CIRCLE WITH A DOT

Yesterday, I left home vowing to Dawn that I’d “finish the damn blog post.”

Today, I left home vowing to Dawn that I’d “finish the damn blog post.”

I haven’t. I don’t think I dare go home.

@michaelgemar @futurebird I’ve always thought the Minds treat humans as pets. I never had much of a shared interest with Twitter the Sugar Glider, but I would let her lick yogurt off my finger because she made such charming “this is *so* good” noises.

Jinx the Red-Eared Slider (turtle) became increasingly tiresome as he aged, but we couldn’t just throw him away. That’s not what a respectable person in my culture would do. Same for Minds?

@GeePawHill @billseitz “I suspect they were often ignored” ought to be posted in giant letters where anyone involved in a data visualization or consolidation project should see them.

A neat experiment: how would putting that in the startup instructions for an LLM affect the resulting product?

@GeePawHill Have you read the Aubrey/Maturin series? It’s partly an extended essay on the knife’s-edge dance between the corrupting effects of inviolate power and being a social animal. And power due to position vs. power due to individual accomplishment.

@Spoofer3 As my writer’s block intensifies, I suppose I should be looking into LLMs, but I’ve managed to convince myself (enough) that The Struggle Is the Reward, given that I’m not getting paid, even in endorphin hits at being read. (I don’t track page views. That way lies madness. More madness, I mean.)

@Spoofer3 How are LLMs at things like callbacks and foreshadowing?¹ I think those are important for holding the reader.

How are they at quirky/unexpected combinations? For example, I was rather pleased when I used Lincoln’s old joke:

L: If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?
A: Five.
L: Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

… as an organizing theme in an essay about Popper and Marxism (ended up tossing the idea).

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callback_(comedy)

…

This, via @Spoofer3, is what Claude Sonnet 4.6 said in response to my prompt. It’s pretty good as a summary of the controversy. I have quibbles, and it’s dry, but… damn.

Spoofer3 (@Spoofer3@infosec.exchange)

