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Applied Virtues
Curiosity: The drive to find new problems and generate conjectures.
Self-Criticism: The primary tool of intellectual honesty.
Clarity: The virtue of refining thoughts to be less ambiguous and easier to criticise.
Epistemic Humility: The constant recognition of one's own fallibility.
Thoroughness: The commitment to accounting for all known uncontroverted ideas and pending criticisms that may pertain to the problem at hand. {This seems weak}
Good Faith: The commitment to "steel-manning" ideas and criticisms.
Resilience / Fortitude: The ability to recover from failure and re-apply the process.
Decisiveness: The will to act once a conjecture is provisionally accepted and criticism is exhausted.
Self-Discipline: {This one needs work. I don't understand it well enough to write a good summary.}
Courage: The will to face the potential pains of the epistemic process (facing uncomfortable truths, acting on counter-intuitive conclusions, thinking alone).
Accountability: A social manifestation of integrity; the willingness to "own" the consequences of one's actions.
Reliability: The practice of meeting one's voluntary commitments.
Proportionality: The skill of acting proportionately to a given situation, criticism or event.
Intellectual Impartiality: The skill of separating the content of an idea from its source, allowing criticism to be applied fairly.
Fairness: The consistent application of the same critical standards to all ideas.
Intellectual Patience: The willingness to give a problem the time it needs, rather than using a problematic solution (a solution with pending criticisms). {Okay but what if it is an emergency?}
Foresight & Planning: The application of conjecture and criticism to problems pertaining to future circumstances.
Diligence / Industriousness: The sustained application of effort to the problem-solving process, usually to a particular problem.
Creativity / Ingenuity: The skill of generating novel conjectures and criticisms.
Efficiency: The drive to reduce the work, resources or steps it takes to solve problems.
Resourcefulness: The skill of solving problems within constraints.
Purposefulness: The skill of defining a hierarchy of problems to solve, ensuring one's productive effort is directed at goals worth pursuing.
Focus: The ability to sustain mental effort.
Sharpness: Raw mental processing power.
Energy / Vitality: The capacity to be highly productive, especially over long durations.
Athleticism / Physicality: The capacity of the body to execute actions.
Memory: The ability to store and retrieve important conjectures and criticisms.
In my desire to become a more virtuous person, I want to develop a better explicit understanding of virtues. Let’s discuss them!
Core Moral Virtues (influenced by Ayn Rand and CR)
Rationality: The commitment to the ongoing deliberate use of conjecture and criticism.
Honesty: A refusal to evade one's thoughts, a commitment to searching for one's own errors, and a refusal to fake reality to others.
Integrity: The refusal to permit a breach between one's best ideas and one's actions.
Independence: The acceptance of one's own mind as the first and final executor of rationality within their own lives.
Justice: The application of rationality in judging ideas, people, and actions and acting on those evaluations proportionately.
Productiveness: The application of rationality to sustaining and improving one's life and circumstances.
Pride: An insatiable drive to find and fix errors in one's character, knowledge, and creations. “Moral Ambitiousness” as Ayn Rand puts it.
Please add a ‘first, previous, next, last’ navigation thing to the top of the activity feed page and similar pages. Currently I need to scroll to the bottom to go to a different page.
The Open Society
The concept of an 'Open Society' is central to the political philosophy of Critical Rationalism, detailed by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies. An open society is characterized by individualism, where personal choice and responsibility are paramount, in contrast to a closed society (e.g., tribal or collectivist) which demands the subordination of the individual to the group. It replaces the justificationist political question, "Who should rule?", with the fallibilist question: "How can we structure our institutions so that we can remove bad rulers and bad policies without violence?". In this view, democracy is not "rule by the people" (an essentialist definition) but is valued as the only known institutional mechanism for error-correction and leadership change without bloodshed.
The Open Society
The concept of an 'Open Society' is central to the political philosophy of Critical Rationalism, detailed by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies. An open society is characterized by individualism, where personal choice and responsibility are paramount, in contrast to a closed society (e.g., tribal or collectivist) which demands the subordination of the individual to the group. The theory replaces the justificationist political question, "Who should rule?", with the fallibilist question: "How can we structure our institutions so that we can remove bad rulers and bad policies without violence?” In this view, democracy is not "rule by the people" (an essentialist definition) but is valued as the only known institutional mechanism for changing policy and leadership without violence.
