Utopia, you are standing in it!

The two articles I want to discuss today are fascinating, for they raise a problem that’s now vexing many scientists (especially physicists)—the problem of testability. (Thanks to reader Mark H. for calling my attention to them.)

It all goes back to the philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994). Popper’s views about what made a theory “scientific” were immensely influential. They’re summed up in the Wikipedia piece on him:

A theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments. If the outcome of an experiment contradicts the theory, one should refrain from ad hoc manoeuvres that evade the contradiction merely by making it less falsifiable.

In other words, a theory that can’t in principle be shown to be wrong isn’t a scientific theory. But I disagree with that characterization, and the one from Wikipedia, in two ways.  First, a…

The provocative title of the Scientific American Article below, by physicist Mano Singham, is, I think, deeply misleading.  The idea that science progresses by eliminating incorrect explanations, which is what falsification is all about, seems to me not only a good strategy, but one that’s historically worked very well. To say it’s a myth is not even wrong.

But let’s hear why Singham says that falsification can’t work. Click on the screenshot to read his piece.

Before we get to Singham’s argument, we notice that we can immediately think of scientific theories that have been definitively falsified. One is that the Earth is flat. That has been falsified by any number of observations, and now nobody except loons accepts a flat planet. Alternatively, the Genesis story of creation, once a “scientific” explanation for the origin of life and, especially, humans, has also been falsified, also by any number of observations. …

On November 14, 2011, W.W. Norton & Company published Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942, the first volume of Ian W. Toll’s Pacific War Trilogy. In twelve chapters and an epilogue which take up 493 pages of narrative, Toll covers the first six months of the Pacific War that pitted the Japanese Empire against the combined forces of the United States and the British Empire, as well as the small Dutch military contingent based in what was then the Netherlands East Indies – modern day Indonesia – from the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941)  to the fate-changing Battle of Midway (June 4-6, 1942) and its immediate aftermath.

By writing Pacific Crucible, Toll, whose first book of naval history Six Frigates: The Epic Story of the Founding of the U.S. Navy won the Samuel…

I was pondering this question the other day while observing a hilarious interchange between two such people, Robert Reich and Elon Musk.

Reich is in many ways a creature of the distant past. An old-style American Boomer “liberal” economist who strongly pushes old-fashioned ideas like boosting the minimum wage, empowering unions, and so forth. I only know of him because he was Secretary of Labour in Bill Clinton’s first Presidential term (1993-1997). He was disappointed to find that Clinton’s famous “triangulation” strategy for winning re-election in 1996 meant that Reich’s economic ideas around labour were never implemented to the extent he wanted.

Since then he has maintained a steady patter of pushing these ideas through books and articles. He’s also on Twitter and as an example of how the world has changed, he may have been surprised to find that modern Robber Barons of our age are not…

Truth be told, I think Popper would have approved of the identification effort. How could the person who advanced falsification not have approved of an attempt to address endogeneity and unobserved variables? But most people ignore an important aspect of Popper’s beliefs about scientific theories. He also thought that theories deserve special attention if they make unexpected predictions. Thus, falsification was very powerful if combined with creative derivation of hypotheses.

Now, identification is not in any way contrary to that view. Instrumental variables, or any other technique addressing identification, can be used to test  unexpected hypotheses. However, real scientific practice is about trade offs. Should I spend my time on theory building or some other activities? My view of the identification craze isn’t that it’s wrong. My view is that it’s “end game.” In other words, identification is a luxury when you have an abundance of data and a pretty clear…

An important element of the scientific method is that hypotheses must be testable, potentially falsifiable, to be scientific. That we build theories by testing hypotheses and rejecting them if proved wrong by experiential evidence. And not just hypotheses. Prevailing theories are also constantly open to potential falsification, testing against new evidence and changing to incorporate new findings.

The concept of falsification in science was popularised by Karl Popper.

But who does this testing?

It’s not a matter of personal responsibility. A scientist who advances a new hypothesis is not just left alone to try to falsify it. After all, scientists are human too. They have their own emotions, biases, beliefs and preconceived ideas. They are just a susceptible as anyone else to adopting a blinkered approach to any such testing. In fact, most scientists probably look for experimental procedures which would show their pet hypothesis in a favourable…