Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are cracking
open a file that is, well, it's deceptively heavy.
Yeah. It looks like one thing on the surface,
maybe a bit of dry philosophy, but once you actually
start reading, you realize we are dealing with
the operating system of the modern world. That
is not an exaggeration at all. We are looking
at a figure who essentially reset the board for
how we think. Really? In the 20th and now the
21st centuries? We're talking about Sir Karl
Popper. Yeah. And I have to be honest with you,
and with everyone listening, before we really
dug into the research for this, I had him filed
away in my brain as the meme guy. The meme guy.
You know the one, the little comic strip that
goes around about the paradox of tolerance? It
pops up on my feet every single time there's
a controversy about free speech or, you know,
canceling someone. And the gist everyone takes
from it is we shouldn't tolerate intolerant people.
Simple as that. Right. Which is a very catchy
slogan. But as we are going to find out, it is
a massive, massive oversimplification of what
Popper actually believed. It's like summarizing,
I don't know, Romeo and Juliet as a story about
bad dating choices. Right. Exactly. And that's
our mission today. We want to go way beyond the
meme. We're going to see how this guy, a cabinetmaker
turned philosopher. completely dismantled the
idea that science is about finding truth, and
then used that exact same logic to tear apart
totalitarianism. It is a massive scope. I mean,
we're going to go from the behavior of subatomic
particles all the way up to the behavior of dictators.
Wow. But there is a single beautiful thread connecting
it all, the problem of certainty. So let's set
the vibe for the listener. Because when I think
of philosopher, I think of, you know, ancient
Greece, togas, or maybe a dusty French salon.
But Popper is different. Very, very different.
You have to imagine Vienna in the 1920s. It's
that period between the wars. The old Austro
-Hungarian Empire has just collapsed. Chaos.
Total chaos. The city is poor. It's starving
in places. But it is also intellectually electric.
You have these coffee houses just filled with
radicals, artists, scientists. Freud is there.
Wittgenstein is there. Everybody is arguing about
the future. But it's not just like polite debate,
is it? The world is literally burning down around
them. Exactly. It's a pressure cooker. People
are desperate for answers. They want to know
what is going to happen next. Is the future going
to be communism? Is it going to be fascism? They
want a system. A prophecy. A prophecy. Exactly.
And in the middle of this, you have this young
Karl Popper who looks at all these people claiming
they have the answer. And he basically says,
You're all asking the wrong question. I love
that. The professional buzzkill of Vienna. So
we have this dossier on him, his biography, his
science, his politics. Where do we even start
with a guy like this? We have to start with the
concept that underpins absolutely everything
he did. The core paradox. OK, lay it on us. It's
the paradox of knowledge itself. I mean, most
of us, especially if we love science, we grow
up with this idea that science is the ultimate
truth machine. You observe something, you test
it, you prove it, and now it is a fact. Capital
F. Right. Trust the science. Right. That phrase
implies that science is a solid block of granite,
that it's settled. And Popper takes a sledgehammer
to that granite. He says that science can never,
ever prove anything is true. Okay, hold on. You're
going to have to walk me through this because
that sounds like something a flat earther would
say on a YouTube comment thread. You know, you
can't prove the earth is round. I know. It sounds
counterintuitive, but stick with me. Okay, so
if I drop this pen, it hits the desk. I do it
again, it hits the desk. If I do that a million
times... Haven't I proven the theory of gravity?
You've proven that the pen fell a million times.
You have not, in a strictly logical sense, proven
it will fall the million and first time. But
come on, that's just being pedantic, isn't it?
Of course it's going to fall. The sun is going
to rise tomorrow. Is it? This is the problem
of induction. It goes way back to the philosopher
David Hume, but Popper really weaponized it.
The assumption you're making, the one we all
make, is that the future will resemble the past.
Yeah. But there is no logical rule that guarantees
that. It's an assumption, a very useful one,
but it's still just a leap of faith. Give me
a real world example where that assumption fails.
Something less, you know, the sun explodes. The
classic one is the turkey. The turkey. Bertrand
Russell's turkey. Imagine you're a turkey on
a farm. Every single day at 9 a .m., a friendly
human comes and gives you food. Okay. I'm a happy
turkey. You're a very happy turkey. And you're
a scientific turkey, so you collect data. Day
after day, week after week, month after month,
the data is confirmed. When the man comes at
9 a .m., I get food. Your theory is verified
hundreds of times. You have supreme confidence.
