Reddit reviews Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (Routledge Classics)
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> They should not have a place at the table, building a free, open, and tolerant society
I think you may stumble on the interpretation of Popper's paradox, as it is often given as reason to infringe upon the first amendment rights of those with repugnant viewpoints.
Popper insists that intolerance must not be tolerated, but our evaluation of ideas that are intolerant, repugnant, or otherwise must continue. See Popper's Conjectures & Refutations. Without getting too philosophical, ideas don't die, and people can arrive upon incorrect, intolerant, and repugnant values independently of extremist fringe movements.
Back on topic, whether or not you feel they should, Neo-Nazis do have a seat at the table. They vote. They can run for office and be elected to lead. And as citizens of the United States, Neo-Nazis share in all the protections they want to deprive of others.
Popper's "rational" society does not tolerate intolerance but accounts for the irrational members within it.
The way to mitigate the effect of these irrational members is to permit the irrational to expose themselves, espouse their irrational conjectures, and rebuke them with society's refutation. Protesters and Antifa, the hotel canceling the event space, 4channers identifying the torch-bearers and notifying their employers, and their employers firing them, are each examples of society's refutations of the Nazi march in Charlottesville.
For two of the most well know (albeit conflicting) looks at how science changes over time, you can check out Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge by Karl Popper and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Khun.
See also the Philosophy of Science, Science Studies, and the History of Science.
And there are also subreddits devoted to /r/PhilosophyofScience, this is a good introductory post
Also, this comic
Here are mine..
Five works by Karl Popper, who IMHO is the greatest skeptical thinker who ever lived:
And two books by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, who may be the greatest skeptical thinker currently living:
Taleb has also just come out with another book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, which is funny and has an important message, but doesn't really go deep into his ideas as the earlier books. Personally I am looking forward to his next book on the subject of "Anti-Fragility", a concept coined by Taleb himself.
Any serious reader of /r/skeptic should be familiar with the ideas put forward by both of these men.
Edit: Formatting.
Book: Conjectures and Refutations, by Karl Popper (my first cognitive 'Copernican revolution')
Event: everything after undergrad.
You should study epistemology! There's a funny thing about Truth: it is impossible to find it unless you know what it looks like. If you did happen to stumble upon some absolute, undefiled Truth, how would you know that's what it really was? You'd have to recognize that it matches what you already know is True.
That's why it's impossible to logic anyone to faith. God is Truth, and He reveals Himself to whom He will. If He hasn't revealed Himself to someone, the Truth is not in them, and when they do get hit upside the head with a little bit of truth by an apologist, they can't recognize it as Truth--it's logically impossible.
But there's a very sobering flip side: if you do not know (with absolute certainty) what is True, you cannot say for certain that anything is true or false. How could you? That means that if you do not know God, it is impossible to know anything.
That's about three years worth of part-time study condensed into 10 sentences so it probably doesn't read that well, but I guarantee you that the more you study it the more glorious it will become.
> For the next two years, I delved into the literature on Venezuela with renewed interest. Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold’s book, A Dragon in the Tropics, it turned out, was particularly well-researched and compelling. Since I could no longer get my writing published in any of the outlets for which I’d previously written, I redirected my energies into making a new film entitled In the Shadow of the Revolution with the help of a Venezuelan filmmaker and friend, Arturo Albarrán, and I wrote my political memoir for an adventurous anarchist publisher. But what preoccupied me more and more were the larger questions of socialism versus capitalism, and the meaning of liberalism.
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> I’d visited Cuba twice—in 1994 and again in 2010—and now, with my experience of Venezuela, I felt I’d seen the best socialism could offer. Not only was that offering pathetically meagre, but it had been disastrously destructive. It became increasingly clear to me that nothing that went under that rubric functioned nearly as well on any level as the system under which I had been fortunate enough to live in the US. Why then, did so many decent people, whose ethics and intelligence and good intentions I greatly respected, continue to insist that the capitalist system needed to be eliminated and replaced with what had historically proven to be the inferior system of socialism?
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> The strongest argument against state control of the means of production and distribution is that it simply didn’t—and doesn’t—work. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding—and in this case, there was no pudding at all. In my own lifetime, I’ve seen socialism fail in China, fail in the Soviet Union, fail in Eastern Europe, fail on the island of Cuba, and fail in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas. And now the world is watching it fail in Venezuela, where it burned through billions of petro-dollars of financing, only to leave the nation worse off than it was before. And still people like me had insisted on this supposed alternative to capitalism, stubbornly refusing to recognize that it is based on a faulty premise and a false epistemology.
