Hey folks, welcome to the 34th live stream of the Dark Horse podcast here from Portland, Oregon,

the center of all the confusion in the universe. It would seem. Wow. I'm right here with Dr. Heather

Hying as always. And we are going to try to navigate the confusion and see if we can't rescue

you some sense from it. What do you say? And at the point that we run out of confusion in Portland,

we're going to talk about COVID. We are not going to run out of confusion. We may have to call

a halt to our discussion of the confusion in Portland in order to get to the confusion surrounding

COVID. Yeah. But let's just say there's plenty of confusion to go around. There sure is. Yeah.

All right. So Portland, you've heard lots of things about what's going on in Portland and you've

heard some some efforts by us to try to correct the distortion. But I wanted to start with a couple

of concepts. All right. The first one has to do with verificationism, which is something that you and

I have thought an awful lot about in a scientific context. And the reason it's relevant here is that

a verificationist approach to sense making in science is devastatingly broken because it is very

often that you can find evidence for a perspective in spite of the fact that the perspective is false.

Whereas if you seek to find evidence against a perspective and it is false, you will find

more of that and you will disconfirm it. And it is only when you find an explanation for something

so robust that you can't find disconfirming evidence that you really know you're onto something.

And for fans of the history of epistemology who are out there, we can attribute the origin of

this idea to Karl Popper. To Karl Popper exactly. So a poparian view is a falsificationist view and

all of those of us who pay attention to the the philosophy of science, which is a little bit of a

dry discipline, but a very important one. We know that verificationists are a thing to be feared.

And what I see taking place in the news cycle is verificationist myth making, which is resulting in

completely divergent and unreconcilable portrayals of events that are factual, which should be able to be

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