I feel like I know where this is going. And then
it's the day before Thanksgiving. The man comes
at 9 a .m., and instead of feeding you, he wrings
your neck. Your theory, which had been verified
hundreds of times, was catastrophically wrong.
Okay, that's a good one. So the dossier also
mentions swans. This feels a bit more down to
earth. This is the famous white swan problem.
It's the same logic. Imagine you are a European
naturalist in the 1600s. You have spent your
entire life studying birds. You have traveled
from England to France to Germany, all over Europe.
Every single swan you have ever seen, and you've
seen thousands of them, is white. So I write
in my notebook, all swans are white. And I feel
pretty good about it. That's a scientific fact.
It feels like a fact. You have thousands of data
points confirming it. You have verified your
theory over and over and over again. You tell
all your naturalist friends. It's in the textbooks.
All swans are white. But then you hop on a boat,
a very long and dangerous voyage, and you sail
to Australia. And I see a black swan. One. Single.
Black. Swan. And in that one second, your entire
lifetime of proof, all those thousands of observations,
all the textbooks. It's all just considerated.
Incinerated. It's brutal, but it reveals the
fundamental asymmetry that Popper was obsessed
with. No amount of confirming instances, no number
of white swans can ever prove the theory is true
forever. But one black swan can prove it is false.
Instantly. Exactly. You can never know for certain
if you're right, but you can definitely absolutely
know if you're wrong. And that? For him, it is
the secret weapon of science. That's everything.
We aren't in the business of verifying truth.
We are in the business of hunting for black swans.
We are in the business of falsification. Okay,
this brings us to what the notes call the demarcation
problem. So this is how we tell the difference
between real science and, you know, nonsense,
right? Correct. In Popper's time, this was a
huge, huge issue. He was looking at the intellectual
landscape of Vienna in the 1920s. On one side,
you had Albert Einstein, this towering figure
of physics. On the other side, you had psychoanalysts,
Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. And Popper noticed
something weird. They were all considered scientists
back then, weren't they? They were all doing
science, supposedly. They were. They were all
part of this new, exciting wave of knowledge.
But Popper felt there was a fundamental difference
in how they operated. Let's look at Einstein
first. The notes mention the 1919 solar eclipse
expedition. This is a crucial story. Yeah, flesh
this out for me, because usually people just
say Einstein was right, but it was actually a
huge gamble, wasn't it? It was a massive gamble,
a career -ending gamble. Einstein had this theory
of general relativity. It was beautiful math,
but it was just paper. And it made a very specific,
very weird prediction that gravity from a massive
object like the sun actually warps the fabric
of space -time. Which means light should bend
as it passes by. Exactly. Light passing near
the sun should bend, which sounds insane. straight
line. Newton said light goes straight. For 200
years, that was the rule. So Einstein is basically
challenging Newton. He's saying Newton was wrong.
So the British astronomer Arthur Eddington organizes
this expedition to the island of Principe off
the coast of Africa to photograph the stars during
a total solar eclipse. And why an eclipse? Why
did it have to be an eclipse? Because that's
the only time you can see the stars that are
right next to the sun in the sky. Normally, the
sun's glare would block them out. So the plan
was, take a picture of the stars in their normal
position months earlier. Then, during the eclipse,
take a picture of the same stars. If Einstein
was right, the stars in the eclipse photo would
appear to be in slightly the wrong position.
Because their light had curved around the sun
on its way to the camera? Precisely. And if they
were in the normal position... Then Einstein
is wrong. His theory is dead. Utterly dead. He
literally wrote to Eddington saying... If the
redshift is not there, then the theory is untenable.
He gave the world a roadmap to destroy his life's
work. He put his neck on the guillotine. That
is what Popper called a risky prediction. He
dared the universe to prove him wrong. Yes. Now,
compare that to what Popper saw with the psychoanalysts.
He actually worked for a time in Alfred Adler's
clinics for children in Vienna. He saw this firsthand.
And this is where that example of the drowning
child comes from. This really clicked for me.
It's a perfect illustration of what Popper called
pseudoscience. It's something that looks like
science but isn't. So Popper posits two scenarios.
Scenario A. A man pushes a child into a lake
to drown him. Horrible. Scenario B. A man dives
into a lake to save a drowning child. Heroic.
Total opposites. Evil and good. But look at how
Adler's theory of inferiority complexes handles
them. Why did the man push the child? Adler would
say something like he is suffering from a deep
-seated inferiority complex. By committing this
heinous crime, he is attempting to prove to himself
that he has the power to dare to defy society.
