Popper-Deutsch optimism#

Last tended 2026-02-02

Karl Popper in 1990

Even three years before his death -- in his nineties -- Karl Popper, essentially the mastermind of the modern methodology of science, seemed to find it necessary to emphatically remind his audiences and readers that he was an optimist and why that was so. ¹

I sense that he went through the decades feeling always a little mystified that his universal insight was not imminently apparent: roughly put, all human endeavor reduces to problems to be solved, for which there is a gradient of better and better solutions that emerge from criticism and error reduction.

David Deutsch

Had Popper lived to read and assess David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity, it might have felt to him both like a perfect homecoming and the long-awaited arrival at a distant shore. Deutsch had taken Popper's universal insight and forged it into a capital "U" Universal optimistic framework.

Deutsch's insight, which I think for him has the same imminently apparent nature, distills to something like this: the Universe is an infinity of problems, for each of which Intelligence, the most exceptional facet of the universe, is able to iteratively solve via conjecture and the tuning of conjecture via error correction. The book develops this proposition thoroughly and incisively, and I consider it a must read.

The Catalog

And so now back to Popper's "wide open future, which we are able to influence." In this era that feels predominated by dogma-clashing rather than error-correction, I intend to use this notebook page to catalog instances of the Popper-Deutsch imperative in action. Such are the cases that enable me to stay on team optimism. I will keep up the search for new candidates and dutifully add them when found -- reader contributions via the "Leave a comment" tool are welcomed. This will be an admittedly scattershot list -- I make no apology.

• University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill Applied Epistemology Project
• Techno-Optimist movement (decades on, there's still no dampening Marc Andreessen's optimism)
• The Law OS project at the Santa Fe Institute
• Utah AI regulatory sandbox (there are a growing number of similar initiatives in the U.S. and globally)
• The Hacker Culture (the ultimate practitioners of applied fallibilism)
• "Beautiful Loop" theory of consciousness research (metaphysical mystery turned falsifiable mechanical model)

End Notes

Works Cited

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