Recent comments in /f/articles

noordinaryspider wrote (edited )

Reply to [tw suicide] Police Broke Into Chelsea Manning’s Home with Guns Drawn — in a “Wellness Check" by neku

"Wellness checks" are like that. Many perfectly decent people in less-marginalized circumstances aren't aware of this fact and genuinely think they are helping. Other times----well, it can be like SWATing.

Video isn't working for me so Imma go look for text. I hope Chelsea's okay...well, as okay as anyone can be. :(

ETA: https://www.advocate.com/transgender/2018/6/05/wellness-check-chelsea-manning-involved-armed-police

tl/dr: She wasn't home when the incident happened, fortunately.

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musou wrote (edited )

Reply to nice article against Popper's falsificationism by mm_

Popper's falsificationist strategy of conjectures and refutations can only deliver negative knowledge. It shows certain scientific theories are false, but it never shows that any theory is true.

i don't understand why he calls this a flaw. refuting positivism was one of the main purposes of popper's argument (as i understand it, anyway). in both of the counterexamples he brings up-- that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer and that matter is made of atoms-- neither needs to be strictly capital-t True in order for us to be able to apply those theories to make useful predictions about the world. in fact neither statement is capital-t True in the sense accepted by most skeptics. plenty of people smoke cigarettes and never develop lung cancer, and no one has directly observed an atom via their senses. Popperian falsificationism has a lot of implications about the nature of knowledge revealed by scientific methods but i don't necessarily think those implications are so disagreeable as to render his argument unusable. in fact i think we might be better off if this kind of understanding of the nature of scientific theories were more widespread.

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