> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Agreed. I think the main issue is not with the idea itself of the scientific method, rather than the practical implications and its limitations.
- The main idea is a qualitative one. It doesn't consider all the statistical can of worms about reproducibility.
- Real world experiments rarely reproduce perfectly/exactly. The more the experiment involves more variables (or unknown variables) you can detect an effect but its magnitude might vary.
- Not everything can be reproduced, not everything can be measured perfectly, hence the "study of knowledge" needs to be able to handle those cases, and not just bury their head in the sand and go "la la la this is not scientific let's ignore it"
A bit of a stretch, but I'm also skeptical of the ability of the scientific method to be able to understand/prove anything with (hidden) state/memory.
For a lot of 'skeptics' unproven means wrong and unmeasurable means wrong.
Popper never said ideas needed to be based on reproducible evidence. He also emphasised explanations over just predictability.
They were also doing that before Popper was a thing.
> Whatever "statistical can of worms" there is regarding it sounds like a problem with the statistics being used rather than science.
Not really. It's easier to prove "Drug X cures dying from disease Y 99% of the time" than "Drug X solves issue Y 30% of the time only in individuals with a certain combination of characteristics".
They were also doing that before Popper was a thing.
Yes, but not sure why you are pointing that out.
> Whatever "statistical can of worms" there is regarding it sounds like a problem with the statistics being used rather than science.
Not really. It's easier to prove "Drug X cures dying from disease Y 99% of the time" than "Drug X solves issue Y 30% of the time only in individuals with a certain combination of characteristics".
If you had a complete understanding you would only apply the drug when it would work and have 100% success rate.
There is no way to have 100% understanding of a specific person to have a designer drug for every condition.
Not even Aspirin is 100% effective nor we have a complete understanding of how it works (though there were some discoveries on that regard around 20yrs ago, I think)
It's hard for physics and it's impossible for biology (and other fields) to come up with completely accurate predictions.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1983/04/28/the-karl-popper-...
Not sure that's true.
But we nearly all of us underestimate how much creativity and energy is expended in trying to be normal (or to appear normal, which is much the same thing).
Intellectual humility is not the same quality as personal meekness and geniuses have always had difficult personalities. Philosophers doubly so. How could it be otherwise? How can one create new stuff if one is too agreeable and too susceptible to groupthink?
Btw, the reason falsifiability doesn't have to be falsifiable (by experiment) is that it isn't a scientific idea; it's a philosophical one. It is potentially 'falsifiable' by criticism, however.
The best modern Popper proponent is David Deutsch. See his books The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. They're both packed with interesting ideas and arguments. He says that Popper did indeed solve the problem of induction. And here's a recent paper of his on the logic of experimental testing: https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.02048