Makes a certain kind of sense, I guess. And the
man who saved the child? Adler would say. He's
also suffering from an inferiority complex. By
risking his own life to save another, he is proving
to himself that he has the courage to overcome
his feelings of inadequacy. So, wait. The theory
explains the murder and the rescue with the exact
same core logic. Exactly. No matter what the
man does, kill the child, save the child, ignore
the child, dance a jig by the lakeside, the theory
can explain it. It's infinitely flexible. It's
like a net with holes so big it can't catch any
fish. And usually we think that's a good thing.
We think, wow, your theory explains everything.
It must be brilliant. And Popper screams, no.
If a theory explains everything that could possibly
happen, then it explains nothing. It's a horoscope.
You will face a challenge today. Well, yeah,
if you get fired, it fits. If you lose your keys,
it fits. It forbids nothing. That is such a huge
shift in perspective. So a real scientific theory
is defined by what it forbids. It draws a clear
line in the sand and says, if you find a fossil
of a rabbit in the Precambrian era, my entire
theory of evolution is wrong. Precisely. Strength
is not being irrefutable. Strength is being vulnerable
to refutation and surviving the attempt. But
this leads to a bit of an existential crisis,
doesn't it? If we can't verify anything, we're
just waiting around to be falsified. Does that
mean we don't actually know anything? Is all
our technology, our medicine, just a lucky guess
it hasn't failed yet? That's the scary interpretation,
and some people do go there. But Popper didn't
view it that way at all. He didn't think it was
nihilistic. He saw it as a dynamic evolutionary
process. He actually had a formula for it. I
saw that in the notes. PS1 to TT1 to EE1 to PS2.
It looks like, I don't know, a chemical equation
or something. It's simpler than it looks. PS1
is problem situation one. We start with a problem.
Why do the planets move like that? That's our
starting point. Okay, that makes sense. Then
we move to TT1, tentative theory. We make a bold
guess. Maybe they move in perfect circles because
God loves circles. Reasonable guess for the time.
Then EE1. Error elimination. This is the Thunderdome.
This is where we attack the theory from every
angle. We make observations. We look for the
black swans. And we realize, wait, the data from
Mars is moving weirdly. It's not a perfect circle.
So the circle theory dies. It's been falsified.
So are we back to the start? Do we know nothing
again? No, this is the crucial part. We are at
PS2, problem situation two. We have a nearer,
better, more refined problem. If it's not a circle,
what the heck is it? And then we make a new tentative
theory, TT2. Maybe it's an ellipse. And we start
the process of error elimination all over again.
So we're failing forward. We are failing our
way to success. We are trading big, crude errors
for smaller, more subtle errors. Popper called
this verisimilitude. Which means truth -likeness.
Exactly. We are getting closer to the truth,
increasing our truth -likeness, even if we can
never be 100 % certain we have arrived at the
final capital T truth. It's like Zeno's paradox.
You get halfway to the wall, then halfway again
and halfway again, but you never quite touch
it. You get close enough to build a GPS system
that can guide a missile to a target or a car
to your house. And for practical purposes, that's
what matters. Okay, before we leave the science
section, I have to challenge you on one thing.
I'm playing the role of the skeptical listener
here. Please do. You said we can't prove anything.
But 2 plus 2 equals 4. Ah, yes. The mathematics
dilemma. I mean, come on. That's not a theory.
That's a fact. You can't falsify that. I can't
go to Australia and find a 2 plus 2 equals 5.
It's just true. You are absolutely right, but
in a very specific sense. Popper had to deal
with this, obviously. And he made a really clever
distinction between pure math and applied math.
What's the difference? Pure math. The statement
2 plus 2 equals 4 is a logical definition. It's
a closed loop of logic. It's true because we
defined the symbol 2 and the symbol 4 and the
operator plus in such a way that it has to be
true. So it's a tautology. It's true by definition.
Exactly. It doesn't tell us anything about the
physical universe. It tells us about the rules
of our own logical language. It's certain, but
it's abstract. Okay, I think I follow. But what
happens when you apply it? The moment you apply
it to the physical world, to world one, as he'd
call it, it becomes a hypothesis. It becomes
falsifiable. Give me an example of that. Popper
used the example of rabbits. If I say two apples
plus two apples equals four apples, that's an
applied theory. And it works. If I put two apples
in a basket and add two more, I have four. The
theory holds up. Sure. But if I take two rabbits
and I add two rabbits and I put them in a box
and wait a year. I see where you're going with
this. You're going to have a lot more than four
rabbits. A lot more. So the applied physical
theory, two rabbits plus two rabbits equals four
rabbits, has been falsified by the biological
process of reproduction. Or think about water
droplets. One drop plus one drop equals... One
bigger drop. So one plus one equals one in that
context. In that physical context, yes. So Popper's
point is elegant. Logical truth is certain but
abstract. Physical truth is concrete but uncertain.
