USD 1,300.00 Bounty for Idea #3069Beta
Idea to criticize
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
Terms
This bounty is more or less a standing re-run of a previous temporary bounty.
Read the discussion and this blog post in their entirety. Focus on Deutsch’s epistemology of hard vs easy to vary.
I want to be proven wrong about Deutsch’s epistemology.
Eligible submissions must meet all of the following conditions:
- Demonstrate a thorough understanding of the relevant parts of my blog post (the parts criticizing Deutsch’s epistemology). Include a summary in your own words.
- Submit a working program implementing Deutsch’s epistemology in code. It must:
- Accept two strings representing arbitrary explanations in natural language (English).
- Return a ranking indicating which explanation is better, worse, or equal.
- Be rigorous, sufficiently specified, non-arbitrary, and meet industry standards for code reviews.
- Be fully testable – something I can paste into a console and run with various explanations.
- Submissions must be handwritten. No AI-generated text or code; suspected AI use makes submissions ineligible.
- Any major programming language is acceptable (e.g., Ruby or JavaScript); avoid esoteric or niche languages.
Remember to mark your submissions as criticisms.
Site-wide terms apply. To be eligible for a payout, participants must connect a Stripe account in good standing and submit at least one direct criticism of idea #3069 meeting all bounty terms and having no pending counter-criticisms 7 days after submission. Counter-criticisms do not need to meet the bounty terms.
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Funders
Verified payment methods| For submission 1 | Dennis Hackethal – USD 1,000.00 Dirk Meulenbelt – USD 300.00 | USD 1,300.00 |
|---|---|---|
| Total USD 1,300.00 | ||
Submissions
No submissions yet.