Measure twice, cut once

Last time my worries about David Deutsch’s views on Brexit were to do with 20^th Century German history.

I now want to talk about how DD’s notion of error correction relates to the now sadly completely quashed notion of a second referendum.

Brexit, error correction and Germany

I mentioned last time a few qualms I had with David Deutsch’s views on Brexit, and in particular on First Past The Post (FPTP) vs Proportional Representation (PR). I should probably dig more into what Karl Popper had to say about error correction and falsifiability, specifically in relation to political rather than scientific theory. But until then, here are some more of my worries, this time about how Deutsch applies the idea of error correction to modern German history.

David Deutsch and Brexit

David Deutsch is a clever man: physics professor at Oxford who pioneered quantum computing. He is also a keen promoter of fallibilism, the idea that we can be mistaken in anything we think or do. In this he sees himself as a follower of Karl Popper, a Viennese philosopher of science famous for (among other things) claiming that a theory is only truly scientific if it is falsifiable.