You can never have both at the same time. That
is actually kind of mind bending. The absolute
certainty of math. only works if the physical
world behaves itself according to the rules we
set. And the physical world loves to misbehave.
Okay, so that's the engine of his intellect.
Falsification, error is good, testing is everything.
But I want to pivot now to the man himself. Because
you mentioned earlier that he wasn't just sitting
in a library dreaming this stuff up. He had a
life that really, really informed this worldview.
He really did. This wasn't just an abstract game
for him. He was born in 1902 in Vienna. And we
have to talk about his background because it
sets up the tragedy that follows. He was from
a family of Jewish descent that had converted
to Lutheranism before he was born. So they were
very assimilated. Very assimilated. Very high
culture. His dad was a successful lawyer with
a personal library of something like 12 ,000
to 14 ,000 books. That's not a library. That's
a bunker made of paper. That's unbelievable.
He grew up just swimming in ideas. But Popper
was a bit of a contrarian from day one. He found
formal schooling boring, so he quit school at
16. And here's the detail I love. that grounds
him. He decided he wanted to be a manual laborer.
The rich kid who wants to get his hands dirty.
A classic story. Exactly. He tried street construction
first, but he was physically quite small and
frail, and he literally couldn't handle the heavy
labor. It was breaking him. So he switched apprenticeships
and became a cabinetmaker. He became a carpenter.
A journeyman cabinet maker. And I think this
matters so much. When you make a cabinet, you
can't theorize it into existence. If you measure
the wood wrong, the door doesn't close. Reality
hits you in the face immediately. There's no
wiggle room. It's falsification in wood. Your
theory, this piece is 30 centimeters, is tested
by the saw. Exactly. But while he's sanding wood
by day, he's getting radicalized by night. It's
1919. The First World War is over. Vienna is
in turmoil. Everyone is starving. And the communists
are promising a worker's paradise, a utopia.
A teenage Karl Popper says, sign me up. So he
becomes a Marxist. For a few months. He really
believed they had the answer. They had the scientific
theory of history, you see. They claimed to know
the future. But then the incident at Hörlgass
happens. This is the turning point, isn't it?
Paint the picture for us. It's June 15th, 1919.
There's a protest. The communists are trying
to free some comrades from a police station in
Hurghast. Popper is there, caught up in the fervor.
The crowd is surging. It's chaotic. And then
the police open fire on the protesters. And people
died. Eight young men. Unarmed party comrades.
Some of them were Popper's friends. He saw them
fall. He saw the blood on the pavement. And he
was devastated. He felt personally responsible.
He had been encouraging people to join this movement.
That's a trauma. That stays with you for life.
But the trauma of the deaths wasn't what changed
his philosophy. It was what happened after. He
went back to the party headquarters, expecting
everyone to be in mourning, horrified, expecting
them to say, we made a terrible mistake. We shouldn't
have provoked this. And instead. Instead, the
party leaders were cool. They were calculated.
They told him that this was necessary. They said
the deaths were actually a good thing because
they would intensify the class struggle and hasten
the inevitable revolution. They were accelerationists.
Exactly. They believed that things had to get
worse to get better. They were willing to sacrifice.
human lives for what they called historical destiny.
They treated his dead friends like pawns in a
chess game. Worse. They treated them like variables
in an equation that they were certain was correct.
And that is when Popper snapped. He looked at
these men and had this horrifying epiphany. You
don't know the future. You are guessing. But
you are willing to sacrifice living, breathing
human beings for a guess that you've dressed
up as a scientific certainty. That is the moment.
That's the direct link between his philosophy
of science and his politics. It is the rat trap.
He saw this kind of ideology as a trap where
you justify atrocities today for a paradise tomorrow
that might never come. It poisons everything.
And that sent him on the path to writing The
Open Society and Its Enemies. It did. He realized
that the intellectual arrogance of knowing the
truth is the root of all tyranny. If you are
100 % sure you are right and 100 % sure the revolution
is inevitable, then killing a few people who
stand in your way isn't murder. It's just sweeping
up the dust of history. So he dedicates his life
to fighting that certainty. But he has to run
first, doesn't he? The Nazis are coming. He's
of Jewish descent, living in Vienna in the 1930s.
