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Need summaries at top of discussions. Could be AI generated.

#4727·​Dennis HackethalOP, 7 months ago

"Veritula could be a place where people break news stories and others can quickly fact-check and improve upon reports by revising them."

I ask myself where I go when I want 'answers' to such problems and immediately I think prediction markets. It's mainly because I think the financial incentives and outcome based 'test' serve as highly reliable error correction. I wonder what different utility Veritula would add in this regard.

#6006·​Michael Briffa, 2 days ago

It is unclear to me why uncomputable should mean unknowable. The halting problem shows that no algorithm can correctly decide, for every program and input, whether the program will halt. Yet we can understand why such an algorithm is impossible, and we can determine the answer in particular cases. Are you equating the impossibility of a universal computational procedure with the impossibility of knowledge? What exactly is being claimed to be unknowable here?

#6008·​Michael Briffa, 2 days ago

By definition, there is nothing in the unknowable, since it can't be known.

This isn’t true. There are unknowable things. Look up uncomputable functions, see eg

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_function#Uncomputable_functions_and_unsolvable_problems
• https://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/2s2wgy/what_is_an_uncomputable_function/.

So there are things that computers like our brains can never access – there are fundamental, natural limitations.

In this context, I think of mysticism as restricting criticism and preventing error correction, ie creating a man-made barrier for reason. That’s different.

#3973·​Dennis Hackethal, 9 months ago

Top-level ideas in a discussion thread are not standalone pages.

One thing that Wikipedia does well is having a structured, high level page for each idea/subject. This enables readers to get a good sense of an idea quickly.

Right now, to get a good sense of an idea on Veritula, a user often has to study a branching discussion, which can take a lot of work depending on how the discussion played out. A discussion also emphasises things that were relevant to the disagreements that took place in the discussion, rather than distilling the most important elements of an idea into a hierarchy, regardless of disagreements that took place in getting to it (like an encyclopedia entry does).

#2752·​Benjamin Davies, 12 months ago

I agree that Veritula deserves to scale to something huge.

Looking through the history of Wikipedia, I see that its core concept is that of “compiling the world's knowledge in a single location […]”. To be clear, I think the core concept of Veritula is to be a programmatic implementation of Popper’s rational discussion methodology; it then becomes a dictionary for ideas as a result. It’s also less about listing facts and more about listing ideas and their logical relationship (though criticisms do provide built-in fact-checking mechanisms). That said, with enough users, Veritula could become a place with a lot of knowledge.

The linked site traces some of the success of Wikipedia to volunteers: “The use of volunteers was integral in making and maintaining Wikipedia.” So early adopters such as yourself are crucial.

In addition, 9/11 apparently played a role in making Wikipedia famous:

The September 11 attacks spurred the appearance of breaking news stories on the homepage, as well as information boxes linking related articles. At the time, approximately 100 articles related to 9/11 had been created. After the September 11 attacks, a link to the Wikipedia article on the attacks appeared on Yahoo!'s home page, resulting in a spike in traffic.

Veritula could be a place where people break news stories and others can quickly fact-check and improve upon reports by revising them. An urgent story would draw a lot of users to the site, too.

Something like Wikipedia’s arbitration process could be interesting, too.

Something similar to Wikipedia’s page-protection feature to combat “edit warring” and “prevent vandalism” could address the issue of people posting criticisms in rapid succession to protect their pet ideas.

Your suggestion to look to Wikipedia for inspiration is spot on. Thanks.

#628·​Dennis HackethalOP, about 2 years ago

Fair, but if the discussion itself is clear and concise, it doesn’t need an AI summary either. I agree that a long discussion could benefit even when each individual idea is concise.

#6002·​Moritz Wallawitsch, 2 days ago·​AI-assisted

Then prohibit unnecessary verbosity directly. Human-written text can be verbose, and AI-edited text can be concise. That doesn’t explain why someone using AI to edit their own argument should have to disclose it.

#6003·​Moritz Wallawitsch, 2 days ago·​AI-assisted

AI-generated text is notoriously verbose regardless of who came up with an idea.

#5983·​Dennis HackethalOP, 4 days ago

Summary feature proposed in #4727 is for discussions not ideas.