Fallibilism
This is the philosophical position that all human knowledge—every belief, theory, and observation—is conjectural, incomplete, and potentially mistaken. It holds that there is no conclusive justification and no rational certainty for any belief. Fallibilism is distinct from skepticism. Skepticism argues that because certainty is impossible, knowledge is impossible. Fallibilism agrees that certainty is impossible but denies that this invalidates knowledge. Fallibilism holds that people can and do possess real, objective knowledge, and that people can improve it through a process of error correction.
Fallibilism
This is the philosophical position that all human knowledge—every belief, theory, and observation—is conjectural, tentative, potentially incomplete, and potentially mistaken. It holds that there cannot be any conclusive justification or rational certainty for anything we might believe to be true (including observations).
Fallibilism is distinct from skepticism. Skepticism argues that because certainty is impossible, knowledge is impossible. Fallibilism agrees that certainty is impossible but denies that this invalidates knowledge. Fallibilism holds that people can and do possess real, objective knowledge, and that people can improve it through a process of error correction.
#3079·Dennis HackethalOP, 3 days agoBut that sucks. Maybe someone works hard and submits a bunch of ideas only to lose access to them all.
This functionality is pretty standard across apps. You can be removed from Discord servers, Telegram channels, etc without warning or reason at any time. People generally know and accept this. If they still put in effort, that’s on them.
#3081·Dennis HackethalOP, 3 days agoBut then invitees might not put as much effort into those discussions.
That depends on a bunch of factors, including their relationship with the discussion owner, into which Veritula has no visibility.
#3072·Dennis HackethalOP, 3 days agoThere could be hard cutoff: they lose access to everything, including their own ideas in that discussion.
But then invitees might not put as much effort into those discussions.
#3079·Dennis HackethalOP, 3 days agoBut that sucks. Maybe someone works hard and submits a bunch of ideas only to lose access to them all.
That risk could be clearly communicated in the UI.
#3072·Dennis HackethalOP, 3 days agoThere could be hard cutoff: they lose access to everything, including their own ideas in that discussion.
But that sucks. Maybe someone works hard and submits a bunch of ideas only to lose access to them all.
#3074·Dennis HackethalOP, 3 days agoThey could keep read-only access to the discussion but can’t add new ideas or change existing ideas.
Maybe you remove them because you don’t even want them to be able to see anything.
There’d probably be a bunch of edge cases with this approach. For example, others would still be able to comment on those ideas, and the comments would have to be hidden from OPs. Which begs the question of how that impacts the displayed criticism count… And so on.
If you later realize that adding someone was a mistake, you should be able to correct that mistake.
#3071·Dennis HackethalOP, 3 days agoWhat happens if you add a user to a private discussion, they submit a bunch of ideas, and then you remove them?
Permanent access: once added, you can’t remove them.
#3071·Dennis HackethalOP, 3 days agoWhat happens if you add a user to a private discussion, they submit a bunch of ideas, and then you remove them?
They could keep read-only access to the discussion but can’t add new ideas or change existing ideas.
#3071·Dennis HackethalOP, 3 days agoWhat happens if you add a user to a private discussion, they submit a bunch of ideas, and then you remove them?
They could keep access to their own ideas but not see others’.
#3071·Dennis HackethalOP, 3 days agoWhat happens if you add a user to a private discussion, they submit a bunch of ideas, and then you remove them?
There could be hard cutoff: they lose access to everything, including their own ideas in that discussion.
#2728·Dennis HackethalOP revised 19 days agoFeature idea: private discussions only the creator and invited people can see. This could be a paid feature; $2 per discussion, say.
What happens if you add a user to a private discussion, they submit a bunch of ideas, and then you remove them?
My critique of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity as a programmer. In short, his ‘hard to vary’ criterion at the core of his epistemology is fatally underspecified and impossible to apply.
He says one should adopt explanations based on how hard they are to change while still explaining what they claim to explain. The hardest-to-change explanation is the best and should be adopted. But he doesn’t say how to figure out which is hardest to change.
A decision-making method is a computational task. He says you haven’t understood a computational task if you can’t program it. He can’t program the steps for finding out how ‘hard to vary’ an explanation is, if only because those steps are underspecified. There are too many open questions.
So by his own yardstick, he hasn’t understood his epistemology.
You will find that and many more criticisms here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable
My critique of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity as a programmer. In short, his ‘hard to vary’ criterion at the core of his epistemology is fatally underspecified and impossible to apply.
Deutsch says that one should adopt explanations based on how hard they are to change without impacting their ability to explain what they claim to explain. The hardest-to-change explanation is the best and should be adopted. But he doesn’t say how to figure out which is hardest to change.