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> As long ago as the early 1940s, F.A. Hayek had identified the impossibility of centralized social planning and its catastrophic consequences in his classic The Road to Serfdom. Hayek’s writings convinced the Hungarian economist, János Kornai, to dedicate an entire volume entitled The Socialist System to demonstrating the validity of his claims. The “synoptic delusion”—the belief that any small group of people could hold and manage all the information spread out over millions of actors in a market economy—Kornai argued, leads the nomenklatura to make disastrous decisions that disrupt production and distribution. Attempts to “correct” these errors only exacerbate the problems for the same reasons, leading to a whole series of disasters that result, at last, in a completely dysfunctional economy, and then gulags, torture chambers, and mass executions as the nomenklatura hunt for “saboteurs” and scapegoats.
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> The synoptic delusion—compounded by immense waste, runaway corruption, and populist authoritarianism—is what led to the mayhem engulfing Venezuela today, just as it explains why socialism is no longer a viable ideology to anyone but the kind of true believer I used to be. For such people, utopian ideologies might bring happiness into their own lives, and even into the lives of those around them who also delight in their dreams and fantasies. But when they gain control over nations and peoples, their harmless dreams become the nightmares of multitudes.
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> Capitalism, meanwhile, has dramatically raised the standard of living wherever it has been allowed to arise over the past two centuries. It is not, however, anything like a perfect or flawless system. Globalization has left many behind, even if their lives are far better than those of their ancestors just two hundred years ago, and vast wealth creation has produced vast inequalities which have, in turn, bred resentment. Here in California, the city of Los Angeles, “with a population of four million, has 53,000 homeless.” Foreign policy misadventures and the economic crash of 2008 opened the door to demagogues of the Left and the Right eager to exploit people’s hopes and fears so that they could offer themselves as the solution their troubled nations sought to the dystopian woe into which liberal societies had fallen. In his fascinating recent jeremiad Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen itemizes liberal democracy’s many shortcomings and, whether or not one accepts his stark prognosis, his criticisms merit careful thought and attention.
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> Nevertheless, markets do work for the majority, and so does liberal democracy, as dysfunctional as it often is. That is because capitalism provides the space for ingenuity and innovation, while liberal democracy provides room for free inquiry and self-correction. Progress and reform can seem maddeningly sluggish under such circumstances, particularly when attempting to redress grave injustice or to meet slow-moving existential threats like climate change. But I have learned to be wary of those who insist that the perfect must be the enemy of the good, and who appeal to our impatience with extravagant promises of utopia. If, as Deneen contends, liberalism has become a victim of its own success, it should be noted that socialism has no successes to which it can fall victim. Liberalism’s foundations may be capable of being shored up, but socialism is built on sand, and from sand. Failures, most sensible people realize, should be abandoned.
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> That is probably why Karl Popper advocated cautious, piecemeal reform of markets and societies because, like any other experiment, one can only accurately isolate problems and make corrections by changing one variable at a time. As Popper observed in his essay “Utopia and Violence”:
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> > The appeal of Utopianism arises from the failure to realize that we cannot make heaven on earth. What I believe we can do instead is to make life a little less terrible and a little less unjust in each generation. A good deal can be achieved in this way. Much has been achieved in the last hundred years. More could be achieved by our own generation. There are many pressing problems which we might solve, at least partially, such as helping the weak and the sick, and those who suffer under oppression and injustice; stamping out unemployment; equalizing opportunities; and preventing international crime, such as blackmail and war instigated by men like gods, by omnipotent and omniscient leaders. All this we might achieve if only we could give up dreaming about distant ideals and fighting over our Utopian blueprints for a new world and a new man.
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> Losing faith in a belief system that once gave my life meaning was extremely painful. But the experience also reawakened my dormant intellectual curiosity and allowed me to think about the world anew, unencumbered by the circumscriptions of doctrine. I have met new people, read new writers and thinkers, and explored new ideas I had previously taken care to avoid. After reading an interview I had given to one of my publishers a year ago, I was forwarded an email by the poet David Chorlton. What I’d said in that interview, he wrote, “goes beyond our current disease of taking sides and inflexible non-thinking. I’m reading Havel speeches again, all in the light of the collective failure to live up to the post-communist opportunities. We’re suffering from a lack of objectivity—is that because everyone wants an identity more than a solution to problems?”
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> Clifton Ross writes occasionally for Caracas Chronicles, sporadically blogs at his website, [www.cliftonross.com](http://www.cliftonross.com/) and sometimes even tweets @Clifross
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> Note:
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> 1 Considerable confusion surrounds the definitions of “socialism” and “capitalism.” Here, I am using “socialism” to mean a system in which the state destroys the market and takes control of all capital, as well as the production and distribution of goods and services. I am using “capitalism” here to refer to a market economy in which the state, as a disinterested party, or a “referee,” sets guidelines for markets but allows private actors to own and use capital to produce and distribute goods and services.
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