Take Action, Invite Criticism
Res Extensa #59 :: What standup comics teach us about Popper’s epistemology
What can comedy teach us about how to learn? About how to produce great work?
Standup comics are devotees of Karl Popper's philosophy of science. The way comedians select and refine a joke mirrors the way we generate new knowledge. This analogy might sound strange, but let me explain.
You’ll hear comedians talk about the unique challenge of performing standup. The exercise is raw: no tools, no support, no hiding. Just the comic on a stage, a microphone, a spotlight, and a sea of faces waiting to "test out" the material. They'll describe the ruthlessness of the process — the jokes landing flat, hecklers in the crowd, bombing sets to the sound of a silent room. Unperturbed, the professional comic takes the material back to the lab for adjustment. The polished final version is composed of what survived this brutal testing phase.
Morgan Housel wrote about Chris Rock’s process of testing and failure in developing his act:
No comedic genius is smart enough to know what jokes are sure to land well. Every big comedian tests their material in small clubs before using it in big venues. The stakes are lower in small clubs – you may disappoint 30 drunk people, but you won’t hurt your reputation with HBO. It’s manageable damage. Rock was once asked if he missed small clubs. He responded:
“When I start a tour, it’s not like I start out in arenas. Before this last tour, I performed in this place in New Brunswick called the Stress Factory. I did about 40 or 50 shows getting ready for the tour.”
One newspaper profiled these small-club sessions. It described Rock thumbing through pages of material, not all of them landing. “I’m going to have to cut some of these jokes,” he says in the middle.
Standup comedy exemplifies the scientific process of falsification, the idea that theories are reinforced or refuted through empirical testing. A funny idea forms into a joke, and the joke is delivered to an audience… Do they laugh? A dead room may falsify the idea completely. Delete it from the act. Middling laughter leads to refinement. The comic reworks the phrasing, condenses it, changes the delivery. Then it’s back to the stage for more testing. Comics even use the term “working out material” to describe this repetitive process of honing an act.
Falsification is also how modern science works.
Popper, conjecture, and refutation
Exposing ideas to criticism is how they improve. The 20th century philosopher of science Karl Popper brought us some of the most profound ideas on how we generate knowledge. In Popper’s model, science advances not through an idea being proven correct, but by it not being falsifiable. His version of epistemology was rooted in fallibilism: the principle that our knowledge is always provisional and subject to error.
Knowledge doesn’t advance through being proven once-and-for-all, but through an ongoing process of conjecture and refutation. An idea develops and is exposed to the world, criticized, proven partially or totally wrong, reworked, reproposed, ad infinitum. Through this process we weed out the bad ideas, the ones that don’t stand up to scrutiny.
This doesn’t mean that knowledge has been proven to be true. It’s simply yet to be falsified. What we call “cutting edge science” is the sum total of what we haven’t yet found to be false.
Robust ideas survive attempts to falsify them. But criticism doesn't just indicate failure, it also tells us something about what's missing. It’s feedback that indicates what needs refining.
This is the process of error correction. I wrote about this way back in RE 9, on the topic of Popper’s liberal science:
In the world of ideas, progress comes from the ability to freely experiment, to try thousands of concepts on for size, test them, and ditch or ignore those that don't work. People should be motivated and enabled to try out ideas in lower-risk settings when we can check them for validity. When a species develops a mutation poorly-fit to an environment, the trait is invalidated and gone before it has time to take root. If it gets protected and entrenched in a population artificially (animals raised in captivity, or genetically-modified plants, for example), it's exposed to catastrophic tail risk once back in the natural environment.
Evolution corrects errors.
The comic’s best jokes, the ones that make the Netflix special in front of Carnegie Hall, are the ones that survive the torture test of criticism by audiences in basement comedy clubs.
Bias to action
Fallibilism is about negation — proving ideas false rather than true. But this negative orientation shouldn’t deter us from making conjectures. Quite the opposite! More conjecture means more exploration.
We use conjecture and refutation in work all the time, whether we’re creating a new software feature, writing an essay, creating a company policy, or an entire product. Falsifiability is a useful framework that teaches us how to make our way forward.
We’ve all been on teams that agonized too long over a decision, spent too long overanalyzing next steps in the conference room, or sketched and refined an idea for days, only to have our efforts immediately invalidated the minute they made contact with the world. Ultimately this resistance to action is an avoidance of risk, but building things and generating knowledge is about taking calculated risk. Many actions will be proven wrong, but we have no idea which ones without taking them. Rather than focus group ourselves to death, paralyzed from putting our work out there, we should bias toward action.
Action is Popper’s conjecture — an opinion about what should be, pushed out to a customer for criticism. If we’re judged harshly, we head back to the drawing board or take another tack. If it survives, we’ve found a workable path. The work carries on across stepping stones of forward progress.
In To Know What to Build, Start Building (RE 41) I talked about the concept of the “adjacent possible”. At any given moment in a project, imagine yourself facing a choice of stepping stones, each one representing an adjacent possibility. At first we have limited insight into what’s beyond each. The only way to truly gauge is to take small steps and explore the next selection of stones. The bias to action propels us to take steps.
Conjecture and criticism create knowledge. Action is a form of conjecture, and your customer’s feedback is criticism. Action, feedback, and the criticism that follows create knowledge. Keeping our work to ourselves hides it from the critique that pushes it forward.
It’s a gradual stepwise process. But as I’ve written before, gradual compounds. Gradual is powerful.
Our best work is what survives encounters with reality. It’s the jokes that got the biggest laughs, with the bad ones left on the cutting room floor.
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