A decision-making method is a computational task. He says you haven’t understood a computational task if you can’t program it. He can’t program the steps for finding out how ‘hard to vary’ an explanation is, if only because those steps are underspecified. There are too many open questions.
So by his own yardstick, he hasn’t understood his epistemology.
You will find that and many more criticisms here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable
My critique of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity as a programmer. In short, his ‘hard to vary’ criterion at the core of his epistemology is fatally underspecified and impossible to apply.
He says people should adopt explanations based on how hard they are to change. The hardest-to-change explanation is the best and should be adopted. But he doesn’t say how to do that.
A decision-making method is a computational task. He says you haven’t understood a computational task if you can’t program it. He can’t program the steps for finding out how ‘hard to vary’ an explanation is, if only because those steps are underspecified. There are too many open questions.
So by his own yardstick, he hasn’t understood his epistemology.
You will find that and many more criticisms here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable
My critique of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity as a programmer. In short, his ‘hard to vary’ criterion at the core of his epistemology is fatally underspecified and impossible to apply.
He says one should adopt explanations based on how hard they are to change while still explaining what they claim to explain. The hardest-to-change explanation is the best and should be adopted. But he doesn’t say how to figure out which is hardest to change.
A decision-making method is a computational task. He says you haven’t understood a computational task if you can’t program it. He can’t program the steps for finding out how ‘hard to vary’ an explanation is, if only because those steps are underspecified. There are too many open questions.
So by his own yardstick, he hasn’t understood his epistemology.
You will find that and many more criticisms here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable
My critique of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity as a programmer. In short, his ‘hard to vary’ criterion at the core of his epistemology is fatally underspecified and impossible to apply.
He says people should adopt explanations based on how hard they are to change. The hardest-to-change explanation is the best and should be adopted. But doesn’t say how to do that.
This decision-making method is a computational task. He says you haven’t understood a computational task if you can’t program it. He can’t program the steps for finding out how ‘hard to vary’ an explanation is, if only because those steps are underspecified. There are too many open questions.
So by his own yardstick, he hasn’t understood his epistemology.
You will find that and many more criticisms here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable
My critique of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity as a programmer. In short, his ‘hard to vary’ criterion at the core of his epistemology is fatally underspecified and impossible to apply.
He says people should adopt explanations based on how hard they are to change. The hardest-to-change explanation is the best and should be adopted. But he doesn’t say how to do that.
A decision-making method is a computational task. He says you haven’t understood a computational task if you can’t program it. He can’t program the steps for finding out how ‘hard to vary’ an explanation is, if only because those steps are underspecified. There are too many open questions.
So by his own yardstick, he hasn’t understood his epistemology.
You will find that and many more criticisms here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable
My critique of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity as a programmer. In short, his ‘hard to vary’ criterion at the core of his epistemology is fatally underspecified and impossible to apply.
He says people should adopt explanations based on how hard they are to change. The hardest-to-change explanation is the best and should be adopted.
This decision-making method is a computational task. He says you haven’t understood a computational task if you can’t program it. He can’t program the steps for finding out how ‘hard to vary’ an explanation is, if only because those steps are underspecified. There are too many open questions.
So by his own yardstick, he hasn’t understood his epistemology.
You will find that and many more criticisms here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable
My critique of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity as a programmer. In short, his ‘hard to vary’ criterion at the core of his epistemology is fatally underspecified and impossible to apply.
He says people should adopt explanations based on how hard they are to change. The hardest-to-change explanation is the best and should be adopted. But doesn’t say how to do that.
This decision-making method is a computational task. He says you haven’t understood a computational task if you can’t program it. He can’t program the steps for finding out how ‘hard to vary’ an explanation is, if only because those steps are underspecified. There are too many open questions.
So by his own yardstick, he hasn’t understood his epistemology.
You will find that and many more criticisms here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable
#2669·Dennis HackethalOP, 21 days agoFeature idea: pay people to address criticisms (either revise an idea and check off criticisms or counter-criticize).
Could this feature be unified with #2811 somehow?
#2811·Dennis HackethalOP revised 15 days agoFeature idea: pay people to criticize your idea.
You submit an idea with a ‘criticism bounty’ of ten bucks per criticism received, say.
The amount should be arbitrarily customizable.
There could then be a page for bounties at /bounties. And a page listing a user’s bounties at /:username/bounties.
Could this feature be unified with #2669 somehow?