#5982·​Dennis HackethalOP, 4 days ago

It doesn’t play the whole codebase at once. It walks through the code line by line, and when a file changes, it jumps to the changed lines and plays an accent made from them, rising or falling with that file’s health. So a small change in a big codebase is as audible as one in a small codebase. What’s quieter in a big codebase is the overall stage, and that’s on purpose: one long function shouldn’t make a whole healthy codebase sound sick. Bugs are the exception, since they count in full. One syntax error drops even a huge project from beautiful to meh.

#5980·​Dennis Hackethal, 4 days ago·​AI-assisted

Midnight Ride: Production Errors That Fix Themselves (Almost)

blog.dennishackethal.com

Midnight Ride: Production Errors That Fix Themselves (Almost)

Midnight Ride, my new Rails gem, sends production errors from Solid Errors to Telegram and starts a Claude Code session that opens a PR with the fix.

#5990·​Dennis Hackethal, 3 days ago

These three paragraphs could be shortened to: ‘basing badges on non-AI use may discourage non-native speakers.’ Verbosity is a recurring issue

#5993·​Dennis HackethalOP, 3 days ago

That all makes sense to me, thanks. But there is a cost: my previous badges were removed which means that my contributions would have stayed limited to 3 per day if I understand the rules correctly. This should change of course, now, that I do not use AI for responses, so I should be fine in the log run, but my friend, who would then disclose that he uses AI for all his discussions, would never be able to submit more than 3 ideas per day, and would also never be able to join more than one discussion per week because none of his responses would count towards earning the necessary badges https://veritula.com/badges.

My criticism goes deeper though: I really think that there is a case to make that for the goal you describe, to find a bit of truth (or maybe just the current best explanation), it is actually better to use AI, simply because we can spend less time correcting bad faith, misunderstandings, unclear language etc. (Also, one might just say "well, so it takes a bit more time, no problem" - but it's more complicated, because bad faith is often provoking emotions etc which often ends debates before finding a bit more truth)
In our sample discussion about animal consciousness, if I would correct for the "too long" and "not simple enough", I think it would be helpful. But of course, now that I know that you don't appreciate it and since you are currently the only one responding, I will gladly follow your wish not to use it.

I guess, the point I'm trying to make is really that it should not be coming with any form of punishment (like that this does not count for badges) IF the AI assist is clearly done in good faith.

#5985·​Vincent Brunsch, 3 days ago

That all makes sense to me, thanks. But there is a cost: my previous badges were removed which means that my contributions would have stayed limited to 3 per day if I understand the rules correctly. This should change of course, now, that I do not use AI for responses, so I should be fine in the log run, but my friend, who would then disclose that he uses AI for all his discussions, would never be able to submit more than 3 ideas per day, and would also never be able to join more than one discussion per week because none of his responses would count towards earning the necessary badges https://veritula.com/badges.

My criticism goes deeper though: I really think that there is a case to make that for the goal you describe, to find a bit of truth (or maybe just the current best explanation), it is actually better to use AI, simply because we can spend less time correcting bad faith, misunderstandings, unclear language etc. (Also, one might just say "well, so it takes a bit more time, no problem" - but it's more complicated, because bad faith is often provoking emotions etc which often ends debates before finding a bit more truth)
In our sample discussion about animal consciousness, if I would correct for the "too long" and "not simple enough", I think it would be helpful. But of course, now that I know that you don't appreciate it and since you are currently the only one responding, I will gladly follow your wish not to use it.

I guess, the point I'm trying to make is really that it should not be coming with any form of punishment (like that this does not count for badges) IF the AI assist is clearly done in good faith.

#5985·​Vincent Brunsch, 3 days ago

This takes me back to my startup days in Berlin. It was common knowledge among founders that anyone overly worried about telling people about their great idea because someone might ‘steal’ it was a newbie founder. It’s almost always a mistake not to tell people, for several reaasons:

1. Your idea probably isn’t new anyway. Somebody has probably already tried it before you and realized why it doesn’t work.
2. If you don’t share your idea, you don’t get any critical feedback. You’ll make more mistakes. It will be harder to launch it.
3. Most people don’t care. They have their own problems. They’re not looking to copy ideas.

Tik Tok came up with reels and then Instagram copied the feature. Arguably, Instagram does it better now. Imagine the founder of Tik Tok getting angry with Zuckerberg and trying to shame him online. That would be ridiculous.

