If people displayed as much snarkiness in real life as on Metafilter, there'd be a lot of people without gainful employment, at least. No boss would put up with it.

Nor would employees.

If people displayed as much snarkiness in real life as on Metafilter, I'd be in prison.

I corrected the professor who'd gotten Popper's falsifiability all wrong, then realized I've never actually read Popper and most of my (partial) knowledge of his ideas comes from arguments on MeFi.

so... how do you know he got popper all wrong? how'd he respond?

I had a student last semester who was really sharp and seemed amazingly well read for a 19 year old - he offered correction-ish comments from time to time, although (luckily?) none of them really tripped me up (most of them were alternative interpretations I was plenty familiar with, so I just went into greater detail about the matter). But anyway, about half way through the semester I realized he had probably not read any of these books, but just read all the wikipedia articles about these books (or the equivalent). At first I had attributed a lot more knowledge to him than he really had; once I realized this, it became more clear that his knowledge was actually pretty superficial. Which is totally normal for a 19 year old...

Some 19 year olds are pretty cluey, and I've encountered at least one lecturer who got Popper wrong. So I too am keen to hear the gory details.

I have to go to bed soon. I'm sure this thread will be miles down the page when I next login, so I'd just like to say that the best thing (IMO) to read about this is Alan (aka A.F.) Chalmers's book What is this thing called Science?" (1976, reprinted heaps of times, and still a timely work). Chapters 4, 5, & 6 give you a great grounding in falsification. His Science and its Fabrication develops some of those themes.

I think a good project could be "the best insults heard on metafilter."

Maybe someone has already done that.

re:Popper: he said that falsifiability was about being able to show that a proposition was "true or false", so I stuck up my hand and said "nope, just false", and explained about all black ducks, one white one, etc.

And he responded very well, actually edited his powerpoint presentation right then, and just moved along. Very good move, from a teaching perspective.

A-ha! Wikipedia says it's all white swans and then one black swan - nothing at all about ducks. However, they confuse matters by showing a picture of two black swans. Not sure if Popper explained that one.

In my defense, I started out by saying I've never read Popper myself.

I harshed a professor on Monday! I felt bad.