Activity Feed
#4016·Dennis HackethalOP, 3 days agoThere’s an issue with horizontal scroll for overflowing code blocks in the activity feed on mobile. Can’t scroll all the way to the right.
Fixed as of e49cd8d.
Just as nations can have different forms of governance, minds can too.
For example: Most probably have that CEO-sense of self.
Some minds with lots of coercive memes are more like dictatorships.
People with "smaller egos" (less anti-rational memes) are more like libertarian societies.
But people with set preferences for less self are more like communist societies. That's a kind of coerced decentralisation.
Split personalities would be akin to a highly polarised society that switches governance back and forth.
Just as nations can have different forms of governance, minds can too.
For example: Most probably have that CEO-sense of self.
Some minds with one coercive memeplex are more like dictatorships.
People with "smaller egos" (less anti-rational memes) are more like libertarian societies.
But people with set preferences for less self are more like communist societies. That's a kind of coerced decentralisation.
Split personalities would be akin to a highly polarised society that switches governance back and forth.
Dennis Hackethal updated discussion ‘Living a Rational Life in an Irrational Society – Book Club’.
The ‘About’ section changed as follows:
Discussing ‘How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?’ by Ayn Rand.
https://courses.aynrand.org/works/how-does-one-lead-a-rational-life-in-an-irrational-society/
Ayn Rand says one important part of living rationally in an irrational society is to pronounce judgment.
In short, if someone attacks your values, say something! Especially if silence could be mistaken as sanction of evil.
If you don’t pronounce judgment, both good and evil know they can’t expect anything from you. So by default, silence favors evil and betrays good. There’s no such thing as moral neutrality or ‘grayness’.
To pronounce judgment, you don’t need to be omniscient or infallible. But you do need integrity.
Many people are afraid of being judged. They like to say “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” They hope to get a moral blank check by writing one for others.
But the reality is that people have to make choices. To make choices, they need moral values. So moral neutrality hurts their ability to make choices. It’s also a slippery slope toward evasions. When people are morally ‘gray’, they say things like ‘no one is fully good or fully bad.’ That just helps evil along.
The moral principle people should adopt instead is: “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”
Judging means “evaluat[ing] a given concrete by reference to an abstract principle or standard.” It’s not easy and you can’t do it automatically through feelings. It requires deliberate, rational thought. It must be well-reasoned and can’t be arbitrary.
Judging does not mean going around offering your opinion unsolicited or saving others. It does mean two things: “(a) that one must know clearly, in full, verbally identified form, one’s own moral evaluation of every person, issue and event with which one deals, and act accordingly; (b) that one must make one’s moral evaluation known to others, when it is rationally appropriate to do so.”
Sometimes you can just say you disagree, other times you may need to state your views more fully. It depends on your interlocutor and on context.
Pronouncing judgment protects the clarity of your thoughts against society’s irrational background.
Ultimately, society is run either by “the man who is willing to assume the responsibility of asserting rational values” or by “the thug who is not troubled by questions of responsibility.”
So speak out when someone attacks your values.
Summary
Ayn Rand says one important part of living rationally in an irrational society is to pronounce judgment.
In short, if someone attacks your values, say something! Especially if silence could be mistaken as sanction of evil.
If you don’t pronounce judgment, both good and evil know they can’t expect anything from you. So by default, silence favors evil and betrays good. There’s no such thing as moral neutrality or ‘grayness’.
To pronounce judgment, you don’t need to be omniscient or infallible. But you do need integrity.
Many people are afraid of being judged. They like to say “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” They hope to get a moral blank check by writing one for others.
But the reality is that people have to make choices. To make choices, they need moral values. So moral neutrality hurts their ability to make choices. It’s also a slippery slope toward evasions. When people are morally ‘gray’, they say things like ‘no one is fully good or fully bad.’ That just helps evil along.
The moral principle people should adopt instead is: “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”
Judging means “evaluat[ing] a given concrete by reference to an abstract principle or standard.” It’s not easy and you can’t do it automatically through feelings. It requires deliberate, rational thought. It must be well-reasoned and can’t be arbitrary.
Judging does not mean going around offering your opinion unsolicited or saving others. It does mean two things: “(a) that one must know clearly, in full, verbally identified form, one’s own moral evaluation of every person, issue and event with which one deals, and act accordingly; (b) that one must make one’s moral evaluation known to others, when it is rationally appropriate to do so.”