He knows exactly what's coming. He writes his
first major book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery,
partly as an academic credential, a resume, to
get a job abroad so he can escape. It was literally
his ticket out of Austria. And it worked. He
got a post at Canterbury University College in
New Zealand. So picture this. It's the late 1930s,
early 1940s. Hitler is annexing Austria, invading
Poland. The Holocaust is beginning. The world
is on fire. And Karl Popper is literally on the
other side of the planet in quiet, peaceful,
sheep -filled New Zealand. He must have felt
so helpless, so isolated. He felt incredible
guilt. He was safe while his friends and family
back in Europe were in mortal danger. Many of
them were murdered. So he decided to make his
next book, The Open Society and Its Enemies,
his war effort. He couldn't shoot a gun, so he
was going to shoot bullets at the ideas that
created Hitler and Stalin. Let's get into that
book, because open society is a term we hear
a lot, usually thanks to George Soros, who was
his student, and we'll get to him later. But
what does Popper actually mean by an open society?
An open society is, at its core, a society that
recognizes it could be wrong. It's a society
that is structured around the principles of the
scientific method. How does that translate to
government and laws? Well, think about its opposite,
a closed society. like a traditional tribe or
a monarchy or a modern dictatorship. In a closed
society, the truth is fixed and handed down from
on high. The leader knows the truth. The ancestors
know the truth. The sacred texts know the truth.
You don't challenge it. It's rigid. It's tribal.
But if the leader is wrong or the sacred texts
are wrong about something, then the society drives
straight off a cliff. There is no mechanism for
error correction. To question the leader is treason.
So an open society is all about building in mechanisms
for error correction. Exactly. And this leads
to his redefinition of democracy. This is really
important. If you ask most people what is democracy,
they'll say rule by the people or the majority
is right. Or choosing the best leader, you know,
finding the wisest person to put in charge. Right.
And the ancient question from Plato onwards was
always who should rule. That's the classic question
of political philosophy. Popper says it's the
wrong question entirely. Why is it the wrong
question? Because if you ask who should rule,
the answer is always some variation of the best
person, the wisest, the strongest, the purest.
But who defines the best? Hitler thought he was
the best. Stalin thought he was the best. It's
an invitation to tyranny. So what's the right
question to ask? The right question, Popper says,
is how can we organize our political institutions
so that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented
from doing too much damage and can be removed
without violence? That is incredibly pragmatic.
It's not about finding a messiah. It's about
damage control. It's negative politics. Just
like science is about eliminating bad theories,
democracy is about peacefully eliminating bad
leaders. The ballot box isn't a magical tool
for finding the truth. It's a nonviolent mechanism
for firing the manager without having to start
a civil war. That makes democracy sound less
like a holy crusade and more like taking out
the trash on a regular basis. Which is... Honestly,
refreshing. It lowers the stakes. And in politics,
lowering the stakes is a very, very good thing.
But this brings us to the main villain of his
book, this idea of historicism. Now, we need
to clarify this because it sounds like he hates
history. He loves history. He's a great historian.
He hates historicism, capital H. This is the
belief that history has a script. That there
are inexorable laws of history, just like there
are laws of physics. The Marxist idea, for example,
that feudalism inevitably leads to capitalism,
which inevitably leads to communism. Exactly.
Or the fascist idea that the Third Reich will
last a thousand years because it is the destiny
of the Aryan race. Popper attacked this with
a logic bomb that I think is just brilliant in
its simplicity. Okay, walk us through the logic
step by step. Step one, the course of human history
is strongly influenced by the growth of human
knowledge. Okay, that seems obvious. We invent
the printing press or the atomic bomb, and history
changes course. Agreed. Step two, we cannot predict,
by rational or scientific methods, the future
growth of our own scientific knowledge. Hold
on, explain that. If you could predict that you
will invent, say, a cure for cancer in the year
2030, you would have to know what that cure is
right now in order to predict it. And if you
knew what it was now, you'd invent it now, not
in 2030. Right. You can't predict an invention
before you invent it. The act of predicting it
is the act of inventing it. Exactly. So the conclusion.
Therefore, we cannot predict the future course
of human history. The future is open. It's not
written. It's not a movie we're just watching.
So anyone standing on a podium telling you history
is on our side or the decline of the West is
inevitable is a fraud. They are selling you a
snake oil prophecy to get you to give up your
freedom and your critical mind. It's incredibly
empowering, but also a little terrifying. Because
if there's no destiny, there's no script, then
we're driving the bus completely without a map.
