David Deutsch’s associate tweeted a Popper misquote. Here’s the azquotes page they were using but didn’t link to, and the text of the misquote that they only provided as an image:
Optimism is a duty. The future is open. It is not predetermined. No one can predict it, except by chance. We all contribute to determining it by what we do. We are all equally responsible for its success.
No source is given, but I found the quote with a source. It’s misquoted from Popper’s book All Life is Problem Solving. I’ll copy/paste the most similar part of the book:
Peace is necessary. Perhaps it will have to be fought for and defended for a long time to come. We must be prepared for that. And also be prepared for ourselves and the United Nations to make mistakes. But optimism is a duty.
Before I finish, I should just like to clarify this phrase, ‘Optimism is a duty’.
The future is open. It is not fixed in advance. So no one can predict it – except by chance. The possibilities lying within the future, both good and bad, are boundless. When I say, ‘Optimism is a duty’, this means not only that the future is open but that we all help to decide it through what we do. We are all jointly responsible for what is to come.
So we all have a duty, instead of predicting something bad, to support the things that may lead to a better future.
The quote being spread around on a bunch of different quote websites is like a rough paraphrase. It’s wrong by a lot of words. It’s so far off that it looks like maybe whoever made that version originally wasn’t even trying to quote, just to state a similar idea more succinctly, but somehow it’s now being spread as if it were a quote.
Also, related to this, someone asserted on Facebook that the optimism is a duty idea is original to Kant, but that people now mistakenly believe it was Popper’s original idea:
“Optimism is a moral duty”
Immanuel Kant
(so often quoted by Karl Popper that many people now think that it’s an original popperian quote).
Basically Harvard nutrition researchers were bribed by the sugar industry and were able to publish their biased (by bribes) opinions in influential peer reviewed articles. Although this was many decades ago, I’m unaware of changes that have been made which would effectively prevent it from happening today.
This YouTuber stopped making videos about his field (behavioral science) because he lost confidence in the academic research. He now thinks that maybe 50% of the research is wrong and he can’t reliably tell which research is the good stuff and which is bad. He now makes videos about research fraud, data manipulation, flaws with peer review, bad incentives in academia, etc. He is able to do this because he works elsewhere, not in academia.
Some of the fraud detection is automated. I wonder what it’d take to get people interested in catching misquotes. Many misquotes could also be found with software instead of manually searching. I think a lot of the problem is that most people think most misquotes aren’t very bad so they wouldn’t be motivated to find them (and if people did find misquotes, I suspect authors, journal editors, universities, etc., would largely ignore them and not care. Or would treat them like fixing typos, not like anyone did anything wrong).
A question I tend to have for misquoters, which they usually don’t want to take a position on, is: are your misquotes accidental errors that you think should be corrected? Or did you do it on purpose because you think it’s OK and think your misquotes are better in some way (what way?).
I think a lot of small misquotes are intentional, and that there’s often some evidence that can be used in arguments against the claim they were accidental. For example, sometimes there are a lot of misquotes and it’s hard to come up with an explanation of how they all got introduced. Sometimes misquotes were from quotes found electronically, not typed in from paper. Sometimes all the misquotes from an author make the quotes more elegant, and none less elegant, or there’s some other pattern to them.
I’ve seen some people admit to misquoting on purpose and claim it’s OK, but I think most authors view that as somewhat wrong and hard to defend, and don’t want to clearly admit that. But they don’t want to clearly claim their misquotes were accidents either because that might be refuted, so they prefer ambiguity about what their defense is so it’s harder to argue with it. And they don’t want to engage in the discussion and get asked tough questions about how they keep having these supposed accidents and what exactly their process is for entering quotes, proofreading quotes, etc.
A reason to do automated searches for misquotes is that I bet misquotes correlate with data fraud, with conclusions that don’t replicate, and with simply being mistaken.
Speedrunning communities have better anti-cheating policing and integrity than academia/science (which e.g. refuse to police misquotes seriously, in addition to having lots of data fraud and other big issues). Example:
Policing the timings of Mario blinking in a gameplay video is more picky/pedantic than policing misquotes.
Good video except for suggesting maybe things improved in recent years and that the way to know that would be through new studies.
There has been no major reform movement. There were no major policy changes at these journals that were even intended to fix this. In general it’s unnecessary to retest a system until after an intentional change has been made, at which point retesting makes sense to see if the change worked.
I think the thing that bothers me the most watching that video is that the paper he was talking about got published in 1998.
To me, it only felt like a recent trend that a lot of people have been talking about the issues in academia yet there have been problems from way before. The way people talk about academia is that it is something recently broken. I don’t think I could find videos easily in the past about how it sucks. Although as I’m writing this I tried to google about this stuff and I found it kind of surprising how little stuff I could find about large institutions talking about whats going on. On YouTube I could only find a few YouTubers who really talked about it in detail and they were quite small.
