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  Dennis Hackethal addressed criticism #5557.

I agree that people can disagree about what counts as a variation versus a completely different explanation. I don't agree that the program itself needs to recognize the difference.

The program isn't intended to distinguish a variation from a completely different explanation. That's something the user has to decide. In fact, I don't see how a program could make that distinction in general without being a general intelligence that actually comprehends the problem situation and the explanations involved.

And people themselves can disagree about what counts as a variation. That's unavoidable because it depends on how they understand the underlying explanatory argument. What looks like a harmless change to me might look to someone with a deeper understanding like a change that completely breaks the explanation.

So I don't think different people getting different results is necessarily a problem. If I understand an explanation poorly, I may think lots of its details can be changed independently. Once I understand more of the connections between those details, I may realize that many of those variations don't actually work. On the other hand, an expert might also know valid ways of varying an explanation that I would never have thought of. The result reflects our current understanding, and that can change as our knowledge changes.

This is also part of the broader point I made in #5553: the program operates on the user's current understanding of the problem and explanations rather than independently understanding them for the user.

#5557​·​Jad Elmourad, about 11 hours ago