work-blog/articles/drafts/popper-and-the-risky-test.md

Popper and the Risky Test. You've covered modus tollens but stopped short of the inevitable: Popper's demarcation criterion[1]. A good test is a risky prediction — one the product could plausibly fail. Low-risk tests (tests that pass because there's nothing interesting they could catch) are the testing equivalent of unfalsifiable theories: they look like science but aren't. This would give you a rigorous vocabulary for the intuition behind "my regression suite is green but I don't feel confident."

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/
feat(drafts): add initial drafts for philosophy-inspired testing articles Introduces nine new draft articles exploring intersections of software testing with philosophy, epistemology, and related concepts: - On Flakiness (Heraclitus and non-deterministic tests) - Popper and the Risky Test (demarcation criterion) - Regression as Institutional Memory (Wittgenstein's On Certainty) - Tacit Knowledge and the Testing Checklist (Polanyi's tacit dimension) - Test Environments as Platonic Shadows (Plato's cave allegory) - The Tester as Witness (legal metaphor and testimony) - Testing Probabilistic Systems (ML and statistical testing) - The Oracle Problem (oracles in testing frameworks) - When Quality Becomes Quantity (Goodhart's Law and metrics) 2026-04-20 08:28:28 +00:00			Popper and the Risky Test. You've covered modus tollens but stopped short of the inevitable: Popper's demarcation criterion[1]. A good test is a risky prediction — one the product could plausibly fail. Low-risk tests (tests that pass because there's nothing interesting they could catch) are the testing equivalent of unfalsifiable theories: they look like science but aren't. This would give you a rigorous vocabulary for the intuition behind "my regression suite is green but I don't feel confident."

			`[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/`