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 […]
A tax on carbon emissions is an efficient way to make firms and consumers internalize the environmental costs due to climate change. However, there are many other aspects to consider in a transition from a fossil-fueled economy to a cleaner one. In a past article we presented the case for subsidies on research to develop […]
As I mentioned in passing in my last entry , many, if not most, of the oldest stories about Christian martyrs and saints are nothing but legendary fabrications, something that scholars knew perfectly well since at least the time of the Enlightenment, when scientific criteria of historiographic research started to be employed by ecclesiastical historians […]
One book that has caused much stir in the past months is Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World . I confess I approached the book with some skepticism, for ‘the classical world’, I thought, was already considerably ‘destroyed’ by the time Christianism became the official, and soon the only […]