People get angry because they hope to control more than they actually can. Ideas spread; we can’t control people’s speech. One can’t expect secrecy from people who didn’t agree to secrecy. If it’s important, like industry secrets or product launches, one should make people sign NDAs. If something is truly secret, the only person you should tell is your lawyer. Aside from that, sharing generously and openly is more profitable for you 99% of the time anyway.

#5988·​Dennis Hackethal, 3 days ago

I recently spent a Sunday vibe coding an ai-image-gen micro-SaaS. The person that inspired me accused me of copying his product and threatened to damage my reputation. However, I improved on his idea by implementing several features his product didn’t have such as allowing for 7 multiple output styles, custom prompts, churn-prevention email follow-ups, and a landing page that better explains the product.

Most people hold fundamentally wrong ideas about morality. This includes thinking that copying business ideas or having CRISPR-edited super babies is immoral, that death is good, that the existence of billionaires is wrong, and that not helping others is immoral. They all spring from an avoidance of conflict: the conflict of ideas, the conflict of accepting not to exist, the conflict of envy, etc. This “morality” becomes destructive because it’s scared of the turning forces of evolution by evading conflict and adversity of any kind. It’s suffocating.

Morality is best explained by epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge), not religion or intuition. With this lens morality is the knowledge about what to want, and what to strive for¹.

The most fundamental tenet of morality is to not remove the means of error-correction². Since error-correction is the only way our knowledge can improve.

If society hinders a scientist from inventing and distributing a cure for cancer, that is deeply immoral. Many regulations that restrict the freedom of people and their ideas are immoral.

Copying someone's business

The Samwer brothers famously copied Airbnb and other companies, but these companies provided the solution to people in different geographies or demographics, improving access to the solution.

Their Airbnb clone, Wimdu, largely failed because it was only a surface-level copy that didn’t innovate on any aspect of the business. It incentivized Airbnb to innovate on better host support, internationalization, trust infrastructure, and regulatory compliance.

Opening a lemonade stand two blocks from an existing one incentivizes both lemonade stand operators to improve their lemonade. Competition leads to innovation.

Now, why do most people believe that copying someone’s business is immoral?

I think the main reason is that people think ideas can be “stolen”. That is wrong. Ideas are non-rivalrous³. And everyone should be incentivized to reproduce them and correct their errors. Problems are solvable⁴, and there is an infinity of problems (people always want more). IP law is another way to incentivize people to innovate. Unfortunately, large companies like Amazon (with hundreds of people in their internal legal department working on IP law) exploit this system to prevent competition.

But isn't competition for losers?

Peter Thiel famously proclaimed this in his book Zero to One. In a demand-constrained market, this is true. Building another AI headshot app wouldn’t be a great idea if the demand for AI headshots were shrinking rapidly. It is not.

Even Founders Fund (Thiel’s venture firm) invested in companies with strong competition:

• Ramp: Launched two years after Brex; both grew quickly as financial operations digitalized.
• Spotify: Entered a crowded market (iTunes, Pandora, Rhapsody) just as music streaming took off.
• Rippling: Entered HR/payroll after Gusto, ADP, and Paychex; succeeded by bundling HR, IT, and finance as businesses moved to the cloud.
• Postmates: Was started after Grubhub and Seamless, but grew fast as on-demand delivery became a habit.
• Icon.com: Was started after there were already countless AI ad generator platforms. As more people consume short-form video content and realistic AI-image and video generation becomes possible, demand for this kind of software explodes.

It would be stupid to claim these companies are immoral because they copied another business. Here are some other moral mistakes I have considered lately. They range from economics to biology to altruism.

Altruism

Helping can be immoral if it prevents people from learning to solve their own problems. It can also be immoral if the invested resources could have led to a greater error correction. Socialism, with its underlying philosophy of altruism, is the embodiment of this error. For example, the US government taxes the 343 million Americans ~$1.2 trillion per year (that’s ~$3,580 per person on avg.) to fund a public education system that is stuck in the 1800s. These people could have used the resources the state took from them to buy education services from private companies that have a clear profit incentive to improve their service. To quote my previous post, “They don’t care if the students hate school” nor if they end up in student debt.

Being immortal

Death is not the only reason that life is “precious”. There are better reasons.

The idea that the shortness of life is what gives it its “meaning” is wrong. Meaning is not zero-sum. I.e., your life doesn’t have a fixed amount of meaning that is reduced if you live longer. The opposite is true, a longer life leads to more meaningful experiences. Life is more like water when you’re thirsty than a rare diamond; its value comes from how much you can experience, not from being limited in quantity.

