Activity Feed
The Open Society
This is the political philosophy of Critical Rationalism, detailed by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies. It is defined as a society "in which an individual is confronted with personal decisions," as opposed to a closed, "tribal or collectivist society". 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.
Justificationism
The mistaken philosophical tradition holding that knowledge must be "justified" (i.e., proven, supported, or made probable) by appealing to an ultimate, infallible authority. Critical Rationalism identifies this entire approach as logically untenable, as any demand for justification leads to an inescapable logical trap known as the Münchhausen Trilemma: either an infinite regress (every justification needs a justification), circularity (the belief justifies itself), or dogmatism (the justification stops at a "self-evident" belief). Critical Rationalism is a non-justificationist philosophy; it rejects the entire quest for justified, certain foundations and replaces it with an emphasis on criticism and error correction.
Political Holism
Synonymous with large-scale social engineering, this is the political program that follows from Historicism. It is the attempt to remodel an entire society from a central blueprint, based on a historicist prophecy of an "ideal" state. Popper argued this program is both violent and irrational. It is violent because it requires the suppression of all dissent to enact the central plan, and it is irrational because when an entire system is changed at once, it becomes impossible to trace the consequences of any single action, making it impossible to learn from mistakes.
forgot title
The mistaken belief that history is governed by discoverable, large-scale "laws of history" or "powerful historical trends". This belief leads to the idea of unconditional historical prophecy, which is anti-rational and politically disastrous, as seen in the philosophies of Plato, Hegel, and Marx. It is contrasted with the "piecemeal" method of making specific, conditional predictions.
Historicism
The mistaken belief that history is governed by discoverable, large-scale "laws of history" or "powerful historical trends". This belief leads to the idea of unconditional historical prophecy, which is anti-rational and politically disastrous, as seen in the philosophies of Plato, Hegel, and Marx. It is contrasted with the "piecemeal" method of making specific, conditional predictions.
The mistaken belief that history is governed by discoverable, large-scale "laws of history" or "powerful historical trends". This belief leads to the idea of unconditional historical prophecy, which is anti-rational and politically disastrous, as seen in the philosophies of Plato, Hegel, and Marx. It is contrasted with the "piecemeal" method of making specific, conditional predictions.
#2818·Benjamin Davies, 8 days agoIdea: Links within Veritula could be made bidirectional. While viewing an idea, users could see all the ideas that refer to it. This could be displayed as a list of backlinks at the bottom of the idea’s page.
This could lead to a cool knowledge graph feature down the line, where users could see how ideas might relate across discussions, and which ideas are referred to the most.
Idea: Links within Veritula could be made bidirectional. While viewing an idea, users could see all the ideas that refer to it. This could be displayed as a list of backlinks at the bottom of the idea’s page.
The user could publish it as a separate independent idea, including a link to the idea they want to relate/refer to.
This is how relating discussions works currently. For instance, if I start a discussion on Bitcoin, I might want to connect it to the existing discussion on Zcash. At present, the only way to achieve this is by adding a link to the Zcash discussion within my new Bitcoin discussion.
I suspect you would agree with me that this approach to how discussions interact isn’t really an issue. I also think it wouldn’t be an issue for independently published ideas, for the same reasons.
The user could publish it as a separate independent idea, including a link to the idea they want to relate/refer to.
This is how relating discussions works currently. For instance, if I start a discussion on Bitcoin, I might want to connect it to the existing discussion on Zcash. At present, the only way to achieve this is by adding a link to the Zcash discussion within my new Bitcoin discussion.
I suspect you would agree with me that this approach to how discussions interact isn’t really an issue. I also think it wouldn’t be an issue for independently published ideas, for the same reasons.
Note: This has lead me to the idea that links within Veritula could be bidirectional. Each idea could have an option to display all other ideas that refer to it. I will submit this as a top-level idea in this thread.
#2814·Dennis HackethalOP, 8 days agoWhat if somebody wanted to post something related that isn’t a comment or criticism? Where/how would they do that?
The user could publish it as a separate independent idea, including a link to the idea they want to relate/refer to.
This is how relating discussions works currently. For instance, if I start a discussion on Bitcoin, I might want to connect it to the existing discussion on Zcash. At present, the only way to achieve this is by adding a link to the Zcash discussion within my new Bitcoin discussion.
I suspect you would agree with me that this approach to how discussions interact isn’t really an issue. I also think it wouldn’t be an issue for independently published ideas, for the same reasons.
What if somebody wanted to post something related that isn’t a comment or criticism? Where/how would they do that?
#2807·Dennis HackethalOP, 8 days agoForget the term ‘article’ for a second. It sounds like you want the ability to post ideas without having to associate them with a discussion, is that right?
Yes.
Feature 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.
Feature 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.
#2736·Benjamin Davies revised 11 days agoIdea: ‘Reason Arena’, ‘RA’
I like something with ‘Arena’ because it would imply action, some ideas winning out over others, and has a Darwinian aspect to it. Our best ideas are the tentative champions in the arena of ideas, waiting for the next challenger.
I have largely inexplicit criticisms of the word ‘arena’ in this context, but one that bubbled up to the explicit level is that the word reminds me of Pokemon for some reason 😅
#2800·Dennis HackethalOP revised 9 days agoIn Brave for iPad, the footer doesn’t extend all the way to the bottom of the page. As a result, in dark mode, there’s a black gap underneath the gray footer. I cannot reproduce the issue in Safari. The cause is unclear; seems to be a Brave quirk.
