Mathematics and Language aren't themselves Structural Causal Models but some stupid people thought otherwise. It took a bit of Math to prove Math aint a type of Magic which could just decide everything by itself with little further application of mind. But nothing will convince those who believe that 'Language thinks us' that they aint either paranoid nutters or careerist practitioners of a Credentialist Ponzi Scheme.
Charlotte Sleigh is a 'researcher, writer and practitioner across the science humanities'. She writes in Aeon-If you ask philosophically minded researchers – in the Anglophone world at least – why it is that science works, they will almost always point to the philosopher Karl Popper (1902-94) for vindication. Science, they explain, doesn’t presume to provide the final answer to any question, but contents itself with trying to disprove things. Science, so the Popperians claim, is an implacable machine for destroying falsehoods.
Charlotte may be right. But 'philosophically minded researchers' tend to be shit. Science works where it identifies a robustly predictive Structural Causal Model and then cobbles together a mechanism which improves outcomes. Thus, it pays for itself without having to beg for money while pretending to be able to save your soul or to save Society from Neoliberalism or Nazism or the Jews or the Gays or whatever.
Popper didn't think Science was an 'implacable machine' for anything. His point was that only scientific- or 'positive'- hypothesis are falsifiable according to prespecified protocols. But, anything at all could have a representation as a protocol bound, juristic process. Indeed, 'buck stopped' processes of this type exist in the Law and for Bureaucracies.
Popperian Science, however, was neither 'juristic' nor 'buck stopped'. It was special pleading for an old fashioned naturalism. But, during the Twenties, Physics moved on. Copenhagen prevailed. Instrumentalism paid for itself. Popperism but pauperized its adherents.
It follows from the Spilrajn extension theorem, that, with respect to any finite data set and certain types of infinite ones, there must be a Science of a non-Popperian sort i.e. one whose experimentum crucis would be incompossible. So what? No great scandal was entailed. Indeed, one was spared embarrassment at Popper's Fregean turn. Still, the fact is this guy worked hard and helped lots of black and female and working class cunts like wot I iz. The LSE was set up for us and he was an ornament for our alma mater.
By the start of the Eighties, buttoned down, algorithmic, notions of Science were in tatters. Guys tripping on LSD might make the next breakthrough. Anyway, even the Continentals had embraced Lyotard type 'death of grand narrative' 'Post-Modernism'. But structuralism was a successful program in Math. Nothing is 'post' that. Nowadays, smart people in any discipline won't tolerate a Popper like intermediary. They go straight to the source. The last person they'd want sticking her nose in is some sad sack with a PhD in 'Scientific Method' or lame shit of that sort. Incidentally, that's what Vandana Siva has. Why not simply give such Doctorates away as a consolation prize to kids who leave skool unable to read gud?
Popper, poor fellow, like Bruno Betthelheim, needed a PhD to escape Austria. It made sense for people of Jewish heritage to invest in academic credentials because 'Human Capital' is the only sort of asset refugees get to keep. I notice that Palestinian Christians are fanatical about getting professional skills and accumulating transferable credentials and accreditations. That is a perfectly rational thing to do. Of course, they also set up businesses and diversify their portfolios and put a lot of money and time into social and charitable work and spend quality time with their families and in their places of worship and so on and so forth. One mustn't be too hard on them for producing an Edward Said level retard. The tragedy there is that Said genuinely liked Literature when he started off. Did Charlotte Sleigh like anything at all when she entered the Academy?
Perhaps not. She may simply have been fighting the good fight against Neo-Liberalism.
Popper is her enemy because his big idea is that when a thing is shown to be false, it is...urm... shown to be false to those who care about showing it to be false. But nobody really cares about falsifying shit as opposed to inventing cool new stuff or getting things to work way better. For that everybody was always, albeit unconsciously, on the side of what Judea Pearly has formalized. That formalization may be foolish in some detail. But that scarcely matters. The thing is more than paying for itself.
