Good Entropy

My regrettable libertarian romance: I rebounded from my experimental phase, but many don’t | Salon.com

In “Democracy in Chains,” Nancy Maclean explores the history of libertarianism, providing irrefutable evidence that it gained political stature in the United States not in opposition to taxation, but racial integration of public schools. It is endlessly curious that libertarianism and conservatism — two approximate philosophies that claim to champion the “primacy of the individual” — are always just around the corner from the deadliest form of collectivism and identity politics: racism.

But Nancy Maclean’s work on this book was abysmal. Many many people have proven conclusively that most of crap.

Why falsificationism is false

Karl Popper famously defended the view, known as falsificationism, that what distinguishes science from non-science is falsifiability. On this view, a theory is scientific if and only if it’s falsifiable, at least in principle. What this means for a theory to be falsifiable is that one can think of a possible observation that would be inconsistent with the theory. For instance, since Newton’s law of universal gravitation implies that every particle exerts a force of attraction on every other particle, it would be falsified if we observed a particle that repels another particle. Since it’s at least conceivable that we could observe this, Newton’s law of universal gravitation is falsifiable and therefore scientific. Popper wants to contrast this with theories like psychoanalysis, which according to him can be reconciled with any conceivable observation, hence is not scientific.