POPPER'S PEAK

Nary a week goes by without some climate crank invoking Popper's falsifiability criterion to reject climate models as uncientific.

But the ritual invocation of  the late Sir Karl is by no means limited to the Climate Wars, and it vexes professional philosophers no end, witness Willard's  send -up of the genre at ATTP :

The Popper Ratio 

Posted on August 3, 2019by Willard

I hereby propose the Popper Ratio – (n.) Unit obtained by calculating the number of “popper” in a long-form text compared to the number of times Sir Karl is really cited.

By “really cited” I mean (a) a quote and (b) a reference. No mere mention. No handwaving. Proper quote and citation.
The Ratio is inspired by a SpeedoScience fight between Nassim and Claire. Both misrepresent our curmudgeon. Why? The simplest hypothesis is that paying lip service to authors makes one forget to pay due diligence to their points. 

As a proof of concept, here are the results of a simple search at Claire’s. It may not be an exhausive list. It sure exhausted me. Numbers are involved. Caveat emptor...

All well and good, but how influential has pop Popperology been in the culture wars at large?

The ever useful NYTimes media analytics service casts some very wan light on the subject;

If the Times word-counting software is to be believed, the most invoked  philosophical F-word, 'falisifiable'  has flatlined ince 1970, It simply has not appeared in the newspaper of record in the last half century. Nada.  Zip.

So low are the stakes in the pop philosophy wars that the F-noun 'falsifiability ' enjoyed only one year of postmodern currency in the Times.  Peak Popper came and went in 2013 when it briefly rose from zero to about 200 parts per million of the paper's vocabulary. A great many buzzwords have done better before and since. 

NB:

I initially punted on  searching the ‘falsification’  Times timeline, , fearing the legal charge of  'falsification of evidence '  might drown out the Popper signal.

Sure enough, falsification has always been present in the Times vocab,  peaking in the 70’s at about 5X the current rate. – a spike  that could be the real Popper’s Peak.