As an undergrad at Georgetown University in the 70's I worked in the library of the Kennedy Institute of Bioethics. Karl Popper was often there doing his research and writing. At my age back then I found it kind of exciting to be in the presence of this great man.
Popper was not really interested in meta-ethical discussions, he thought they were pointless and boring. Though his epistemology had an ethical aspect to them through and through.
Anti-authoritarianism is core to Popperianism. Though Popper would not say this himself but he is up there with Plato and Aristotle. The best philosophers are Socrates, Hume and Popper. The rest are just playing in the sandbox. Rand for me is not up there, but I don’t think she deserves the vitriol she gets. Her ethical writings are her best, but her epistemology is very bad. The spirit behind them is commendable for being anti-nihilist and pro-human. Elliot Temple has tried to combine Ayn Rand with Popper and be does a fairly decent job of it. I look forward to the time that objectivists really start to engage with Popper’s epistemology, I think they will realise that Rand’s epistemology can be enriched by such a collaboration.
What positive idea did he discover? Popper is a minor Kantian nihilist, attacking perception, induction and rational certainty. He is not a wisew guide to mans life. He is a destructive fool who believes that mans fundamentaal alternatives are mysticism and subjectivism (Anti-authoritarianism). Ayn Rand discovered the third alternative in the 1950s, man knows reality by some means, in some form.
Less wrong is not Popperian, it’s bayesianism. The meaning of less wrong from a Bayesian perspective just means making the certainty of your claims more and more numerically precise, which according to Poppe is a pointless activity, because you don’t add any content to knowledge by changing the measure of the credence of claims.
Leo Strauss will likely have a much longer legacy than Popper for the simple fact that Strauss pretty much called things correctly while in the thick of it. Strauss called that the Modern Scientific Development, spanning several centuries from Machiavelli to Max Weber, ran into the dead end of Positivism and Historicism in theory and these in practice amounted to Technocracy, rule by scientific experts. Strauss's recommendation to correct this failure of political philosophy / science is to start all over again with the ancient Greeks, but this time go directly to Aristotle and skip over Plato.
I prefer Popper and Hayek to Rand. She is too influenced by Nietzsche and her mind is clouded by the idea certain individuals move society forward; while Hayek and Popper point more to happenstance of information the individual comes across in particular situations and acts upon it.
The rationalization of evasion, the unfocused mind, happpenstance, is a threat to mans life. Rand is basically different from the mind-evading Nietzsche.
Think about how many businessmen say they have read and were influenced by Rand (including huge ones like Steve Jobs) and also how many politicians say that.
@@francescaerreia8859exactly what I mean. Like why do I hear everbodies name EXCEPT Rand. Like John walls for Christ sake. Who cares? That’s the guy apparently Warren Buffett listens to
@@itamarfeldmanyet we don’t ever hear about til after their dead. Like Steve Jobs never said that. It was Steve Wozniak that afterward said that. Just seems like everyone except Rand gets her name said and never her. It’s ridiculous
I find some of these discussions of epistemology can get extremely boring and pointless. ALL knowledge comes with a certain degree of certainty, understanding, evidence, logic, etc. Of course no system of knowing things is perfect - but so what? If you wanna get hung up on that, you can't proceed onto any other question! Literally any discussion of any topic would have to contain constant questions of "how do you know?", not based on tangible doubt, but on the abstract notion that nothing can be perfectly known. What a waste of time. Everyone applies science all the time. We use our eyes, ears and other senses - we're collecting data and making observations. We remember things. We consciously or unconsciously notice patterns. We "know" a lot of things! We know someone's happy, sad, scared, etc., but noticing their emotions. It's not perfect, but we can break down HOW we know. The same with any kind of knowledge. When something doesn't work, we can troubleshoot to find the problem. No perfect knowledge required. The abstract idea that nothing is known for sure is useless and should be moved on from immediately. Accept that we can know some things with at least some modicum of certainty. Then let us analyse why some forms of knowledge are more reliable or deeper than others, specific reasons some people get confused, how science works, cases where science has gone astray. So many interesting things to consider, but too many intellectuals spend hours or tens of pages repeating the dull "fact" that you can't know anything for sure - how do they know that for sure!?
Your last paragraph has literally the exact philosophical solecism that Hume and Popper’s philosophy defeats. We don’t know anything with any kind of certainty. Knowledge does not include and does not need to include any type of certainty. It only needs to include the idea of truth, which again has nothing to do with certainty. Certainty is unobtainable to any degree and is irrelevant.
‘How do they know that for sure?’ They don’t, but it’s true nonetheless. All theories of justification fail. And they fail because of a logical fault in the structure of the theories and the fault can be outlined like this: Justificationists claim that there is some kind of principle, let’s call this principle P. Now P would allow us to sort what should be believed from what shouldn’t be believed. Now the question is what principle would allow us to select P? There is no justificationist answer to this question that doesn’t just demand the earlier selection of P without employing another principle that isn’t P, therefore contradicting that P is the core principle of justification. This argument is not justified it is just valid and true. Good luck defeating it.
The only criticism that would defeat the above argument is to provide a justificstionist theory the avoids this fault. what Popper argues is that the original selection of any theory, claim, argument etc, does not need justification. Knowledge is a risk, and we mitigate this risk only by logically locating error, and if they have have an error we reject them and try to come up with alternative theories, claims, arguments that avoid that error. This is called critical rationalism. We don’t get anywhere by just finding things that agree with what we already said. Progress is made by discovering error and new problems.
@@drewzi2044 "Certainty is unobtainable to any degree" I agree. And everyone knows that and it's obvious. And my whole point went right over your head. You're projecting a bunch of rubbish onto me. I don't know or care what justificationist means. I'm guessing you don't either since, after all, nobody can know anything - right? How do you know you're real? How do you what any of these words mean? Can you see how stupid discussions get when you think like that? There are degrees of knowing and there are lots of ways to test theories and learn more. That's extremely obvious though and to waste books and books repeating "you can't ever know for sure" is moronic. You can be very deeply confident of certain things and there are tangible ways of testing what you know and enhancing it. So let's focus on those things. For example, you can get quite far with logic alone. Maths can help you determine lots of abstract truths which nevertheless apply to the real world. If you doubt something, you're welcome to test it. I'm a maths teacher and I do this with students. Let's count multiples of 25, for example. They go 25, 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, 175, 200, etc. Notice a pattern? How do you KNOW it keeps doing that? Let's keep going. 225, 250, 275, 300, 325, 350, 375, 400, 425, 450, 475, 500. Getting bored? Still, how do we KNOW that it repeats this pattern of 25, 50, 75, 00? I did it until the students were very clearly sick of it and started to accept that it must be true. It's not hard to understand why. If we wanted, we could spend 10 1-hour lessons proving that the multiples of 25 have that pattern. It can be proven in about a minute, but we could just be really, really thorough and pedantic about it. Is that the kind of thing Popper argued for? Or can we move on at a certain point? Is it really safe to move on to trigonometry when we don't know for sure that numbers exist at all? Can we do calculus if we don't know everything about arithmetic? The thing is, economics overarches philosophy, in the sense that there are always trade-offs. Everything is scarce, including knowledge, information and human attention. So instead of being pedantic to the extreme, let's accept some base, reasonable level of "certainty" and move on. At a certain point, spending hours double-checking a trivial fact is not worth the same as spending that time investigating new ideas. The costs outweigh the benefits. Trust me, I know. Of course, you don't even know Popper or anything for that matter, so I probably shouldn't ask you.
@@Gretchaninov I never said anything about not knowing anything. I am saying that knowledge and justification have nothing to do with each other. Knowledge is just information, some of it is true and some (lots of it is not). Many philosophers obsession with finding justification for claims to be knowledge is 2 thousand year detour without any gains. It is Popper that wanted to move on from the pedantic arguments in epistemology and introduced a new conception of knowledge. Which you can find in his book 'Objective Knowledge: An evolutionary approach'. "I'm guessing you don't either since, after all, nobody can know anything - right? How do you know you're real? How do you what any of these words mean? Can you see how stupid discussions get when you think like that?" My claim isn't that you can't know anything, my claim is that people who link knowledge with (any degree of) certainty, always fail to make sense of what it is, because it is not about degrees of certainty. Most of the questions you mention are dumb and show the poverty of most epistemology in dealing with simple problems. I think your view is almost identical to mine. You just need to shed the idea that certainty (or degrees of certainty) are linked to knowledge. What matters, as you say, is creating new ideas to solve new problems and not constantly going on about whether or not we are justified in what we are doing. That is a barren wasteland.
As an undergrad at Georgetown University in the 70's I worked in the library of the Kennedy Institute of Bioethics. Karl Popper was often there doing his research and writing. At my age back then I found it kind of exciting to be in the presence of this great man.
I conjecture that you are wrong. Can you refute me?
popper absolutely has moral theories and is not a moral skeptic. Yaron - you should bring David Deutsch or Brett Hall on to talk about Popper
Popper was not really interested in meta-ethical discussions, he thought they were pointless and boring. Though his epistemology had an ethical aspect to them through and through.
@justcurious-tl8ts Seconded. Few understand Popper. Those guys get him.
Yaron Brook should interview David Deutsch!
Anti-authoritarianism is core to Popperianism.
Though Popper would not say this himself but he is up there with Plato and Aristotle.
The best philosophers are Socrates, Hume and Popper. The rest are just playing in the sandbox.
Rand for me is not up there, but I don’t think she deserves the vitriol she gets. Her ethical writings are her best, but her epistemology is very bad. The spirit behind them is commendable for being anti-nihilist and pro-human. Elliot Temple has tried to combine Ayn Rand with Popper and be does a fairly decent job of it. I look forward to the time that objectivists really start to engage with Popper’s epistemology, I think they will realise that Rand’s epistemology can be enriched by such a collaboration.
What positive idea did he discover? Popper is a minor Kantian nihilist, attacking perception, induction and rational certainty. He is not a wisew guide to mans life. He is a destructive fool who believes that mans fundamentaal alternatives are mysticism and subjectivism (Anti-authoritarianism). Ayn Rand discovered the third alternative in the 1950s, man knows reality by some means, in some form.
Less wrong is not Popperian, it’s bayesianism. The meaning of less wrong from a Bayesian perspective just means making the certainty of your claims more and more numerically precise, which according to Poppe is a pointless activity, because you don’t add any content to knowledge by changing the measure of the credence of claims.
Leo Strauss will likely have a much longer legacy than Popper for the simple fact that Strauss pretty much called things correctly while in the thick of it. Strauss called that the Modern Scientific Development, spanning several centuries from Machiavelli to Max Weber, ran into the dead end of Positivism and Historicism in theory and these in practice amounted to Technocracy, rule by scientific experts.
Strauss's recommendation to correct this failure of political philosophy / science is to start all over again with the ancient Greeks, but this time go directly to Aristotle and skip over Plato.
In summary would you say with certainty that Popper would claim nothing can be certain?
Certainly!
-Moe, Larry and Curley
😝🤣
@@timberskid Wow you guys just destroyed Popper in 2 seconds
Certainly.
Nietzsche: "There are no facts, only interpretations."
Common Sense: "Oh really, is that a fact?"
I prefer Popper and Hayek to Rand. She is too influenced by Nietzsche and her mind is clouded by the idea certain individuals move society forward; while Hayek and Popper point more to happenstance of information the individual comes across in particular situations and acts upon it.
The rationalization of evasion, the unfocused mind, happpenstance, is a threat to mans life.
Rand is basically different from the mind-evading Nietzsche.
Seems everyone under the sun has influence except Rand
She has a lot more influence than we realize I think, it just goes largely uncredited/unrealized.
Think about how many businessmen say they have read and were influenced by Rand (including huge ones like Steve Jobs) and also how many politicians say that.
Rand is a radical opponent of our mainstream culture. Trump just showed, "Its the culture, stupid!"
@@francescaerreia8859exactly what I mean. Like why do I hear everbodies name EXCEPT Rand. Like John walls for Christ sake. Who cares? That’s the guy apparently Warren Buffett listens to
@@itamarfeldmanyet we don’t ever hear about til after their dead. Like Steve Jobs never said that. It was Steve Wozniak that afterward said that.
Just seems like everyone except Rand gets her name said and never her. It’s ridiculous
I find some of these discussions of epistemology can get extremely boring and pointless. ALL knowledge comes with a certain degree of certainty, understanding, evidence, logic, etc. Of course no system of knowing things is perfect - but so what? If you wanna get hung up on that, you can't proceed onto any other question! Literally any discussion of any topic would have to contain constant questions of "how do you know?", not based on tangible doubt, but on the abstract notion that nothing can be perfectly known. What a waste of time.
Everyone applies science all the time. We use our eyes, ears and other senses - we're collecting data and making observations. We remember things. We consciously or unconsciously notice patterns. We "know" a lot of things! We know someone's happy, sad, scared, etc., but noticing their emotions. It's not perfect, but we can break down HOW we know. The same with any kind of knowledge. When something doesn't work, we can troubleshoot to find the problem. No perfect knowledge required.
The abstract idea that nothing is known for sure is useless and should be moved on from immediately. Accept that we can know some things with at least some modicum of certainty. Then let us analyse why some forms of knowledge are more reliable or deeper than others, specific reasons some people get confused, how science works, cases where science has gone astray. So many interesting things to consider, but too many intellectuals spend hours or tens of pages repeating the dull "fact" that you can't know anything for sure - how do they know that for sure!?
Your last paragraph has literally the exact philosophical solecism that Hume and Popper’s philosophy defeats. We don’t know anything with any kind of certainty. Knowledge does not include and does not need to include any type of certainty. It only needs to include the idea of truth, which again has nothing to do with certainty.
Certainty is unobtainable to any degree and is irrelevant.
‘How do they know that for sure?’
They don’t, but it’s true nonetheless.
All theories of justification fail. And they fail because of a logical fault in the structure of the theories and the fault can be outlined like this:
Justificationists claim that there is some kind of principle, let’s call this principle P. Now P would allow us to sort what should be believed from what shouldn’t be believed. Now the question is what principle would allow us to select P?
There is no justificationist answer to this question that doesn’t just demand the earlier selection of P without employing another principle that isn’t P, therefore contradicting that P is the core principle of justification.
This argument is not justified it is just valid and true.
Good luck defeating it.
The only criticism that would defeat the above argument is to provide a justificstionist theory the avoids this fault.
what Popper argues is that the original selection of any theory, claim, argument etc, does not need justification. Knowledge is a risk, and we mitigate this risk only by logically locating error, and if they have have an error we reject them and try to come up with alternative theories, claims, arguments that avoid that error. This is called critical rationalism.
We don’t get anywhere by just finding things that agree with what we already said. Progress is made by discovering error and new problems.
@@drewzi2044
"Certainty is unobtainable to any degree"
I agree. And everyone knows that and it's obvious. And my whole point went right over your head.
You're projecting a bunch of rubbish onto me. I don't know or care what justificationist means. I'm guessing you don't either since, after all, nobody can know anything - right? How do you know you're real? How do you what any of these words mean? Can you see how stupid discussions get when you think like that?
There are degrees of knowing and there are lots of ways to test theories and learn more. That's extremely obvious though and to waste books and books repeating "you can't ever know for sure" is moronic. You can be very deeply confident of certain things and there are tangible ways of testing what you know and enhancing it. So let's focus on those things.
For example, you can get quite far with logic alone. Maths can help you determine lots of abstract truths which nevertheless apply to the real world. If you doubt something, you're welcome to test it.
I'm a maths teacher and I do this with students. Let's count multiples of 25, for example. They go 25, 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, 175, 200, etc. Notice a pattern? How do you KNOW it keeps doing that? Let's keep going. 225, 250, 275, 300, 325, 350, 375, 400, 425, 450, 475, 500. Getting bored? Still, how do we KNOW that it repeats this pattern of 25, 50, 75, 00? I did it until the students were very clearly sick of it and started to accept that it must be true. It's not hard to understand why.
If we wanted, we could spend 10 1-hour lessons proving that the multiples of 25 have that pattern. It can be proven in about a minute, but we could just be really, really thorough and pedantic about it. Is that the kind of thing Popper argued for? Or can we move on at a certain point? Is it really safe to move on to trigonometry when we don't know for sure that numbers exist at all? Can we do calculus if we don't know everything about arithmetic?
The thing is, economics overarches philosophy, in the sense that there are always trade-offs. Everything is scarce, including knowledge, information and human attention. So instead of being pedantic to the extreme, let's accept some base, reasonable level of "certainty" and move on. At a certain point, spending hours double-checking a trivial fact is not worth the same as spending that time investigating new ideas. The costs outweigh the benefits. Trust me, I know.
Of course, you don't even know Popper or anything for that matter, so I probably shouldn't ask you.
@@Gretchaninov I never said anything about not knowing anything. I am saying that knowledge and justification have nothing to do with each other. Knowledge is just information, some of it is true and some (lots of it is not). Many philosophers obsession with finding justification for claims to be knowledge is 2 thousand year detour without any gains.
It is Popper that wanted to move on from the pedantic arguments in epistemology and introduced a new conception of knowledge. Which you can find in his book 'Objective Knowledge: An evolutionary approach'.
"I'm guessing you don't either since, after all, nobody can know anything - right? How do you know you're real? How do you what any of these words mean? Can you see how stupid discussions get when you think like that?"
My claim isn't that you can't know anything, my claim is that people who link knowledge with (any degree of) certainty, always fail to make sense of what it is, because it is not about degrees of certainty. Most of the questions you mention are dumb and show the poverty of most epistemology in dealing with simple problems.
I think your view is almost identical to mine. You just need to shed the idea that certainty (or degrees of certainty) are linked to knowledge.
What matters, as you say, is creating new ideas to solve new problems and not constantly going on about whether or not we are justified in what we are doing. That is a barren wasteland.