Karl Popper is most famous for his work in the theory of science; primarily the importance of falsifiability. Apparently he had an issue with Marxism because he felt it wasn't falsifiable. The idea is that it should be possible in theory to prove any good theory wrong. For example, the theory of evolution is a good theory because there are things that we could discover that could prove it wrong (Precambrian rabbits).
Marxism is not really what I would pick to talk about Karl Popper and falsifiability... his writings on politics are pretty much a side-act. I am guessing the author was recently reading some of Karl Popper's more political writings. I would have picked psychoanalysis.
I don't think Marxism was Popper's side act, particularly later in life (The Open Society And Its Enemies, The Poverty Of Historicism). Marxism and Freudianism were targets of Popper's because they appropriate the language of science for what he argued were in fact non-sciences.
It's important to remember that in the '20s, Marxism was presented as a scientific theory, that it described a logical, teleological process by which human society could be perfected. This was the Popper's later great white whale. Ask George Soros!
An amusing fact about Karl Popper is that he also rejected quantum mechanics as a valid scientific theory because no probabilistic theory can be falsified.
The irony is that the standard methods of hypothesis testing which are often used to test statistical theories, including quantum mechanics, is based on reasoning with strong parallels to Popper's theory of falsifiability.
It is worth noting that Popper's theory is itself false. Real scientists do not simply throw away a theory because it is proven false. Good theories are hard to find. And a false theory may still be a useful approximation!
oh, I see. There's a seriously flawed parallelism in his list; the first is a direct analogy (between GE and amazon itself) and the second is an analogy about analogies made on amazon.
Marxism is not really what I would pick to talk about Karl Popper and falsifiability... his writings on politics are pretty much a side-act. I am guessing the author was recently reading some of Karl Popper's more political writings. I would have picked psychoanalysis.