Popper & Hayek & Friedman and so forth were for free markets. But so were most people who wanted a better standard of living and a higher return on their savings and the ability to have a wonderful retirement while still leaving a substantial inheritance for their progeny. One reason Bretton Woods broke down and free markets prevailed was because non-Europeans wanted to get ahead. Primary producers wanted and got a better deal. But, so did European Women and African Americans and those who hadn't been to the right Schools but who wanted to be richer than those who patronized them. On the other hand, the victory of free markets wasn't really a victory for Democracy. It was a victory of law-breakers over a police and prison system which had lost the will to really fuck people up in a manner such that they'd stay fucked up if they broke unworkable and stupid laws. But this was a comparatively late development- post Watergate by most reckonings. Prior to that, Elvis Presley himself wanted an F.B.I badge. Even nerds got hot girl friends if they could plausibly claim to working out new ways to nuke Commies or napalm gooks. Henry Kissinger once dated Jill St. John. Don't tell me carpet bombing Cambodia didn't work out well for him.
Charlotte, wholly anachronistically, believes that back in the Fifties, or even the Sixties, it wasn't the long haired who were getting the shit kicked out of them. The truth is, nobody back then had to apologize for being Dirtier than Harry rather than Holier than Thou.
Consider the following-
Popper himself declared that science is an essentially theoretical business.
It is. Engineering isn't. That's why 'Scientists' get paid shit. Technocrats get private jets.
Yet it was a naïve scientist working during the Cold War who didn’t realise the significance of their funding source and the implications of their research.
But- except for some highly cultured Jews and one or two Leftists- working for the Pentagon figuring out ways to kill lots of gooks more cheaply was something to boast about. Charlotte is being very naive to suggest otherwise.
Medawar, for example, knew full well that his own field of immunology sprang directly from attempts at skin grafting and transplantation on wounded victims of the Second World War.
This is nonsense. Medawar, like everybody else knew that his field had been named by a Russian who got a Nobel in 1908. As with other scientific fields, there was rapid development during and after the War.
Why does Charlotte not mention Monod? Is it coz Monod was seen as a Lefty? Yet, Monod was far more intellectually influential than Medawar. His endorsement of Popper contributed to the 'Post-Modern' turn in France.
Moreover, he was perfectly aware of the high body-count involved in its experiments (including the use of guillotined criminals in France) – by no means unethical in all cases, but certainly far from theoretical.
Experiments may or may not be ethical but they can't be theoretical because...urm... experiments aint theories.
Charlotte seems to believe that saying something is a theory means it can't be evil. Thus she is suspicious of Popper. Why did the guy write books? We know he was for open markets- which is like totally evil right?- and so he must have been guilty of great crimes against humanity. Why don't people understand that Neo-Liberalism is like totally Nazi and it is TRYING TO KILL YOU!
The Popperian get-out clause was deployed in that most controversial of 20th-century sciences, eugenics.
That's right folks! Them Scientists are coming fer yer genes! They are gonna cut them out of you, laughing maniacally, and then they are gonna send them to some fucking Conversion Therapy Camp run by the fucking Mormons and they are gonna make your genes 'good' and more 'fit'.
Wake up sheeple! YOU COULD BE NEXT!
Medawar didn’t hesitate to deploy the supposed moral non-accountability of science in defending eugenics, the topic that furnished the basis of his BBC lectures and much that followed.
but also everything which didn't- like the fact that dem Scientists are TRYING TO KILL YOU and extract your genes and convert them into good little hetero-normative neo-fucking-liberal conformists!
His argument was a subtle one, separating the science of eugenics into two types. ‘Positive’ eugenics – the creation of a perfect race – he characterised as bad because it was (a) Nazi, and (b) an unfalsifiable scientific goal – un-Popperian on two counts. This left the field clear for Medawar to lend his support to ‘negative’ eugenics, the deliberate prevention of conception by carriers of certain genetic conditions.
Coz what parents really want is babies with congenital defects.
This, claimed Medawar, was a strictly scientific (that is, Popperian) question, and didn’t touch upon matters of ethics. It was something of an invidious argument.
Coz the true aim of Science is TO FUKING KILL YOU and steal all your genes and send them to, like, a fucking Concentration Camp where they will be brainwashed and turned into Trump supporters with, like, washboard abs and smooth hairless bodies and degrees in non shite subjects...
