Dennis Hackethal
@dennis.hackethal·Joined Jun 2024·2,904 ideas: 1,929 adoptable, 975 rejectable
Founder Veritula.
Author. Software engineer. Ex Apple. Translator of The Beginning of Infinity.
dennishackethal.com
~All previous methods of preference formation focus too much on what the ideas say; on their content.
Nobody really knows just how simple an idea is (Occam’s razor) or how likely (Bayesianism), for example. In some cases it’s obvious how ideas compare, but in others not so much.
Adherents of those epistemologies are all fooling themselves into thinking they’re being rational when really they’re still acting on whim. Just fancier whim.
Focus instead on how the ideas relate, on the structure of the current state of the discussion, and preference formation gets much easier and simpler.
Then you can easily see which ideas you can adopt and which you can’t. You can even see exactly which criticisms you’d need to address to change someone’s mind, say.
Beautiful.
#5288·Tyler MillsOP, 2 months agoIt strikes me that I may have some confusion around compromise. There's an idea (from who/where? Gemini says Brett Hall...) that a compromise can actually be bad, because it is a new theory that no one was advocating for. So if it fails, it's harder to learn from and hold anyone accountable for. Yet, to resolve our procrastination and other hangups (and many problems in life), it seems like finding a common preference is the thing to do (and it seems like it works). But isn't that the same as compromising?
… it seems like finding a common preference is the thing to do …
It is.
… (and it seems like it works).
It usually does.
But isn't that the same as compromising?
No. A common preference is a new option everyone involved prefers to their respective original stance. A compromise is an option they do not prefer, but merely reluctantly agree to. And it’s usually not really new in content but resulted from mechanically mixing existing options. See the article linked in #5301.
#5288·Tyler MillsOP, 2 months agoIt strikes me that I may have some confusion around compromise. There's an idea (from who/where? Gemini says Brett Hall...) that a compromise can actually be bad, because it is a new theory that no one was advocating for. So if it fails, it's harder to learn from and hold anyone accountable for. Yet, to resolve our procrastination and other hangups (and many problems in life), it seems like finding a common preference is the thing to do (and it seems like it works). But isn't that the same as compromising?
… a compromise can actually be bad, because it is a new theory that no one was advocating for.
Compromise is always bad. It’s a form of irrationality.
#5288·Tyler MillsOP, 2 months agoIt strikes me that I may have some confusion around compromise. There's an idea (from who/where? Gemini says Brett Hall...) that a compromise can actually be bad, because it is a new theory that no one was advocating for. So if it fails, it's harder to learn from and hold anyone accountable for. Yet, to resolve our procrastination and other hangups (and many problems in life), it seems like finding a common preference is the thing to do (and it seems like it works). But isn't that the same as compromising?
Gemini says Brett Hall...
No it’s TCS: https://takingchildrenseriously.com/how-is-a-compromise-not-a-real-solution/
Time-release melatonin has solved the backfire problem for me. But I don't want to be dependent on it forever to get a good 8 hours.
Time-release melatonin has solved the backfire problem for me. But I don't want to be dependent on it forever to get a good 8 hours.
#5292·Tyler MillsOP, 2 months agoWell the device may deal with some noisy neighbors, but sure, a criticism overall. Edited.
Not to be nitpicky, especially since you ended up agreeing, but #5234 now has a pending criticism (yours), yet you acted on the idea. (Or rather, on the suggestion implied by it.) Acting on an idea with pending criticisms is technically the definition of irrationality on V.
I’m purposely not marking this a criticism so the flags don’t flip.
Idea: rational discussion graph with recursive criticism evaluation, like Veritula does now. Except the ideas are programs, not natural-language text. And they execute when they have no pending criticisms.
#5212·Tyler MillsOP, 2 months agoSo just stay up 18 hours every day, and sleep in the next day by the extra two hours (assuming 8, which seems optimal for me).
I tried this for a few days recently. By day three or four I went to bed at around 6am and woke up at 2pm. Didn’t feel great the rest of the day. Went back to a more regular sleep schedule after that and feeling better now.
#5276·Benjamin DaviesOP, 2 months agoFrom #1497, emphasis mine:
Discussion title: problem
Top-level ideas in the discussion: proposed solutions
Nested ideas: criticisms, counter-criticisms, and further solutionsThis is what I was going off. Did I misunderstand #1497?