This UI bug essentially exacerbates a wider issue: that the footer color does not match the background color of the
htmlelement, which becomes apparent with scroll inertia on the bottom of the page.
6623c22 implements #2802 and there is no difference in background between footer and page body anymore.
Maybe I’ll figure out the Brave quirk more generally someday, but it’s not noticeably anymore.
#2775·Benjamin Davies, 9 days agoIf Veritula did implement articles, the first thing I’d want is the ability to criticize them; to submit deeply nested counter-criticisms; and to render a label showing how many pending criticisms an article has, calculated based on criticism chains.
I agree, and I think here you have inadvertently pointed at a key difference between discussions and articles. In terms of implementation, articles would be a near clone of discussions, except that the articles themselves can be criticised by users, including all the functionality that articles being criticisable may one day come with, like entire articles going dormant if they don’t answer criticisms within a certain period.
A couple of examples: If I wanted to keep and share information on Karl Popper, it would be a lot more intuitive to produce an article on him in encyclopedia style—where I can present information in a hierarchy, rather than creating a discussion and then making each detail about him a top-level idea, which is more chaotic. The same would be true if I wanted to make articles on CR terms—this doesn’t seem very natural to do in a Veritula discussion, but would be very natural in a series of Veritula articles, one for each term.
It also favours this articles idea that implementing it would be fairly straightforward, due to how much could be carried over from the discussions implementation. It makes it low cost to try.
If I wanted to keep and share information on Karl Popper, it would be a lot more intuitive to produce an article on him in encyclopedia style—where I can present information in a hierarchy, rather than creating a discussion and then making each detail about him a top-level idea, which is more chaotic.
You already don’t have to do divvy it up like that. Nothing is stopping you from creating a discussion called ‘Karl Popper’ and then posting a single, long-form, top-level idea where you present information in a hierarchy.
#2753·Benjamin Davies revised 11 days agoIdea: Veritula Articles
Currently, Veritula is a discussion website. I believe it could one day do what Wikipedia and Grokipedia do, but better.
A step towards that would be enabling users to produce ‘articles’ or something similar.
An ‘Articles’ tab would be distinct from the ‘Discussions’ tab, featuring explanatory documents similar to encyclopedia entries, and perhaps also blogpost-like content.
Articles focus on distilling the good ideas created/discovered in the discussions that occur on Veritula.
Forget the term ‘article’ for a second. It sounds like you want the ability to post ideas without having to associate them with a discussion, is that right?
#2783·Benjamin Davies revised 9 days agoThese are not standalone pages in the sense that a Wikipedia page is a standalone page.
Articles would have the same ‘page’ status as the discussion pages that currently exist. (Forgive my lack of technical vocabulary.)
A possible counter-factual that may or may not be relevant to the goals of Veritula: An article with title metadata ‘Boron’ would presumably be much more search engine-friendly than a top-level ideas for Boron where the metadata title is ‘#[ID]’ and the actual desired title is merely included as the first line of the body text, while it is effectively a subpage of a discussion of another name.
‘page’ status
What is a page status? How did you determine that an idea’s page status is not the same as a Wikipedia article’s?
#2783·Benjamin Davies revised 9 days agoThese are not standalone pages in the sense that a Wikipedia page is a standalone page.
Articles would have the same ‘page’ status as the discussion pages that currently exist. (Forgive my lack of technical vocabulary.)
A possible counter-factual that may or may not be relevant to the goals of Veritula: An article with title metadata ‘Boron’ would presumably be much more search engine-friendly than a top-level ideas for Boron where the metadata title is ‘#[ID]’ and the actual desired title is merely included as the first line of the body text, while it is effectively a subpage of a discussion of another name.
As far as search engines are concerned, every idea page is already a standalone page. Not an SEO expert but I cannot imagine search engines penalize URLs containing an ID.
Done as of a12ffb3, see eg https://veritula.com/discussions/veritula-meta/activities and the new link to ‘Activity’ at the top of each discussion.
A discussion aiming to identify and develop Critical Rationalist terminology
Dennis suggested I create this discussion and tag @dirk-meulenbelt and @darren-wiebe.
Logan Chipkin has also suggested I get in contact with @darren-wiebe in regards to putting together a CR encyclopedia or something of the sort.
I could simply give the footer the same background color as the rest of the page.
I could simply give the footer the same background color as the rest of the page. There’s a discrepancy between light and dark mode anyway. And on horizontal overscroll, the difference in background is painful.
In Brave for iPad, the footer doesn’t extend all the way to the bottom of the page. As a result, in dark mode, there’s a black gap underneath the gray footer. I cannot reproduce the issue in Safari. The cause is unclear.
This UI bug essentially exacerbates a wider issue: that the footer color does not match the background color of the html element, which becomes apparent with scroll inertia on the bottom of the page.
In Brave for iPad, the footer doesn’t extend all the way to the bottom of the page. As a result, in dark mode, there’s a black gap underneath the gray footer. I cannot reproduce the issue in Safari. The cause is unclear; seems to be a Brave quirk.
This UI bug essentially exacerbates a wider issue: that the footer color does not match the background color of the html element, which becomes apparent with scroll inertia on the bottom of the page.