Thanks David for this. My sense is the cited passage from C&R provides an excellent illustration of an exhortation typical of what I found in Popper, both persuasive emotionally for science as a grand knowledge enterprise, and missing the subtleties needed for everyday science as pragmatic engineering.
On the one hand it captures an important aspect of knowledge evolution - our need to resolve apparent contradictions, motivating theory modifications. On the other hand it does not speak to the constant apparent contradictions in details that one will encounter in real research, not all of which can be addressed or even need to be addressed in the time that can be allotted by real users to real problems.
On the grand scale an example would be the conflict between general relativity and quantum field theory that has obsessed some theorists for generations going back to Einstein. Unresolved to this day to general satisfaction, engineers and most physicists tolerate it as they can make good use of the theories in the separate domains where they hold practical sway. On the small scale applied scientists tolerate inconsistencies like the theory that different methods should produce clearly heterogeneous observations, yet often don’t (specific examples from past collaborations of mine available on request).
So, in isolation the passage looks a product of its time in its overemphasis on contradiction resolution. It’s fine if taken with a caution in light of practical needs, and with awareness (which I did not see in Popper, but perhaps you can point it out) of developments in rationality and logic that followed in later decades to address those needs (like satisficing, type-II rationality, paraconsistent logics and so forth: weaker systems of reasoning than the absolute contradiction intolerance of classical deduction).
I tend to label strict adherence to classical logic as naive deductivism, understanding that the use of “naive” here is not an epithet; it is instead an acknowledgement of unawareness of later developments of specifically circumscribed contradiction tolerance and deductive gaps, which may better suit scientific activities in their more instrumental, pragmatic, “normal”/everyday mode (note that these would still regard the power abuse you cite as something to discard, since it has no rationale even in these weaker systems). This naivety is no different than the fact that most math uses naive set theory without concern about Russell-type paradoxes and the contradictions they entail, since most applied math (and much pure math as well) does not enter territory where those concerns must be heeded.
With that clarification, I hope you know I share your concerns about biostatistics and statistics in general. The personal conflict I have with some Popperians obscures the fact that I think the falsficationist/refutationist perspective is indispensable for sound research at any level, and that the epistemology implicit in much of “statistical inference” is naive in the negative sense or worse: obscurantist and even nonsensical. But the conflict over how to address the latter problem remains intense and often nasty, leading me to think that progress is arrested by a complex mix of human factors, including the innate unrecognized cognitive limitations we are saddled with, as well as unopposable social pressures.
In that light, claims about “getting beyond the statistics wars” begin to sound like “peace in our time” did in 1938. And as in Brave New World from the same decade, AI/machine learning now offers some glimmer of a future beyond the conflict, in which the goal of individual understanding is recognized as hopeless and perhaps the central obstacle to progress (after all, who understands the internet and its World Wide Web full detail?).