We are making the map as we go. That is the burden
and the glory of an open society. Okay, we have
to address the elephant in the room. The meme.
The paradox of tolerance. We've set the stage.
Now let's unpack it properly. Let's do it. The
internet version, the one you see in that cartoon,
is basically, if you are intolerant, I don't
have to tolerate you. So I can punch you or ban
you or deplatform you. Which is a very dangerous
and simplistic reading. Yeah. Because who defines
intolerant? If I disagree with your tax policy,
am I being intolerant? Can you silence me? It
becomes a weapon to shut down any dissent. So
what was Popper's actual nuanced argument? He
was a staunch, almost absolute defender of free
speech. He says, and this is a key quote, I do
not imply that we should always suppress the
utterance of intolerant philosophies. As long
as we can counter them by rational argument and
keep them in check by public opinion, suppression
would certainly be most unwise. So if a guy is
standing on a street corner shouting some hateful
garbage, Popper's first instinct is let him shout
and then go over there and debate him. Show everyone
why he's wrong. Yes. Don't make him a martyr.
Don't drive his ideas underground where they
can't be challenged. Defeat him with better ideas
in the open marketplace. But there is a limit.
There is a red line. There is a clear red line.
He says we reserve the right to suppress them,
if necessary, even by force, if they are not
prepared to meet us on the level of rational
argument, but begin by denouncing all argument.
They may forbid their followers to listen to
rational argument. and teach them to answer arguments
by the use of their fists or pistols. So the
moment you stop talking and you pick up a rock,
you lose your right to be tolerated. Or even
the moment you start inciting other people to
pick up rocks and abandon debate. It's not about
the content of their ideas, however vile. It's
about their refusal to participate in the process
of rational debate itself. If you use your freedom
of speech to destroy the very possibility of
free speech for others, you've broken the social
contract of the open society. But it's a measure
of left resort. It's a defensive measure to protect
tolerance, not an offensive tool for canceling
people you find annoying. Precisely. That nuance
is missing from 99 .9 % of the Twitter debates
on this topic. Nuance usually is. Before we get
to the really trippy metaphysics, there is one
more political point in the notes. The conspiracy
theory of society. This feels huge right now.
It's the default setting of the modern mind,
isn't it? Something bad happens, a pandemic,
a recession, a war, and we assume someone planned
this. The elites, the deep state, the globalists,
there's always a shadowy group pulling the strings.
Popper says this is a theological error. It's
a secularized version of the belief in gods.
We used to think the gods made the crops fail
or the storms rage. Now we've killed God, so
we had to replace him with something just as
powerful and all -knowing. We replaced him with
conspirators. We assume that powerful people
are competent enough to actually control the
world. And Popper says, they aren't. He says
famously, nothing ever comes off exactly as intended.
Even the most powerful dictator in the world
issues an order. And by the time it trickles
down through the bureaucracy, it gets misinterpreted.
It changes. Then it hits the real world and a
million unintended consequences happen that nobody
could have predicted. So the recession isn't
a secret plot by a cabal of bankers. Yeah. It's
just a massive. complicated screw -up. It's usually
a toxic mix of greed, incompetence, error, and
just the chaotic friction of millions of people
making individual choices. Popper thinks assuming
a conspiracy is actually wildly optimistic because
it implies someone is in control. The reality
that no one is really driving the bus is much,
much scarier. I think I prefer the Illuminati.
At least they have a plan, you know? That's the
psychological appeal. It's comforting. All right,
let's take a deep breath. We've done the science.
We've done the politics. Now... The notes say
we're going to the three worlds. And frankly,
this part of the outline looks a little sci -fi.
It is where Popper gets really creative and a
bit strange. He wasn't just a dry logician. He
had a theory of reality and ontology. He said
the entire universe consists of three distinct
but interacting worlds. Okay. Let's start with
world one. World one is the physical stuff, the
easy stuff. Atoms, rocks, tables, your brain,
the stars, plants, animals, everything that physics,
chemistry, and biology study. Got it. The hardware
of the universe. So what's World 2? World 2 is
the psychological stuff. Your subjective consciousness,
your thoughts, your feelings of joy or pain,
the feeling of seeing the color blue, your memories.
It's the software running inside your individual
head. Okay, the hardware and my personal software.
