Darwin’s great breakthrough was that of finding the only one explanation of the great variety and complexity we find in the living world, which is compatible with the fact that the matter and energy of which living beings are made of can only do what they do because of purely physical mechanisms. There is only […]
It is generally considered that equality of opportunities means equal access to education and health. When the society considers that some goods like school and vaccines must be consumed by everyone, economists define them as “merit goods”, which deserve a special treatment, as in the case of public goods or goods that cause consumption externalities […]
The term “innovation” has been ubiquitous for decades in many areas of European society. Since Lisbon 2000—and even earlier—the European Union has promoted policies to drive innovation with the intention of restoring to Europe the economic leadership it has undoubtedly lost. Two decades later, we are close to Horizon 2020—at least chronologically speaking. Within the […]
T here are two major impossibility theorems in social choice: Arrow’s theorem (1951) : the only system to aggregate individual preferences into social preferences (e.g., a voting mechanism) that satisfies the properties of transitivity, monotonicity and independence of irrelevant alternatives for all possible individual preferences is the dictatorial system. Gibbard–Satterthwaite’ theorem (1973) : any voting […]
In the second entry of this series, I discussed one of the two big problems of Karl Popper’s ‘Proto-constitution of science’, namely, whether following in the strictest possible way Popper’s falsificationism would necessarily be the most efficient means to attain what he considers in The Logic of Scientific Discovery to be the major goal of […]
According to the results of the article The spread of true and false news online , which analyzed the posts on Twitter of 3 million people between 2006 and 2017, false news spread on the network faster than the true ones and they have a greater impact. Although many of us know how Twitter works […]
By the end of the first part of this series I listed the most important norms included in what Ian Jarvie calls Karl Popper’s ‘Proto-constitution of science’. Now I will start discussing several important problems of this Popperian rules. One first problem we can identify is whether Popper proposes these norms as just a suggestion […]
In spite of the title of his most important book ( The Logic of Scientific Discovery -LSD-, published originally in German as The Logik der Forschung , in 1935), Karl Popper’s fundamental claim about the rules of science is that they are not a matter of logic , in the sense that they cannot be […]
The share of the world’s population living below the global extreme poverty line has dropped from 42% in 1981 to 11% in 2013. This dramatic change has encouraged the UN to set the goal of ending it by 2030. Can it happen? In a recent article published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Page and […]
Observations vs intuitions Einstein’s Theory of Relativity introduced us to the concept of Spacetime, as a unified entity. This stands in contrast with the intuition that we develop since birth, which leads to naturally separate space and time. Human intuition is a way to understand how the world works, our brain processes our daily experiences […]