Free Republic

As Karl Popper demonstrated, evaluating a scientific proposition requires falsifiability—theories or hypotheses can’t be proved or disproved if they can’t be subjected to empirical tests. When the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was passed, we were criticized for being overly optimistic about the effects we predicted it would have. Now the evidence is in. Our critics were wrong, and the economic data have met or even exceeded our predictions. In 2017, we predicted that reducing the federal corporate tax rate to 21% from 35% and introducing full expensing of new-equipment investment would boost productivity-enhancing business investment by 9%. Though...

< snip >In "The Black Swan"--a kind of cri de coeur--Mr. Taleb struggles to free us from our misguided allegiance to the bell-curve mindset and awaken us to the dominance of the power law. The attractiveness of the bell curve resides in its democratic distribution and its mathematical accessibility. Collect enough data and the pattern reveals itself, allowing both robust predictions of future data points (such as the height of the next five people to enter the room) and accurate estimations of the size and frequency of extreme values (anticipating the occasional giant or dwarf. The power-law distribution, by contrast,...

I finished part one of this series by mentioning an even deeper level to our current predicament. I want to get to that, but first, I want to set that discussion up a bit more. I begin with this statement: Wokism is now the official state religion of the United States of America. By constitutional standards, this means something has gone wrong. The United States isn't supposed to have a state religion. The First Amendment specifically prohibits the establishment of a state religion. Yet it now has one, and its name is Wokism. Fuss about my characterization if you want—it...

Karl Popper, one of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, argued against classical inductivist reasoning in science. He argued that a scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable -- similar to the statistician's practice of proving the null case rather than the hypotheses itself. Questioning the claim of human-made climate change, I am often dismissed as a "denier" and asked why I don't accept that in this particular arena, "the science is settled." But anthropogenic global warming (AGW) a.k.a. "climate change" isn't science at all by Popper's standards and is, in fact, a perfect example of that which Popper rejected:...

The announcement that George Soros will commit $1 billion to create the Open Society University Network (OSUN) has flooded the mainstream media and the internet in the last several days. The announcement has attracted public attention and certainly deserves a closer look. George Soros is a currency speculator with political ambitions. His goal is to remake the world. The idea of the “open society” goes back to the period of the Cold War when Karl Popper, a British philosopher, advanced it as a response to the Soviet threat. It has been largely neglected since then. George Soros has turned the...

Between May 29 and July 1919, an expedition organized by Cambridge astronomer Arthur Eddington and the Astronomer Royal Frank Dyson photographed first an eclipse of the Sun (May 29) and then, a month later, the stars where the Sun had been during the eclipse. By comparing the two photographs, the deflection of light caused by the Sun’s gravity could be precisely measured. Einstein’ gravity theory predicted a deflection value of 1.75 arcseconds, and Newton’s gravity theory a value half that. The results were announced in November 1919 to a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society....

If a person is to be judged by his enemies, George Soros can feel proud. Autocrats across Eastern Europe, including his native Hungary, as well as those from China to Egypt and many in between, have expressed fear and loathing — and taken action against — the civil society organizations that Mr. Soros has generously supported for three decades. Dictators do not like Mr. Soros at all, so it is good news that he has now contributed $18 billion of his fortune to his Open Society Foundations. Mr. Soros was moved many years ago by the 1945 book by Karl...

If you scrape all the way down to the barrel’s bottom, you will find that Obama’s puppet master, George Soros is an advocate controlling public opinion—by force, if necessary. Lacking in any genuine creativity of his own, Soros eventually glommed onto the work of Karl Popper who concocted the theory of the Open Society. Against the backdrop of Hitler’s invasion of Austria, Popper opined that totalitarianism creates “closed societies.” Popper argued that humans have only two possible destinies: one was to live in a closed society in which everyone was forced to believe the same thing. The other would be...

I've been reading Karl Popper's two volume work "Open Society and it Enemies". Here's the amazon.com link:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691019681/103-5859654-8821426?v=glanceThe thread I posted at commongroundcommonsense.org, "In Defense of Open Society" was inspired by that work. I'd like to start a thread with the same name here because I see this as an important problem that crosses partisan lines. In a nutshell, the central question is this: how can we rationally institute changes in our society? Changes take place whether we consciously bring them about or not, and some changes are threatening to some people. Popper charts some of the philosophers who have tried...

  GEORGE SOROS:KERRY-DEMOCRAT PUPPETMASTER We are the only site on the web devoted exclusively to intellectual conservatism. We find the most intriguing information and bring it together on one page for you. HomeArticlesHeadlinesLinks we recommendFeedbackLink to usFree email updateAbout usWhat's New & InterestingMailing ListsIntellectual IconsSubmissions   The Dark Lord Sorosby A.M. Siriano 26 January 2004 What is embodied George Soros is the morphed spirit of the philosopher Karl Popper, who fostered and defined a politico-economic theory called Open Society.   Billionaire and ideologue George Soros, who came out of disembodied obscurity to popular recognition by vowing to unseat President Bush,...

Forward Observer By James K. Glassman The Soros Threat George Soros, the 38th richest person in the world according to Forbes, says that defeating President George W. Bush in 2004 is "the central focus of my life." In an eye-popping interview recently with the Washington Post, he argued that "America under Bush is a danger to the world.""When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans." It evokes memories, he says, of the Nazi rhetoric of his childhood in Hungary.This wild antipathy toward the President is making Soros--who earned his $7 billion...

“My attempts at formulating my philosophy have not been crowned by success. As a young man I tried to state my views in a short book entitled The Burden of consciousness but, by the time I had completed it, I found it wanting and so it was not published. Then came a series of attempts at reformulation, which ended only when one day I could not make head or tail of what I had written the day before. I gave up abstract philosophy and devoted myself to making money.” (George Soros) Soros claims Popper as his mentor yet their affinity...

Betrayers of The Mind- The Postmodern Left and Intellectual and Other Elites The following are excerpts taken from Karl Popper and regarding the betrayal by those in society which have been gifted by upbringing, circumstance and in some cases the genetic or heridetary lottery. These are the individuals that populate media organs like the BBC, NYT, LA Times and the organs of Cultural Production in Hollywood, Madison Avenue as well as Ivy League Academic Institutions. Sir Karl Poppers words have unusually strong resonance today as we battle forces which undermine Amerrican and Western Institutions and Values. "Each time it has...