With Popperian impatience over so-called mere semantics, Medawar brushed away worries that the eugenic word ‘fitness’ implied a judgment about who was ‘fit’ or not to be a part of society.
He was right to do so. It is not one's genes but one's actions which give legal grounds for inclusion or exclusion from the non-incarcerated population.
Rather, Medawar claimed, it was a mere tag of convenience for an idea that had perfect clarity among evolutionary biologists. Ordinary people shouldn’t worry themselves about its implications; the important thing was that scientists had it straight in their minds. Science merely provided the facts; it was for the potential parent to decide. On one level, this sounds innocuous – and Medawar was by no means a bad person.
The guy helped a lot of people. He is considered the father of transplant surgery. On the other hand, he had a penis. Many people with penises are rapists. RAPE IS WRONG!
But it was, and remains, intellectually shortsighted to disconnect science and ethics in this way.
It was and remains intellectually shortsighted to think Ethics isn't mischievous, stupid, shite.
To suppose a situation
is stupid if you are stupid
in which a potential parent will exercise a perfect and unencumbered liberal choice lends unwarranted impartiality to the scientific facts.
Nothing can lend anything to facts. That's not how facts work.
In reality, economics or politics might force that parent’s hand.
If there is scarcity, then any choice is 'economic'. If legal or other Societal constraints arise there is a political dimension.
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.
Yes we would- if we were in the scientist's shoes and it were indeed the case that such a legal responsibility devolved upon the scientist. On the other hand we might say he was deficient in reason, depending on the circumstances. No one says Heisenberg didn't behave responsibly when he worked for the Nazis. But he himself wanted to give the impression that he was reasonable enough to have tried to shirk or otherwise subvert his duties and responsibilities.
As he prepared his lectures on the ‘future of man’, Medawar speculated that biological ‘fitness’ was in fact best understood as an economic phenomenon:
[I]t is, in effect, a system of pricing the endowment of organisms in the currency of offspring: ie, in terms of net reproductive performance.
I guess, this is the Price Equation. But it extends to all living things- not just man.
Making such a connection – between the hidden hand of nature and the apparently impartial decisions of the market – was a hot way to read Popper.
But nobody read Popper in that way because he knew shit about Econ. By contrast, Von Neumann was a first class mind. But game theory took time to establish itself. Smart people were reading Kolmagorov and Kantorovich and finding cool things to do with Pontryagin's principle. Econ theories have to pay for themselves. If the Left is doing cool stuff in O.R & Control theory and so forth- that's what smart people study. Ideology doesn't matter. By the time Game theory had provided the Right with an ideology, nobody cared. Communism had fucked up too obviously. Meanwhile, game theory had enabled Biology to give a simple, easily comprehensible, account of why homosexuality was as 'natural' and 'kin selectively altruistic' as hetero-normativity and also why women could be just as good as men in any useful activity.
His greatest fans outside the scientific community were, in fact, economists.
This was because two influential strains of Anglo-American Economics had already embraced Vienna Circle epistemology. Carnap got to Chicago in 1935. Tarski taught Ken Arrow. Still, prior to about 1960, you had to learn German and read Institutionalist shite to get an Econ PhD at Harvard. Popper was useful in getting that Historicist shite off the curriculum and substituting Maths for it- which increased employability. Look at McNamara's stellar career. A little math could take you a long way both in Big Biz as well as Government.
At the London School of Economics, Popper was close to the neoliberal theorist Friedrich Hayek.
Hayek was considered a catch for the LSE back in 1931. Failure to jump on the Keynesian bandwagon meant his star declined. But it was bound to rise again for the same reason.
He also taught the soon-to-be billionaire George Soros,
No he didn't. Soros was doing Econ, not Philosophy. He did ask Popper to read an essay of his. But Popper was not impressed by that very poor young man.
who named his Open Society Foundations (formerly, the Open Society Institute) after Popper’s most famous book. Along with Hayek and several others, Popper founded the Mont Pelerin Society, promoting marketisation and privatisation around the world.
