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Veritula (Latin for ‘a bit of truth’) provides an objective, partly automated way to tentatively determine whether a given idea is true or false.

It follows Karl Popper’s epistemology, which says that ideas are assumed true until refuted. This approach leaves us free to make bold conjectures and use the full arsenal at our disposal to criticize these conjectures to correct errors and seek truth. It’s a creative and critical approach.

Veritula is a programmatic implementation of Popper’s epistemology.

If a criticism of an idea is criticized in turn, the criticism is neutralized and the original idea considered true again. Veritula marks ideas accordingly, automatically. Since there are many ideas, many potential criticisms (which are also just ideas), and deeply nested counter-criticisms, the result is a tree structure. Because decision-making is a special case of, or follows the same logic as, truth-seeking, this tree can also be used as a decision tree.

All ideas, including criticisms, should be formulated as concisely as possible.

Separate ideas should be submitted separately, even if they’re related. Otherwise, you run the risk of receiving ‘bulk’ criticisms, where a single criticism seems to apply to more content than it actually does.

Again, criticisms are also just ideas, so the same is true for criticisms. Submitting each criticism separately has the benefit of causing the proponent of an idea to address each criticism individually, not in bulk. If he fails to address even a single criticism, the idea remains problematic and should be considered false.

The more you discuss a given topic, the deeper and wider the tree grows. Some criticisms do apply to multiple ideas in the tree, but that needs to be made explicit.

Ideas that are neither criticisms nor top-level conjectures – eg follow-up questions or neutral comments – are considered ancillary ideas.

One of the main benefits of Veritula is that the state of a discussion can be seen at a glance. If you are new to a much-discussed topic, the rational course of action is to adopt the displayed truth status of the ideas involved.

Veritula acts as a dictionary for ideas.

One of the problems of our age is that the same discussions are had over and over again, sometimes by the same people. Part of the reason is widespread irrationality, expressed in the unwillingness to change one’s mind; another is that it’s simply difficult to remember or know what’s true and what isn’t. Discussion trees can get complex, so people shouldn’t blindly trust their judgment of whether some idea is true or problematic, whether nested criticisms have been neutralized or not. Going off of memory is too error prone.

Veritula solves this problem: it makes discussion trees explicit so you don’t have to remember each idea and its relation to other ideas. Veritula therefore also enables you to hold irrational people accountable: if an idea has outstanding criticisms, the rational approach is to either abandon it or to save it by addressing them. To address a criticism, you either criticize it or revise the criticized idea so that the criticism doesn’t apply anymore.

Many people don’t like to concede an argument. But with Veritula, no concessions are necessary. The site just shows you who’s right.

Using Veritula, we may discover a bit of truth.

This is the kind of thing that’s messed up and should be prevented: https://x.com/CatchUpFeed/status/1819079527366382071

There are financial incentives to do abortions as late as possible.

Done as of e3f2c5b.

In activity feed, behind timestamp (‘… hours ago’), link to corresponding discussion.

Done as of c11a13c.

As of 9702c05, a revision activity now says that the idea was either marked or unmarked as a criticism.

Done as of 735c3cc.

When a comment is a criticism on another criticism, the activity should say ‘So and so addressed criticism #…’

such like

‘just like’

Done as of 8269806.

Done as of 7e7c6cd.

Done as of 146e967.

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It doesn’t really matter. This would be like calling a controller action from a helper method. Not something people do.

The activity feed just shows top-level criticisms as regular ideas. They should be shown as criticisms such like when they are child ideas.

Should I give the icons in the activity feed colors?

Should probably show the explanation in a revision, when given.

Discuss Veritula itself. For feedback and suggestions.

When all I change during a revision is the criticism flag, the activity log just says ‘no changes’.

I think the thing I’m really fighting here is Rails being object-oriented. Which I can’t do anything about.

Not sure the Rails team realizes how much OOP reduces the extensibility of Rails.

Having explored three different ideas, I believe #302 – having regular helper methods to render Hiccdown structures – is the best.

The idea is not without its flaws, but having to qualify a method name by, say, calling it idea_form instead of form is still better than manually having to pass the view context around all the time and not being able to trivially access instance variables.

So I’ll stick with #302 for now, which is the status quo already.

#327 applies here, too: no access to instance variables inside helper class methods.

Not as of #330, they couldn’t.