Mentions personal use of The Open Society. Mentions personal use of The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

Transcript context

…But it’s true. Yes, I’ve never — when I was 18 or whatever it was, I read The Open Society and I read The Logic of Scientific Discovery and each one, there’s a cool idea. It was nice to have the cool idea; maybe I didn’t need a book to get it. Somebody could just tell you the cool idea. And maybe the idea is too simple and you move past it after a while. I don’t know, if a philosopher over the course of his professional life has a few cool ideas that you’re happy to have heard about — I mean, he did good, so I’m not going to complain about Popper. I don’t, myself, see the idea of being a Popperian that you would — this would be a school you would join, or something like that — but I’m glad I heard about those ideas. If you think about sociological correlates of philosophers and if you learn that someone has a philosophy PhD, they have knowledge of formal philosophy — other than the obvious, “Oh, they went to school for a lot of years,” what unusual correlates do you associate with that? Let me give you an example. When I meet a philosopher, I actually tend to assume they’re not that interested in the quality of the food they eat relative to people of similar education and income classes. Because that’s what I’ve observed empirically. What have you observed empirically? What signals or correlates of knowing formal philosophy do you see?…

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