Newton’s Laws were totally, completely true, Mercury had this weird fuck wobble in its orbit that said we should find another planet. Except we looked and no planet. And now we know for sure that Newton wasn’t completely right. Einstein? He was a patent clerk for fuckssake, and he came up with a fucking incredible guess. And we just keep devising more and more complicated tests to check it out, and it keeps on passing. When it does finally fail, we’ll fucking know. There won’t be aaaaany confusion whatsoever. Souls? How the fuck would we go about testing for souls? “Well, we cut him open, and we didn’t find a soul, so...” “Yeah, but you can’t see souls! That’s the whole point!” So you’re saying we can’t ever test for souls? That’s fine, just, it means souls can’t come to the science party. They’re not falsifiable. You must be THIS FALSIFIABLE to ride the science ride, and souls just aren’t.
Also, this from his summary of Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”:
Humanity isn’t an end, it’s a fork in the road, and you have two options: “Animal” and “Superman”. For some reason, people keep going left, the easy way, the way back to where we came from. Fuck ’em. Other people just stand there, staring at the signposts, as if they’re going to come alive and tell them what to do or something. Dude, the sign says fucking “SUPERMAN”. How much more of a clue do these assholes want?
--Scott Aaaronson, Retiring falsifiability? A storm in Russell’s teacup
Philosophy Bro writing as Popper:
Also, this from his summary of Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: