Comment on Popperian Decision making

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 04:11:01 GMT

Show it how? I can conjecture it. Got a criticism?

I'm replying a second time to this remark because thinking about it more it illustrates a major problem you are having. You are using a specific set of epistemological tools and notation when that is one of the things that is in fact in dispute. That's unproductive and is going to get people annoyed.

It is all the more severe because many of these situations are cases where the specific epistemology doesn't even matter. For example, the claim under discussion is the claim that " people who can only be narrowly interpreted as Popperian outperform people who are not Popperian" That's something that could be tested regardless of epistemology. To use a similar example, if someone is arguing for Christianity and they claim that Christians have a longer lifespan on average then I don't need to go into a detailed discussion about epistemology to examine the data. If I read a paper, in whatever branch of science, I could be a Popperian, a Bayesian, completely uncommitted, or something else, and still read the paper and come to essentially the same results.

Trying to discuss claims using exactly the framework in question is at best unproductive, and is in general unhelpful.

Discuss