Sometimes you can just say you disagree, other times you may need to state your views more fully. It depends on your interlocutor and on context.
Pronouncing judgment protects the clarity of your thoughts against society’s irrational background.
Ultimately, society is run either by “the man who is willing to assume the responsibility of asserting rational values” or by “the thug who is not troubled by questions of responsibility.”
So speak out when someone attacks your values.
Ayn Rand says one important part of living rationally in an irrational society is to pronounce judgment.
In short, if someone attacks your values, say something! Especially if silence could be mistaken as sanction of evil.
If you don’t pronounce judgment, both good and evil know they can’t expect anything from you. So by default, silence favors evil and betrays good. There’s no such thing as moral neutrality or ‘grayness’.
To pronounce judgment, you don’t need to be omniscient or infallible. But you do need integrity.
Many people are afraid of being judged. They like to say “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” They hope to get a moral blank check by writing one for others.
But the reality is that people have to make choices. To make choices, they need moral values. So moral neutrality hurts their ability to make choices. It’s also a slippery slope toward evasions. When people are morally ‘gray’, they say things like ‘no one is fully good or fully bad.’ That just helps evil along.
The moral principle people should adopt instead is: “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”
Judging means “evaluat[ing] a given concrete by reference to an abstract principle or standard.” It’s not easy and you can’t do it automatically through feelings. It requires deliberate, rational thought. It must be well-reasoned and can’t be arbitrary.
Judging does not mean going around offering your opinion unsolicited or saving others. It does mean two things: “(a) that one must know clearly, in full, verbally identified form, one’s own moral evaluation of every person, issue and event with which one deals, and act accordingly; (b) that one must make one’s moral evaluation known to others, when it is rationally appropriate to do so.”
Sometimes you can just say you disagree, other times you may need to state your views more fully. It depends on your interlocutor and on context.
Pronouncing judgment protects the clarity of your thoughts against society’s irrational background.
Ultimately, society is run either by “the man who is willing to assume the responsibility of asserting rational values” or by “the thug who is not troubled by questions of responsibility.”
So speak out when someone attacks your values.
#3951·Dennis HackethalOP, 8 days agoDone as of
cc1ab95.Ruby example:
rubydef criticized? ideapending_criticisms(idea).any?enddef pending_criticisms ideacriticisms(idea).filter { |c| pending_criticisms(c).none? }enddef criticisms ideachildren(idea).filter(&:criticism?)endJS example (h/t ChatGPT):
javascriptfunction criticized(idea) {return pendingCriticisms(idea).length > 0;}function pendingCriticisms(idea) {return criticisms(idea).filter(c => pendingCriticisms(c).length === 0);}function criticisms(idea) {return children(idea).filter(c => c.isCriticism);}
There’s an issue with horizontal scroll for overflowing code blocks in the activity feed on mobile. Can’t scroll all the way to the right.
#1867·Dennis HackethalOP revised 4 months agoThe red ‘Criticized’ label could be a link leading to a filtered version of
ideas#show.
Yeah or see #2628.
#2886·Benjamin Davies, 3 months agoI am currently unable to zoom out to the full width when accessing Veritula on mobile.
Give this another shot. Should be fixed as of 6c7e74b.
For very deeply nested discussions, you may still need to scroll sideways to see some ideas. But you should now be able to zoom out far enough to always fit any idea into the viewport.
#3951·Dennis HackethalOP, 8 days agoDone as of
cc1ab95.Ruby example:
rubydef criticized? ideapending_criticisms(idea).any?enddef pending_criticisms ideacriticisms(idea).filter { |c| pending_criticisms(c).none? }enddef criticisms ideachildren(idea).filter(&:criticism?)endJS example (h/t ChatGPT):
javascriptfunction criticized(idea) {return pendingCriticisms(idea).length > 0;}function pendingCriticisms(idea) {return criticisms(idea).filter(c => pendingCriticisms(c).length === 0);}function criticisms(idea) {return children(idea).filter(c => c.isCriticism);}
There’s a small issue related to previewing changes in code blocks: even when there are no changes yet, if the code overflows horizontally, the scroll shadow is shown through DOM manipulation, which in turn triggers the diffing library into thinking the user made a change.
