I'm Deutschian, until we find something better. But I don't think that all of Kuhn's ideas about scientific progress are mutually exclusive from Popper and Deutsch.

"Kuhn's theory suffers from a fatal flaw. It explains the succession from one paradigm to another in sociological or psychological terms, rather than as having primarily to do with the objective merit of the rival explanations. Yet unless one understands science as a quest for explanations, the fact that it does find successive explanations, each objectively better than the last, is inexplicable." Also, from The Fabric of Reality, Ch.13

Here he's saying "That the truth consists of hard-to-vary assertions about reality is the most important fact about the physical world. It's a fact that is itself unseen, yet impossible to vary. ". Conjecture, creativity, which is not based on observation, but part of something we don't understand yet, consciousness, is where objective progress comes from.

Our knowledge about knowledge, what Popper gives us, is that all observations are theory-laden. That means that if we want better theories/explanations, we need to criticize our best existing theories.

What David Deutsch adds is that theories are explanations, and not just any explanations--they are hard-to-vary. His go-to example is something like, "If I tell you a pound of grass can cure the common cold, you know that you don't need to test that explanation and eat a pound of grass because the explanation is easy-to-vary," in other words, it could be a pound of dandelions or rosemary--what's important is the explanation for why grass. This may seem obvious, but then why is homeopathy such a huge industry?

There is no hierarchy to go by, that's a mistake that gets in the way of progress. A new explanation can replace any level of the chain. This is part of the point of Constructor Theory, whose goal is to redefine the entirety of physics to be based on counterfactuals instead of trajectories. The conjecture there, I think, is that if we do we may be closer to having a better theory/explanation of consciousness.

Also, I tried to write a blog post about this, but kind of gave up when I got too distracted by comparing Bitcoin to ATP and how it could be used to automate trust models for constructors in constructor theory--and how that may aide with consciousness, but I couldn't figure out how to link ATP as an abstraction for coordination for explanations besides the selfish progress from randomness that evolution provides.

But, related is this tweet from Paul Sztorc. I also have this nice explanation/metaphor that I came up with today: "Anyone who gets on a boat that sails forever will always be joining at the beginning of an infinite ride. But, the trick is figuring how to make repairs and upgrades while sailing." Bitcoin is just part of the boat, it's a voluntary resilient global economy whose security model doesn't rely on the nation state model, but it's importance for upgrading the boat (of life) is recognized by all Bitcoiners, I think, and it's our job to try and get that explanation out there into the world WHILE improving it.