Life is not its own meaning. Meaning comes from the things you do and create. If your life is unbounded, so is the meaning you can create within it.

People wear seatbelts. Nobody says, “I want to get hit by a car, because my life will have more meaning if it ends sooner.” There’s nothing inherently meaningful about limitation or scarcity by itself. If that were true, a two-day life would be more meaningful than a 70-year life.

Some argue that meaningfulness of life is binary. But if knowing the exact day of your death feels terrifying, that shows that it’s not simply mortality that gives meaning, but the unpredictable and exciting adventure of living itself.

Even Christianity calls death an enemy from humanity’s fall, promising its end: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). In paradise, “death shall be no more” (Revelation 21:4). It sees death as a problem to be solved, not a source of meaning.

Ultimately I think arguments that claim death is moral originated to cope with the fear of death. The thought that our existence suddenly stops. All the laughter, parties, friends, interesting conversation, sex, beautiful landscapes and skylines are suddenly taken from us, for eternity.

Nick Bostrom in his essay The Fable of the Dragon‑Tyrant calls this "deathist" ideology—the passive acceptance of what should be humanity's greatest enemy. My friend Arjun criticized other common arguments against immortality in his blog post.

Involuntary death isn’t a cosmic necessity; it’s a biological error, possibly the greatest error of all. And it’s one we may soon be able to fix. Just imagine the inventions we never experienced and how many more lives would flourish today if people like Euclid, Newton, Tesla, Marie Curie, or Alan Turing would still be alive.

CRISPER-edited Super Babies

Some people don’t like the idea of us playing God. But that is what we are now. We are as gods and might as well get good at it⁵.

Others claim that gene-editing super babies (to be free from disease or just smarter) would be an innovation that only the rich could afford, thereby creating a segregated society. The 1997 movie Gattaca is a dramatization of this claim.

That logic is wrong because it impedes the spread of an innovation (and error correction). The assumption that non-gene-improved people will be relegated to menial jobs is also wrong because there are many wealthy people with fun jobs who are low in IQ or disabled.

History shows that innovation disperses. Initially only the rich could afford better nutrition or computers. Should we have waited before allowing people to buy a computer until they are cheap enough for eight billion people to have their own? No.

Opposing gene-editing is like opposing antibiotics because not everyone could afford penicillin in 1928.

The technology is here. Using embryo selection or gene editing to have a super baby is a choice about your body and procreation. Some people don't think you should have this choice. But *it's not their choice to make. It's yours*.⁶

Billionaires

Some people claim billionaires shouldn’t exist. That is wrong. I'd even go so far as to say that not wanting to be a billionaire (or trillionaire) is wrong. Ambition is a consequence of optimism. In his Davos 2024 speech Javier Milei said:

Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral

We are like billionaires to people living 5000 years ago. If some of these people did not desire immense wealth, we’d probably still live in mud huts now. We're like iron age peasants to the people that will live 2000 years from now.

Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilization or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now.⁷

I think the disgust of the existence of billionaires likely stems from envy. But that response is wrong. What matters is not the relative, but the absolute wealth and well-being of people. In the future, inequality will become ever greater. Some people will own entire galaxies, while others will only own a continent on a single planet. Everyone will be immensely more wealthy.

---

Thanks for reading this. I’ll now continue playing the infinite game of capitalism.

Thanks to my friends for feedback on this essay: Tom Hyde, Milan Scharfe, Ben Chugg, Vaden Masrani, Maxime Desalle, Saketh, Jesse Ray Nichols, David Taurat, Logan Chipkin, Brian Chau, Remus

---

1. The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 3. The Spark, Page 61

2. See discussion here: https://nav.al/david-deutsch

3. While ideas as abstract knowledge are non-rivalrous, their application can involve rivalry over scarce complementary resources such as capital, employees, customers, or attention. In this practical sense, ideas can “compete,” but this competition is itself part of the process of error-correction and innovation.

4. The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 3, The Spark, Page 64

5. Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, opening sentence, 1968

6. Quoting my friend Kian Sadeghi in his launch video for Nucleus.

7. The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 9, Optimism, Page 218. I omit the sentence’s final clause (“and you and I would be immortal”), which Deutsch corrected in the book’s errata.

