Why Warren Buffett is Unfalsifiable
Berkshire’s core logic is retrospective narrative coherence:
“We liked the business”
“We trusted management”
“It fit our circle of competence”
“We were patient”
All of these explanations are elastic.
They can accommodate almost any outcome after the fact.
There is no pre-committed condition like:
“If X happens by time Y, this thesis is wrong.”
Without that, there is no clean falsification event.
Berkshire operates on:
multi-year
multi-decade
sometimes indefinite timelines
This creates a structural escape hatch:
A poor outcome can always be reframed as “too early”
A drawdown can always be reframed as “temporary”
A miss can always be reframed as “part of the process”
Berkshire Hathaway is not falsifiable in the Popperian sense, because its explanations are adaptive, retrospective, and temporally unconstrained.
Berkshire Hathaway is extraordinarily successful, but it is epistemically unfalsifiable: its theses are evaluated retrospectively, over unconstrained time horizons, with no pre-committed conditions that would render them decisively wrong.