The open universe Book

I picked up this book because of my interest in skepticism, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. I was familiar with the author (previously having written about him in my undergraduate thesis, "the Afterlife of Memory"). That being said, I was impressed not only by the meticulous thinking for which Popper is famous, but also by the applicability of some of the issues raised to my chosen field of Business Analysis.

As a Business Analyst, I occasionally encounter two types of resistance to the profession. First, there are those who reject the discipline from fear of a loss of freedom; this is quite fashionable amongst those who misunderstand "Agile" to be a rejection of all documentation and process. The second form comes as doubt, essentially stating that we can't know that the work products I produce are True, or even stating that they must be necessarily incomplete, and, therefore, useless.

In the Open Universe, Popper argues that no theory (even the physical sciences) can reduce the world to a causally determined system, thus freedom (especially where it counts: creative behavior) can never be eliminated from human experience.

He also discusses the role of abstractions (in Popper's term: World 3), such as process descriptions and other documentation, which are bound to be incomplete and possibly even wrong. Here he reminds us that in ~3,000 years of human inquiry, including many valiant attempts to reduce the world to a simple system of rules (e.g. Unified Theory), we have almost universally failed. Nevertheless, the act of trying has had a powerful effect on our ability to manipulate the material world. Our knowledge may be incomplete -- in fact the very act of attempting to perfect our knowledge seems always to lead us to discover new problems that unravel what once was thought of as an almost completed understanding.

As a BA, I don't consider myself a scientist searching for the Truth, but rather a facilitator, assisting communities in articulating a shared understanding, so they can examine their assumptions, and attempt to improve the impact they collectively have on the world (Popper's World 1).

I enjoyed reading this book. Sometimes the detailed examples from the history of physics were tough to follow, but the main argument was fascinating, and surprisingly pertinent to me as a Business Analyst.