#5954·​Moritz WallawitschOP revised 6 days ago

That all makes sense to me, thanks. But there is a cost: my previous badges were removed which means that my contributions would have stayed limited to 3 per day if I understand the rules correctly. This should change of course, now, that I do not use AI for responses, so I should be fine in the log run, but my friend, who would then disclose that he uses AI for all his discussions, would never be able to submit more than 3 ideas per day, and would also never be able to join more than one discussion per week because none of his responses would count towards earning the necessary badges https://veritula.com/badges.

My criticism goes deeper though: I really think that there is a case to make that for the goal you describe, to find a bit of truth (or maybe just the current best explanation), it is actually better to use AI, simply because we can spend less time correcting bad faith, misunderstandings, unclear language etc. (Also, one might just say "well, so it takes a bit more time, no problem" - but it's more complicated, because bad faith is often provoking emotions etc which often ends debates before finding a bit more truth)
In our sample discussion about animal consciousness, if I would correct for the "too long" and "not simple enough", I think it would be helpful. But of course, now that I know that you don't appreciate it and since you are currently the only one responding, I will gladly follow your wish not to use it.

I guess, the point I'm trying to make is really that it should not be coming with any form of punishment (like that this does not count for badges) IF the AI assist is clearly done in good faith.

#5985·​Vincent Brunsch, 3 days ago

That all makes sense to me, thanks. But there is a cost: my previous badges were removed which means that my contributions would have stayed limited to 3 per day if I understand the rules correctly. This should change of course, now, that I do not use AI for responses, so I should be fine in the log run, but my friend, who would then disclose that he uses AI for all his discussions, would never be able to submit more than 3 ideas per day, and would also never be able to join more than one discussion per week because none of his responses would count towards earning the necessary badges https://veritula.com/badges.

My criticism goes deeper though: I really think that there is a case to make that for the goal you describe, to find a bit of truth (or maybe just the current best explanation), it is actually better to use AI, simply because we can spend less time correcting bad faith, misunderstandings, unclear language etc. (Also, one might just say "well, so it takes a bit more time, no problem" - but it's more complicated, because bad faith is often provoking emotions etc which often ends debates before finding a bit more truth)
In our sample discussion about animal consciousness, if I would correct for the "too long" and "not simple enough", I think it would be helpful. But of course, now that I know that you don't appreciate it and since you are currently the only one responding, I will gladly follow your wish not to use it.

I guess, the point I'm trying to make is really that it should not be coming with any form of punishment (like that this does not count for badges) IF the AI assist is clearly done in good faith.

#5985·​Vincent Brunsch, 3 days ago

I’m not using AI for this response and will not do so moving forward on Veritula to respect the rules and what seems to be the sentiment behind these rules (unless they change).

As written, the forum rules don’t ban AI. They say to disclose it. Someone may voice a preference about AI use and it’s up to you to honor it. Their preference doesn’t bind you like the forum rules do. But members will make decisions about who to spend time discussing with. Our discussion about animals, if you choose to continue it, will probably go better if you don’t use AI.

That said, it’s a good idea, especially for new members, to get a feel for the platform, study the rules, and understand the culture better before going full-steam ahead and submitting dozens of AI-assisted ideas. It’s best to exercise care when entering a new space and prove that you’re worth engaging with. (I’m not only talking about you specifically, I mean new members in general.) Checking a checkbox indicating AI use is a small cost, and it’s a good way to be transparent with readers of one’s ideas.

To that end, it pays to show an understanding that Veritula isn’t a debate club, and that the goal isn’t to win an argument (although winning and losing do happen here, in an objectively recognizable sense – though finding an error is rarely an actual ‘loss’). The goal is to find a bit of truth. It pays to show that you can change your mind, eg by saying things like ‘I never thought of it that way – you’ve given me a new way to look at things.’ Having your AI say something like that on your behalf obviously carries less weight than if you said it yourself. And excessive use of AI gives the impression that someone is just trying to win an argument. (Not saying you specifically – again, this is about the forum rules in general.)

My English is not great but the English from a Spanish friend of mine is considerably worse, and I wonder if I should tell him about this platform, because he would usually use AI to polish his English.

Your English is fine. Clearly good enough to have discussions. As for your friend, he can enlist the help of AI to translate ideas. Again, he’d just need to disclose it.

#5984·​Dennis HackethalOP, 4 days ago