For a long time, philosophers pretty much stopped
there, right? Matter in mind, dualism. Yeah,
they did. But Popper said, no, there is a third
crucial thing, and he called it World 3. And
what is World 3? World 3 consists of the objective
products of the human mind. Things like myths,
stories, philosophical arguments, scientific
theories, mathematical laws, symphonies, engineering
diagrams, legal codes. But wait a minute. A book
containing a theory is World 1. It's paper and
ink. And my understanding of the theory is, in
my head... That's world two. Why do we need a
separate world three? This is the key. Popper
argued that once you create an idea and put it
out into the world, once you write the book or
compose the symphony, it becomes autonomous.
It takes on a life of its own, independent of
its creator and of any individual mind. I'm not
sure I get that. Give me a concrete example.
Think about the number system. Oh. Oh. They exist
objectively, whether we know about them or not.
So World 3 is like a jungle we planted, but things
are now growing in it that we didn't plant ourselves.
That's a perfect analogy. Or think about an algorithm
today. A team of coders writes a social media
algorithm. That's a World 3 object. That algorithm
is then released onto the Internet. It starts
interacting with millions of teenagers. It starts
changing their self -esteem, which is World 2.
It keeps them awake at night, raising their cortisol
levels, which is World 1. And the coders didn't
intend for the algorithm to cause insomnia in
a kid in Ohio. Exactly. But the World 3 object
is doing it. It has real causal power. It acts
back on World 2 and World 1. World 3 pushes back.
That makes the thought experiment in the outline,
the one about the libraries, really haunting.
It is. Popper asks, If the human race was wiped
out tomorrow, every single world to mind just
gone, and all our machines broke down, world
one tools all gone, but our libraries remained
intact, does the knowledge still exist? If an
alien lands and decodes a physics textbook, the
knowledge is dormant, but it is objectively there.
The solution to a problem is in that book, waiting.
It doesn't need a human mind to actively sustain
it. It has crystallized into a world three object.
I feel like this has to connect to his view on
evolution. Because if ideas and problems can
have this objective power, that changes how we
see biology. Massively. This is his act of Darwinism.
He hated this standard, almost mechanical view
of evolution that was common at the time. This
idea that animals are just passive victims. You
know, oh, the environment got cold, so the ones
with thin fur died. It's too passive. It's too
robotic. Right. Popper proposed the spearhead
model. He said the organism is an explorer. It
has goals. It is trying to solve problems. The
hopeful behavioral monster. I love that name.
It sounds like a rock band. It's great, isn't
it? The core idea is that the behavior often
changes before the body does. The mind leads
the way. How does that work? Take the giraffe.
The old passive view is random mutations produced
a giraffe with a slightly longer neck and that
giraffe survived better and had more babies,
Popper says. Maybe the giraffe's ancestor developed
a preference, a world to desire for the tender
leaves at the tops of the trees. It wanted to
reach them. So it spent its life stretching its
neck. Trying to get to those leaves. It pushed
itself into a new ecological niche. This new
behavior created a new selection pressure. Now,
any small genetic mutation that gave a slightly
longer neck was suddenly hugely valuable. The
mind, the desire, the problem solving led the
way. The physical body followed over generations.
That puts the mind and preference in the driver's
seat of evolution, not just random chance. It
restores a kind of dignity and agency to life.
We aren't just clay being molded by the wind
and rain. We are active agents solving problems.
Which leads us directly to the question of free
will. He was an interactionist dualist, which
is a bit of a mouthful, but he worked with a
neuroscientist, Sir John Eccles, and they basically
believed the non -physical mind, world two, genuinely
controls the physical brain. World one, not just
the other way around. He called the mind the
editor. The editor. What does that mean? Think
of your physical brain as a creative but chaotic
generator. It's constantly throwing up random
thoughts, impulses, ideas, maybe spurred by quantum
indeterminacy at the neuronal level. It's brainstorming.
But you, the self, the conscious world too, mind
you, are the editor. You sit at the desk and
you say, no, not that thought. That's a stupid
idea. No, not that impulse. That would be rude.
Yes, that one. That's a good one. Let's act on
that. So freedom isn't in generating the random
thoughts. It's in selecting which ones to approve
and act on. Exactly. Freedom is the power of
veto. It's the selection mechanism that sits
on top of the random generation. Wow. Okay. We
have built a pretty towering statue of this man.
But we have to be Popperian about Popper himself.
We have to criticize him. We have to try and
falsify him. Who are his biggest critics? The
biggest challenger by far was Thomas Kuhn. He
wrote the hugely influential book, The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions. And he basically said,
Popper, this is a nice, logical story, but have
you ever actually met a scientist? What do you
mean by that? Kuhn argued that in the real world,
scientists don't spend their days actively trying
to falsify their core theories. They love their
theories. They've built their entire careers
on them. them. They have tenure. They have grants.
