- A skeptical look at Karl Popper by Martin Gardner
- Effects of food on the brain
- fat sensitivity correlates with BMI (less sensitive, greater BMI)
- Bill McKibben on Climategate: “If you managed to hack 3,000 emails from some scientist’s account, you might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, or at least talking about doing so.” This gives new meaning to the term denialist.
- if someone steals $2 million do you still trust their research?
Thanks to Vic Sarjoo, Anne Weiss, and Marian Lizzi.
Wish I could read more of the food on brain link without spending $32.
Library, maybe.
‘A Sceptical Look at “A Skeptical Look at Karl Popper’ by J.C. Lester:
https://www.la-articles.org.uk/popper.htm
You can read it for free, here:
https://www.physci.ucla.edu/research/GomezPinilla/publications/nrn2421.pdf
Quite often, searching for the paper at Google Scholar will turn up some site that has posted the paper, in this case it looks like Physical Sciences at UCLA.
What do you think of the evidence in your second link? They say “diets that are high in saturated fat are becoming notorious for reducing molecular substrates that support cognitive processing and increasing the risk of neurological dysfunction in both humans [3] and animals [4].”, which seems to be evidence against your animal fat hypothesis.
[3] Greenwood, C. E. & Winocur, G. High-fat diets, insulin resistance and declining cognitive function. Neurobiol. Aging 26 (Suppl. 1), 42—45 (2005).
[4] Molteni, R., Barnard, J. R., Ying, Z., Roberts, C. K. & Gomez-Pinilla, F. A high-fat, refined sugar diet reduces hippocampal brain-derived neurotrophic factor, neuronal plasticity, and learning. Neuroscience 112, 803—814 (2002).
I’ve always been a big fan of Karl Popper for his support of experimentation and his skepticism of Freud and psychology of his time (that, by itself, makes him important….Popper was an early proponent of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy).
thehova and Andrew, I included that link because I’ve always been anti-Karl Popper. His ideas seemed to point in the wrong direction if you wanted to do good science. For example, his emphasis on falsification. In practice, quite often, I don’t “test” theories, I assess their value — their value in finding solutions to problems, for example. When I use evolutionary ideas to suggest treatments to try, I’m not testing evolutionary theory. Nothing I know of Popper’s work shows any sign he understood this basic point. As someone has said, all theories are wrong but some are useful.
Thank you for pointing us to Bill McKibben. We need more like him.
Andrew, I agree with you about Lakatos. And if Lakatos’s work built on Popper’s, I stand corrected.
ASAs comment on Climate gate: https://magazine.amstat.org/2010/03/climatemar10/
Note the emphasis on assessing uncertainty.