But what methodological discussion and awareness might be able to do is to give us more insight into our own and our own scientific cultures’ foibles as we attempt to ‘do science’ (by which I mean to include social science and disciplined discussion more generally). If this is the case then as well motivated as Popper’s search for a criterion is, and as useful as some of his other work has been – for instance pointing to falsification rather than confirmation – it might actually be counterproductive.

I recall one weblog I visited for a while which had a line from Karl Popper emblazoned on its headpiece something along the lines of “We might disagree but I might learn from you and you might learn from me”. Trouble was it was a fractious and arrogant weblog in my opinion. Karl – one of the worlds great hedgehogs – is supposed to have had a similar problem. One person suggested that his great political tome should really have been called “The Open Society: by one of its Enemies” ! A good line n’est pas?

I don’t say this out of disrespect to Popper. As the Menand article to which you linked argued (and as I was thinking as I read it before it said it) hedgehoggery tends to characterise a lot of people of great achievement.

Still there you have it – some thoughts preliminary to a post that I might never manage on the subject (but I’m hoping to!)

Paul Kelly in the Oz on what Labor ‘must’ do to win next year – be proactive, seize the agenda, look to the future, fight the ideas battle, muscle up and so on … The ALP must do bits of all those things, but in the end whether they did or not is determined, with hindsight, by the election result …

Perfect.

A few days before the 2003 caucus vote that installed Latham as federal Labor leader, I posted, on my little website, estimates of the chances each prospective Labor leader had of taking their party to victory the following year. Unlike most, I believed Simon Crean, if he kept the job, stood a fair chance of defeating John Howard – one in three. Beazley, I reckoned, would have two chances in three of winning an election and Rudd almost as much three in five. Latham I gave one chance in 11 because his every utterance showed he had no idea about what makes people change their vote. He wanted to out-Howard Howard.

Throughout the next 10 months I stuck to my prediction that, come polling day, Latham would take his party backwards, which was what happened. Pardon my trumpet-blowing, but comparisons can be illuminating and we are now in the identical position in the three-year cycle.

Beazley was the Labor Party’s best chance for 2007, with Rudd the next most likely. You wouldn’t know it from the almost criminally incompetent journalistic coverage, but opinion polls over the last six months pointed to a federal Labor victory.

As a general matter of course, otherwise, it is amazing how poorly we human beings communicate, even in direct conversation.

Take the innocuous two sentences in the first comment above – two sentences typed in daily on blogs all over the place – and straight into the opening gambit confusion and uncertainty are the order. What comes after that compounds it all into a verifiable state of madness. (Ah.. no? What do you mean, how verifiable?) We really do talk amongst each other in our own heads, for much of our lives.

And if you believe that, and anything else written here or elsewhere, along with this, you’re crazy. Me, I’m having a party.

Instead of “I think most people would agree with what you’ve said” I think (I’m 65% certain) that you should have said “the consensus among shrewd and hard-headed thinkers on either side of Parliament is as you have said”.

And there we have it. Fertile ground for the imaginitive. In just those simple words, which sound ok, don’t they, what has to be objectified? Which ‘points’ are good, (90% of them, if so, which ones?, and of those, to which degree), and of those points, against what or which other points are they to be compared? And who and how are those comparative points rated? Of the ‘most people’, which most people? Most people who read it? Most people in Australia, the world? In Mozambigue? Agree to which percentage? Compared with what? And what and where is it that ‘you said’ it, having made quotes. Are they agreeing with what you’re saying about the quotes, or about the quotes themselves, or about your assessments of them? And so on.

What happens, then, when there’s a whole op-ed piece to go through, or even just a mad commenter suffering the odd (very odd, say, 93%, against the normal type of odd) grammatical error?

It’s a great idea (12% – 86%, depending, see above), but you’d want to have to love numbers (0% – 100%, depending).