So then the same code block is shown without any changes, under the ‘Changes’ tab, which is confusing. It should still just say ‘No changes’.
#3951·Dennis HackethalOP, 8 days agoDone as of
cc1ab95.Ruby example:
rubydef criticized? ideapending_criticisms(idea).any?enddef pending_criticisms ideacriticisms(idea).filter { |c| pending_criticisms(c).none? }enddef criticisms ideachildren(idea).filter(&:criticism?)endJS example (h/t ChatGPT):
javascriptfunction criticized(idea) {return pendingCriticisms(idea).length > 0;}function pendingCriticisms(idea) {return criticisms(idea).filter(c => pendingCriticisms(c).length === 0);}function criticisms(idea) {return children(idea).filter(c => c.isCriticism);}
The diff view can’t handle the removal/replacement of entire code blocks yet. The removed block looks broken, the new block doesn’t show at all.
#3986·Benjamin Davies, 3 days agoBounties should be clear about what currency they are being paid out in.
Valid. As of 7af3c7b, the site uses ‘USD’ throughout.
This is not exactly true. The business still needs to produce something people want to buy, at a price they will accept. This is separate from competition.
Another way to say that is: all businesses are in competition with all others at the broadest level.
If you liked Snickers bars, but they suddenly 5x in price, it isn’t necessarily true that you will buy a different chocolate bar. You might go to the bakery instead, or use that money to put a little more fuel in your car.
This is not exactly true. The business still needs to produce something people want to buy, at a price they will accept. This is separate from competition.
Another way to say that is: all businesses are in competition with all others at the broadest level.
If you like Snickers bars, but they suddenly 5x in price, it isn’t necessarily true that you will buy a different chocolate bar. You might go to the bakery instead, or use that money to put a little more fuel in your car.
#3991·Zelalem Mekonnen revised 3 days agoCan shorting be a mechanism of error correction?
I've also noticed incumbent advantage in business. Unless a competitor offers a better product, a company can be as corrupt and lazy as possible.
This is not exactly true. The business still needs to produce something people want to buy, at a price they will accept. This is separate from competition.
Another way to say that is: all businesses are in competition with all others at the broadest level.
If you liked Snickers bars, but they suddenly 5x in price, it isn’t necessarily true that you will buy a different chocolate bar. You might go to the bakery instead, or use that money to put a little more fuel in your car.
#4006·Edwin de WitOP, 3 days agoI could indeed have been clearer. The point isn’t that using creativity to re-establish direction is the distinguishing feature. The distinction is the method of conflict resolution.
In a non-coercive, rational resolution, you take the distraction or impulse seriously, examine its content, and form a theory of what problem it’s signaling. Then you conjecture candidate solutions and select one to try. A common solution is to acknowledge the distraction and explicitly schedule it for later, which removes the unfinished business feeling it creates in the moment. Direction returns because the conflict got resolved.
In self-coercion, the method is irrational and coercive: you don’t examine the content of the distraction at all. You steamroll it or swat it away. You may regain direction, but the underlying problem remains unresolved.
Both methods cost creativity, but the coercive one causes more downstream problems (maybe even suffering), which then requires further creative expenditure to be resolved in the future.
Thank you, I think that is an important clarification.
#3958·Benjamin Davies, 5 days agoMinor distractions, impulses, or shifts in attention repeatedly pull us away, forcing creativity to be spent again and again just to re-establish intentional direction.
How is using creativity to re-establish direction distinguished from self-coercing? I'm having trouble seeing the difference.
I could indeed have been clearer. The point isn’t that using creativity to re-establish direction is the distinguishing feature. The distinction is the method of conflict resolution.
In a non-coercive, rational resolution, you take the distraction or impulse seriously, examine its content, and form a theory of what problem it’s signaling. Then you conjecture candidate solutions and select one to try. A common solution is to acknowledge the distraction and explicitly schedule it for later, which removes the unfinished business feeling it creates in the moment. Direction returns because the conflict got resolved.
In self-coercion, the method is irrational and coercive: you don’t examine the content of the distraction at all. You steamroll it or swat it away. You may regain direction, but the underlying problem remains unresolved.
