"More practically to me, Popper had many problems with statistics and statisticians. He refused to blindly accept the notion that knowledge can always increase with incremental information - which is the foundation of statistical inference. It may in some instances, but we do not know which ones. Many insightful people, such as John Maynard Keynes, independently reached the same conclusions. Sir Karl's detractors believe that favorably repeating the same experiment again and again should lead to an increased comfort with the notion that "it works". I came to understand Popper's position better once I saw the first rare event ravaging a trading room. Sir Karl feared that some type of knowledge did not increase with information - but which type we could not ascertain. The reason I feel that he is important for us traders is because to him the matter of knowledge and discovery is not so much in dealing with what we know, as in dealing with what we do not know. His famous quote:
These are men with bold ideas, but highly critical of their own ideas; they try to find whether their ideas are right by trying first to find whether they are not perhaps wrong. They work with bold conjectures and severe attempts at refuting their own conjectures."
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