The sunk cost fallacy is huge in academia. Enormous.
Kuhn said if you spent 30 years working on, say,
string theory and a new experiment comes out
that seems to contradict it, you don't jump for
joy and shout, hooray, falsification. You say
the experimental equipment must be broken or
the data was analyzed wrong. You invent patches
and modifications to protect your theory. So
Kuhn is saying science is more political and
tribal and. Well, more human than Popper's idealized
version. Yes. Kuhn's big idea was that science
works in paradigms. For long periods of normal
science, everyone agrees on the fundamental rules
and they just solve little puzzles within that
framework and they actively ignore the anomalies
until the anomalies get so numerous and so bad
that the whole system crashes. That's a paradigm
shift. So Popper is describing the ideal of how
science should work, and Kuhn is describing the
messy reality of how it often does work. That's
a very fair summary. And Popper really, really
hated Kuhn's view. He called it the myth of the
framework. He thought it was a dangerous, relativistic
idea to say we are all trapped in our paradigms
and can't talk to each other. He believed we
could always break out if we had enough critical
spirit. And what about the naive falsification
critique? The notes mention the discovery of
Neptune. Right. This is the practical issue.
When astronomers in the 19th century looked at
the orbit of Uranus, it was wrong. It didn't
follow Newton's laws precisely. So technically,
Newton's theory of gravity was falsified. Technically,
yes. A strict Popperian would have had to say,
OK, throw Newton in the trash. But they didn't.
They said, maybe the theory is right. But our
assumptions are wrong. Maybe there is another
planet out there that we can't see and its gravity
is pulling on Uranus. So they used Newton's laws
to predict where this invisible planet must be.
Exactly. They pointed their telescopes to that
spot in the sky and there was Neptune. So by
refusing to give up on the theory, by being a
bit dogmatic, they made one of the greatest discoveries
in the history of astronomy. Sometimes being
stubborn is good. If you falsify a good theory
too early because of one weird result, you might
miss the bigger picture. Precisely. Popper later
admitted this. He said, a certain amount of dogmatism
is necessary. You have to defend the theory for
a while to see what it can really do. It's a
delicate balance. You defend it, but you have
to know when to fold them, as they say. Exactly.
The Kenny Rogers philosophy of science. So let's
bring it all home. Why does Karl Popper matter
today? We are sitting here in the mid -2020s.
Why should you, the listener, care about a guy
who died in 1994? Just look at the world around
you. We have the rise of new forms of authoritarianism.
We have strongman leaders promising they alone
can fix it, that they have the answers. That
is the closed society fighting back with a vengeance.
Popper's work is the best intellectual defense
we have. He reminds us that the strongman is
a myth. No one knows the future. And in science
and public life. We have a crisis of trust and
expertise. People don't trust the experts anymore.
Popper gives us a way to rebuild that trust,
but on a more honest foundation. We shouldn't
say, trust me, I'm a scientist, I know the absolute
truth. We should say, trust this finding for
now. Because we have tried our absolute hardest
to break it, to prove it wrong from every angle,
and so far, we couldn't. That is a much more
humble, and frankly, a much more honest pitch.
And finally, on a personal, individual level,
Popper's philosophy teaches us how to think.
It teaches us that being wrong isn't a sin. It's
not a failure of character. It's a necessary
step towards being less wrong. I think that's
the hardest lesson for any of us to learn. Our
egos hate being wrong. It feels like a personal
defeat. But if you can learn to separate your
ego from your ideas, if you can say my idea died
in that argument, but I am still here and now
I know better, that is liberation. That is the
open mind. So here's the challenge for everyone
listening. The next time you are in an argument
about politics, about work, about anything, and
you feel that hot flash of absolute certainty,
that feeling of I am 100 % right, just pause
and ask yourself the popper question. What evidence,
what fact, what piece of information would convince
me that I am wrong about this? And if the answer
that comes back is nothing. Then you aren't thinking.
You're preaching. Yeah. And you've closed the
door to knowledge. We're going to leave you with
one final image to chew on. Go back to that alien
library. The human race is gone. The books are
all there. World 3 is waiting in the dark. Does
the truth of the Pythagorean theorem exist if
there's no one there to read it? Or do we light
it up with our consciousness? Thanks for diving
deep with us. We'll see you in the next one.