Both methods cost creativity, but the coercive one causes more downstream problems (maybe even suffering), which then requires further creative expenditure to be resolved in the future.
#3107·Dennis HackethalOP, 2 months agoPreview links of discussions should show the name of the discussion being linked.
See eg https://x.com/agentofapollo/status/1991252721618547023
h/t @benjamin-davies
I implemented this a while back.
X caches link previews, so old previews remain the same. But new previews feature the discussion title, see eg https://www.opengraph.xyz/url/https%3A%2F%2Fveritula.com%2Fdiscussions%2Fcriticisms-of-zcash.
Feature idea: pay people to criticize your idea.
You start a ‘criticism bounty’ of 100 bucks, say, which is prorated among eligible critics after some deadline.
The amount should be arbitrarily customizable (while covering transaction costs). Minimum of $5.
There could then be a page for bounties at /bounties. And a page listing a user’s bounties at /:username/bounties.
When starting a bounty, the user indicates terms such as what kinds of criticism they want. This way, they avoid having to pay people pointing out typos, say.
Anyone can start a bounty on any idea. There can only be one bounty per idea at a time.
To ensure a criticism is worthy of the bounty, the initiator gets a grace period of 24 hours at the end to review pending criticisms. Inaction automatically awards the bounty to all pending criticisms at the end of the grace period.
Feature idea: pay people to criticize an idea.
You start a ‘criticism bounty’ of 100 bucks, say, which is prorated among eligible critics after some deadline.
The amount should be arbitrarily customizable (while covering transaction costs). Minimum of $5.
There could then be a page for bounties at /bounties. And a page listing a user’s bounties at /:username/bounties.
When starting a bounty, the user indicates terms such as what kinds of criticism they want. This way, they avoid having to pay people pointing out typos, say.
Anyone can start a bounty on any idea. There can only be one bounty per idea at a time.
To ensure a criticism is worthy of the bounty, the initiator gets a grace period of 24 hours at the end to review pending criticisms. Inaction automatically awards the bounty to all pending criticisms at the end of the grace period.
Feature idea: pay people to criticize your idea.
You start a ‘criticism bounty’ of ten bucks, say, per pending criticism received by some deadline.
The amount should be arbitrarily customizable (while covering transaction costs). The user also indicates a ceiling for the maximum amount they are willing to spend.
There could then be a page for bounties at /bounties. And a page listing a user’s bounties at /:username/bounties.
When starting a bounty, the user indicates terms such as what kinds of criticism they want. This way, they avoid having to pay people pointing out typos, say.
Anyone can start a bounty on any idea. There can only be one bounty per idea at a time.
To ensure a criticism is worthy of the bounty, the initiator gets a grace period of 24 hours at the end to review pending criticisms. They may even award a bounty to problematic criticisms, at their discretion. Inaction automatically awards the bounty to all pending criticisms at the end of the grace period. If doing so would exceed the ceiling, more recent criticisms do not get the bounty.
Feature idea: pay people to criticize your idea.
You start a ‘criticism bounty’ of 100 bucks, say, which is prorated among eligible critics after some deadline.
The amount should be arbitrarily customizable (while covering transaction costs). Minimum of $5.
There could then be a page for bounties at /bounties. And a page listing a user’s bounties at /:username/bounties.
When starting a bounty, the user indicates terms such as what kinds of criticism they want. This way, they avoid having to pay people pointing out typos, say.
Anyone can start a bounty on any idea. There can only be one bounty per idea at a time.
To ensure a criticism is worthy of the bounty, the initiator gets a grace period of 24 hours at the end to review pending criticisms. Inaction automatically awards the bounty to all pending criticisms at the end of the grace period.
#3912·Dennis HackethalOP, 13 days agoBeen trying a slight modification of bounties in prod for a couple of weeks or so. Working well so far.
@dirk-meulenbelt recently offered to chip in for a bounty I want to run. That got me thinking: multiple people should be able to fund bounties.
This is now a feature, see the ‘Funding’ section of a bounty.
I notice that when I amend a criticism I have made, I’m not able to see what I am criticising. It would be good if the edit screen showed the comment I am disagreeing with similar to how it does when I first go to write a criticism.
When I revise a criticism, I can’t see what it criticises. The edit screen should show the parent idea, similar to when I write a new criticism.