@marick@mstdn.social Per Claude Sonnet 4.6 # The Mote in the Methodologist's Eye: Popper, Lakatos, and the Falsification of Their Own Historiography ## I. The Claim and Its Problems Karl Popper's critique of Marxism in *The Open Society and Its Enemies* (1945) and *Conjectures and Refutations* (1963) rests substantially on a historical claim: that Marxists, confronted with the Russian Revolution occurring in a pre-industrial rather than advanced capitalist society, responded by reinterpreting their theory to accommodate this "refutation" rather than abandoning it. Popper treats this as a paradigm case of immunizing a theory against falsification — the hallmark of pseudoscience. Lakatos, developing his methodology of scientific research programmes in *The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes* (1978), inherits this example and deploys it similarly, contrasting "degenerative" problem-shifts (ad hoc accommodation) with "progressive" ones (genuine prediction). The difficulty, as several scholars have documented, is that the historical premise is false in a specific and consequential way. Marx and Engels did not unambiguously predict revolution would first occur in the most advanced capitalist nations to the exclusion of others. Marx's 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich explicitly entertained the possibility that the Russian *obshchina* (peasant commune) could serve as the basis for a socialist transformation without Russia passing through full capitalist development, provided revolution occurred alongside Western uprisings. Engels made similar qualifications. Lenin's *What Is To Be Done?* (1902) and his subsequent theoretical writings on imperialism and the "weakest link" explicitly theorized why revolution might break out at the periphery of the capitalist system rather than its core. Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, developed before 1917, provided a coherent theoretical framework anticipating exactly the kind of revolution that occurred. These are not post-hoc accommodations; they are pre-revolutionary predictions or principled theoretical revisions made decades before 1917. The point is not that Marxism is therefore scientific by Popper's criteria. The point is that Popper and Lakatos constructed a false historical narrative to illustrate their epistemological categories, and this falsity is not incidental — it is load-bearing in their argument. ## II. What the Error Reveals About Critical Rationalism Popper's criterion of demarcation holds that a theory is scientific insofar as it generates bold, falsifiable predictions and its proponents remain genuinely open to abandoning it when those predictions fail. The rationality of science, on his account, consists precisely in this openness — the willingness to let evidence adjudicate between theories. In *The Logic of Scientific Discovery* (1934/1959) and subsequently, Popper insists that intellectual honesty requires specifying in advance what would count as a refutation. The Marxism example is meant to demonstrate that Marxists violated this norm. But when the historiography is corrected, a structural problem emerges: Popper himself did not apply his own standard to his historical claim about Marxism. He did not cite primary Marxist sources demonstrating the specific prediction he claims was made and then immunized. He relied on a caricature — arguably the received anti-Marxist polemical tradition of Cold War liberalism — and treated it as established fact. The claim functions rhetorically rather than evidentially within his text. This is not a trivial slip. Popper's entire methodological architecture distinguishes between "rational" and "irrational" responses to apparent refutation. A rational response, on his account, involves genuine engagement with the disconfirming evidence and willingness to revise or abandon. An irrational response involves reinterpretation that saves the theory at any cost. Yet Popper's own treatment of Marxism exhibits the structure he condemns: a fixed conclusion (Marxism is pseudoscience) supported by evidence that, when challenged, could always be accommodated by shifting the specification of what the original "Marxist prediction" actually was. Lakatos is, in some respects, more sophisticated. His framework explicitly acknowledges that all research programmes have a "protective belt" of auxiliary hypotheses that absorb anomalies while the "hard core" is preserved, and that this is not inherently irrational — what matters is whether the programme is progressive or degenerative. But Lakatos's application of this framework to Marxism in his essay "Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes" (in *Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge*, 1970, ed. Lakatos and Musgrave) reproduces Popper's historical error rather than interrogating it. He accepts without independent examination that Marxist responses to the Russian Revolution constituted degenerative problem-shifts rather than progressive theoretical development. Given that Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution and Lenin's theory of imperialism represent genuine extensions of Marxist theory that *predicted* novel facts — including the locus of revolution — rather than merely accommodating known facts, this classification is questionable on Lakatos's own criteria. ## III. The Self-Application Problem The deeper issue is one of self-application — a classic problem in epistemology that Popper and Lakatos handle inconsistently. If critical rationalism is itself a theory about rational procedure, it should be subject to its own standards. Specifically, the claim that Marxism functions as a degenerative research programme ought to be assessable against the evidence, and where the evidence fails to support it, the claim should be revised. John Worrall and Gregory Currie, in their editorial work on Lakatos's *Philosophical Papers* (1978), note the degree to which Lakatos's historiography of science was consciously reconstructive — in his phrase, offering "rational reconstructions" rather than actual history. Lakatos was explicit that the methodology of scientific research programmes is normative, evaluating episodes of science against a rational ideal. But this creates a significant problem: if the historical examples deployed to motivate and illustrate the normative framework are themselves inaccurate, the framework is being bootstrapped on false foundations. The normative theory purports to explain why science succeeds and pseudoscience fails, but if the paradigm cases of failure are not correctly described, the explanatory and demarcating work is undermined. Feyerabend, whose *Against Method* (1975) constitutes the most sustained response to Lakatos's program, made a related point: the methodology of research programmes, applied rigorously to actual scientific history, tends to condemn well-accepted science as irrational and exonerate theories retrospectively judged as failures. His specific challenges to Lakatos's historiography, including their extended correspondence published posthumously, question whether the progressive/degenerative distinction can be applied consistently. The Marxism case sharpens this challenge considerably: if Lenin's theory of imperialism and Trotsky's permanent revolution are progressive theoretical developments within Marxism — explaining the novel fact of revolution at the capitalist periphery with a theoretical elaboration made *before* that fact — then Popper and Lakatos's classification of Marxism as pseudoscientific on these grounds fails even by their own criteria. ## IV. Demarcation and Its Limits The demarcation problem — distinguishing science from non-science — was Popper's central preoccupation. His solution, falsifiability, has been criticized on numerous grounds, including by Lakatos himself, who recognized that no single experiment falsifies a theory because the target of any test is always a conjunction of the theory with auxiliary hypotheses (the Duhem-Quine thesis). Lakatos's research programme methodology was intended to address this by evaluating series of theories over time rather than individual conjunctions. What the Marxism case reveals is that both thinkers' demarcation criteria are vulnerable to a problem that is not primarily logical but methodological in a different sense: the application of the criteria depends on accurate description of the theories being evaluated. Demarcation is not a purely formal procedure; it requires faithful representation of what a theory actually predicts, how its proponents actually respond to anomalies, and what counts as a genuine theoretical development versus an ad hoc accommodation. If the input to the demarcation procedure is distorted — if the theory is described in a simplified or polemically convenient form — then the procedure yields unreliable output regardless of its internal validity. This is a structural limitation of the Popperian program that goes beyond the Marxism case. Ian Hacking's work on the sociology and history of scientific knowledge, and Larry Laudan's critique of Popper and Lakatos in *Progress and Its Problems* (1977), both point toward the same issue: any demarcation criterion that abstracts away from the actual content and context of theories risks being applied to straw versions of those theories. Laudan argues that Popper's falsifiability criterion fails as a demarcation device both because it excludes theories we want to count as scientific and includes theories we want to exclude, and because its application in practice depends on judgment calls that the criterion itself cannot adjudicate. cont.

