The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper
When Eric Kandel went on a limb to study memory by analyzing neural processes in the giant snail Aplysia, Karl Popper encouraged him. But he didn’t encourage Kandel by telling him that he was going to be right. His encouragement was to the contrary.
Aplysia has few neurons, and they are large, making its nervous system easy to study. When Kandel was researching them, almost all of his colleagues believed that you could not extrapolate learnings from non-complex systems, like giant snails, to complex ones, like humans. Kandel thought that it might be possible, and he decided to go against the grain.
Popper told Kandel that he should try and run head first into the face of failure. In Popper’s view, Kandel’s job as a scientist was not to be right. His job was to make sure that beliefs were grounded in evidence, and there was limited evidence that non-complex systems could not inform the study of complex ones. Kandel ran towards failure, and as luck would have it, there was no failure on the other end. There was a Nobel prize. (Read In Search of Memory by Eric Kandel to learn more about Kandel’s work and his recollection of his interactions with Popper.)
In The Open Society, Popper carefully dismantles political ideas that make us more inclined to believe in unproven positives rather than acknowledging the true limitations of our knowledge. It’s an inspiring demonstration of Popper’s own analytical ability, which allowed him to see past centuries old biases and outline a concise attack on long-standing traditions of political philosophy.