Fuck off! Popper was invited but ignored. His suggestions were 'Social Democratic'. Why lie about this? It takes just 30 seconds to Google original documents to establish what really went down.
While Hayek et al held the smoking gun of Popperian mischief,
Hayek et al felt greatly superior to Popper who had only been invited for writing philologically obtuse shite of an anti-commie type.
there were well-intentioned reasons for sticking with a simple model of sceptical science. Not least that it dovetailed with the meritocratic narrative of postwar science:
Fuck off! African Americans, or even Chinese women- like Madam Wu- got short fucking shrift! This woman is utterly mad! There was a narrative of White Male merit. That's why colored savants had to fuck off back to their native land once their student visa ran out. This was only changed in 1965.
the notion that science, more than any other discipline, suited the upwardly mobile working and middle classes.
This is nonsense. It was already obvious that Jews and Chinks and African American women- purely by reason of 'Comparative Advantage'- would rise in 'Pure' Science. That is why wage and service provision discrimination was so intense in this field pre- 1965.
It takes a particular kind of education and upbringing to see the aesthetics of completion, or grasp the mathematics of proof,
Fuck off! This is exactly what no fucking Paideia whatsoever enables anybody to see- if they be smart rather than credentialized.
but any smart kid can poke holes in something.
No they can't. Which kid, you know, has poked a hole in the Standard Model? None at all.
If that’s what science is, then it’s open to anyone, no matter their social class.
If this stupid lady is writing in English, she should understand that her shite is 'open' to anyone- even me who am of an infinitely inferior 'social class'.
This was the meritocratic dream of educationalists in the 1950s: Britain would, in mutually supportive vein, be culturally modern and intellectually scientific.
What is this shite? I came to C.P Snow's England in 1977. Due to I iz bleck as shit, and everybody thought I'd just escaped Idi Amin who wanted to eat me, I got a lot of love and affection and encouragement to get good A level grades and go to Collidge. I'd have preferred a g.f and a job in retail. Why? I'd have bought my first house in 1980. My kids would have gone to fake but reassuringly expensive Etons and would have done well by reason of being as stupid as shit. I fucked up by taking a Degree.
Charlotte don't know shit about England. I do. Genuine 'Mandarin' (i.e. upper class as opposed to emigre) British Philosopher/ Economists- like Ian Little- could see little in Popper but found ways to work with that little. Popper wasn't slow witted or entirely an autodidact. True, his Greek and Latin were rudimentary and his polemical works were puerile. Still it was funny to think of Oakeshott having to rub along with the pushy little man. But Popper worked his little ass off. Oakeshott recycled his lecture notes.
That dream backfired. The notion that science is all about falsification has done incalculable damage not just to science but to human wellbeing.
There has never been any such notion. Science is about inventing cool stuff enabling us to live large and kill big time and get to a planet far far away where we can marry an Alien Princess.
It has normalised distrust as the default condition for knowledge-making, while setting an unreachable and unrealistic standard for the scientific enterprise.
Is there anybody who believes this shit? It's true that Science aint going to invent a 'hyper-space drive' and so Star Trek aint happening but my smartphone is way cooler than Captain Kirk's flip up.
Climate sceptics demand precise predictions of an impossible kind, yet seize upon a single anomalous piece of data to claim to have disproved the entire edifice of combined research; anti-vaxxers exploit the impossibility of any ultimate proof of safety to fuel their destructive activism. In this sense, Popperianism has a great deal to answer for.
The problem here is anti-vaxxers existed before Popper was born. Climate sceptics draw on advanced statistical methodologies undreamed off in Popper's day. The world has moved on. Popper left scarcely a ripple in it. This silly lady pretends otherwise. For Heaven's sake- why? If she were a QAnon type with paranoid fantasies about Soros then- okay, there is some point to this. But if not, why go after Popper? There is a Karen Barad type Feminist philosophy of Science but it is way more sophisticated than anything poor old Popper could have imagined. Still, I suppose, if you get paid to beat up dead white guys, why not pick on those whom nobody under the age of 90 rates anymore?
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