Infosec Exchange (infosec.exchange)

I need to think about this.

@Spoofer3 Damn. That’s… not bad.

I have quibbles, but… damn, that’s not a bad description of the issues.

If the response is “whoever asked that question needs to touch grass and not spend a couple of hours a day building up to weird-ass blog posts,” I’d be impressed. It’s probably good advice.

How not to be a sucker 1: introduction

A blog with mostly supplemental material for the Oddly Influenced podcast

(blog.oddly-influenced.dev)

Popper by example

A blog with mostly supplemental material for the Oddly Influenced podcast

(blog.oddly-influenced.dev)

I’m too lazy to do it myself, but I’d be interested to see what an LLM would do with:

“Write an essay on what Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos’ comments about the Marxist response to the Russian revolution – which they claim Marxists said couldn’t happen (though that contradicts actual Marxist writings) – says about their theory of critical rationality aka the scientific method. Include citations to the literature. Avoid psychological explanations for why they said things that are not true.”

Time for the faculty, staff, and students at Yale Computer Science to learn about the “cut direct”: “A cut direct must be employed only when someone has done something truly horrible and everyone in your social circle knows it.” (3/3)

“I was recommending her for a job I thought she'd like. When you do that--when you actually care about a rec letter--you keep the potential boss's habits in mind,” Gelernter wrote in the email to his colleagues, seemingly referring to Epstein. (1/3)

“This one was obsessed with girls (like every other unmarried billionaire in Manhattan; in fact, like every other heterosex male), and if I hadn't said what I did in that letter ten-odd years ago, he would certainly have called me & asked for a lot more aesthetic detail. (This is how men behave.)”

https://yaledailynews.com/articles/gelernter-tells-dean-he-stands-by-praising-student-s-looks-to-epstein… (2/3)

“Epstein had pitched him on a potential art exhibit titled “Statutory” that would showcase underage models dressed to look older than they were. “You are incredible,” Ross told Epstein in response to the idea.”

I hope I speak for all of us when I say: Ick. Gross. What the hell is wrong with you?

Universities need a different funding model than hiring administrators whose main job is sucking up to rich assholes and worse.

Government, too.

Professors in the Epstein Files Begin to Face Consequences

Several faculty members who spoke regularly with Epstein have been stripped of their titles or teaching duties. Nearly two weeks after the largest trove of Epstein files was released, some of Jeffrey Epstein’s regular academic pen pals are facing consequences for their correspondence with the late sex offender.

Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs (www.insidehighered.com)