Thread by @blair_fix

1/N. This is the first in a series of posts about the philosophy of science. In honor of Richard Feynman's famous phrase, I'm calling this thread "How we fool ourselves".

2/N. In grad school, I constantly heard fellow students (and some professors) marvelling at the explanatory scope of some theory. "It explains so much about the world", they would say. Few seemed to realize that explaining too much is a liability.

3/N. Theories that explain "so much" often have the appearance of being "profound". But in reality, they are "not even wrong". This is physicist Wolfgang Pauli's, phrase for theories that fail to make falsifiable predictions. They are immune to evidence. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_…

4/N. I am convinced that making our theories immune to falsification is the number one way we (scientists) "fool ourselves". Let's look at some examples.

5/N. Here is Karl Popper skewering Marxist, Freudian, and Adlerian theories. In Popper's words, these theories are marked by an "incessant stream of confirmations": staff.washington.edu/lynnhank/Poppe…

6/N. In his book "The Psychoanalytic Movement: the Cunning of Unreason",
Ernest Gellner shows how Freudian psychoanalysis is immune to evidence. Gellner notes that the Freudian Unconscious is "cunning" because it can take on any characteristic that the theorist requires of it.

7/N. One of the most devious tricks in Freudian psychoanalysis is the concept of "resistance" --- the idea that when a patient resists therapy, this is evidence for the validity of Freudian theory. Here is Ernest Gellner:
goodreads.com/book/show/6352…

8/N. Marxists have a similar trick --- the idea of "false consciousness". If the proletariat act in a way that defies Marx's theory of history, we can always say they have internalized the ideology of the ruling class. Here is Friedrich Engels: marxists.org/archive/marx/w…

9/N. Postmodern theorists having similar notion of resistance. If a person is critical of postmodern theory, this person can be dismissed as being a prisoner to the "dominant discourse".

10/N. Economists have the same trick. A person is "rational" if they act selfishly to maximize their utility. But how do we know if they are NOT maximizing utility? The concept of utility maximization is conveniently unfalsifiable.

11/N. The concept of "utility" is one of the most seductive circular ideas in science. It is completely immune to evidence. Here is Joan Robinson: goodreads.com/book/show/3221…

12/N. Geoffrey M. Hodgson notes that "utility-maximising ... has the character of a universal ‘explanation’ that can be made to ‘fit’ any set of events. This is a sign of weakness rather than strength."
et.worldeconomicsassociation.org/files/ETHodgso…

13/N Hodgson notes that utility maximization can be used to explain the behavior of any animal species ... even bacteria. The logical conclusion should be that the theory has no scientific merit.
et.worldeconomicsassociation.org/files/ETHodgso…

14/N It is not just the social sciences that have this problem. David Merritt notes how cosmologists have adopted "dark matter" as an unfalsifiable hypothesis. It is inserted in all the places where our theory of gravity is inconsistent with evidence. arxiv.org/abs/1703.02389

15/N Then there is revealed preference theory. The idea is that consumer preferences are revealed through market purchases. But one can only observe what has been purchased, not the internal preference list of the consumer. Here is Stanley Wong commenting: library.fa.ru/files/Wong.pdf

16/N Lionel Robbins famously proclaimed that the postulates of microeconomics were endlessly confirmed by everyday life. No scientific testing was needed: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…