# Episode 116: The Knowledge Machine

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-theory-of-anything-859886/episode-116-the-knowledge-machine
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-theory-of-anything-859886/episode-116-the-knowledge-machine.md
Podcast: [The Theory of Anything](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-theory-of-anything-859886)
Published: 2025-09-16T11:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/episodes/Episode-116-The-Knowledge-Machine-e387ia0
Audio file: https://anchor.fm/s/14b6fc10/podcast/play/108300032/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-8-14%2F5b554098-4d22-025b-ac95-5bb7b5bf1034.mp3
Processing state: processed
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-theory-of-anything-859886/episodes/episode-116-the-knowledge-machine
Duration seconds: 8248

## Resource

This week Bruce take a deep critical rationalist dive into Michael Strevens’s book, The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science , which is an attempt to describe how science is a self-correcting system designed to create knowledge based on explanation. The book is somewhat critical of Popperian falsification, though the reading of Popper presented may be a superficial reading. Bruce describes how Strevens’s “iron rule of science” or the idea that we should settle science based on empirical tests overlaps with what Bruce calls “Popper’s ratchet,” or the idea that we should strive to move our theories to be more testable and avoid ad hoc saves designed to make our theories less testable. Is there anything we can learn from a (semi) Bayesian / Inductivist like Strevens that we Popperians don't already know? Perhaps more interestingly, Strevens' theory is meant to explain why we got stuck in static societies for so long. How does his theory compared to Deutsch's?

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## Transcript

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