You can structure discussions any way you like as long as you make sure the structure won’t break criticism chains.
Comments are for commentary or criticism, not elaborations on the same idea. The same idea shouldn’t be spread over multiple posts. That breaks criticism chains.
Veritula threads don’t work like Twitter/X threads, where people post elaborations on the same idea in comments. They used to have to do that because Twitter enforced a character limit. Now they still do it by tradition. And I’m guessing it’s an adjustment coming to Veritula.
If you realize you need to add more info to an existing idea, put it in a revision, not a comment. Again, #5250 seems like a revision of #5249. The revision of #5249 would then be a combination of both.
#5276·Benjamin DaviesOP, 2 months agoFrom #1497, emphasis mine:
Discussion title: problem
Top-level ideas in the discussion: proposed solutions
Nested ideas: criticisms, counter-criticisms, and further solutionsThis is what I was going off. Did I misunderstand #1497?
But the UI won’t reflect that automatically. Now you have to remember which threads have structure and which don’t. Will you remember that, say, six months from now?
But the UI won’t reflect that automatically. Now you have to remember which threads have this structure and which don’t. Will you remember that, say, six months from now?
Experimental Controls Aren’t What You Think:
#5267·Benjamin DaviesOP revised 2 months agoThey are separate ideas, and the latter ideas depend on their formers. If there is a flaw in former ideas, they apply to latter ideas, but if there is a flaw in latter ideas, they don’t necessarily apply to the former. So arranging them like this was intentional, to respect that hierarchy.
This approach breaks search functions, where the system only goes off the ‘Criticized’ flag. Now the system shows some ideas as rationally adoptable even though they aren’t.
#5267·Benjamin DaviesOP revised 2 months agoThey are separate ideas, and the latter ideas depend on their formers. If there is a flaw in former ideas, they apply to latter ideas, but if there is a flaw in latter ideas, they don’t necessarily apply to the former. So arranging them like this was intentional, to respect that hierarchy.
But the UI won’t reflect that automatically. Now you have to remember which threads have structure and which don’t. Will you remember that, say, six months from now?
#5253·Dennis Hackethal, 2 months agoPopper says to prefer ideas that are better corroborated, more truthlike. I wrote about this recently, pasting it here:
Corroboration was meant to help us form rational preferences between ideas. From The Logic of Scientific Discovery (pp. 281-282):
We can sometimes rationally justify the preference for a theory in the light of its corroboration, that is, of the present state of the critical discussion of the competing theories, which are critically discussed and compared from the point of view of assessing their nearness to the truth (verisimilitude). The current state of this discussion may, in principle, be reported in the form of their degrees of corroboration.
Specifically, corroboration helps you form a rational preference between two theories that have both been shown to be false while there are no known alternatives. From Conjectures and Refutations (p. 318):
… even after t2 has been refuted in its turn, we can still say that it is better than t1, for although both have been shown to be false, the fact that t2 has withstood tests which t1 did not pass may be a good indication that the falsity-content of t1 exceeds that of t2 while its truth-content does not. Thus we may still give preference to t2, even after its falsification, because we have reason to think that it agrees better with the facts than did t1.
That “t2 has withstood tests which t1 did not pass” means t2 is better corroborated than t1.
There’s no need to single out corroboration or verisimilitude as special kinds of criticism.
Preference formation using either can easily be reduced to the method of counting pending criticisms:
Idea A fails to survive two tests.
Idea B fails to survive only one of the two.
Idea C says: I have only A and B; I don’t have time to create another; although both are false, I have to act; so for now I prefer B since at least it passes a test A doesn’t.
If idea C has no pending criticisms, then we should adopt it. (And thus ‘transitively’ adopt B.)
We can rationally prefer A over B if and only if A has no pending criticisms whereas B has at least one.
The property you mention is the existence of pending criticisms.
We can rationally prefer A over B if A has no pending criticisms whereas B has at least one.
The property you mention is the existence of pending criticisms.
#5258·Dennis Hackethal, 2 months agoWe can rationally prefer A over B if and only if A has no pending criticisms whereas B has at least one.
The property you mention is the existence of pending criticisms.
You can still prefer A over B if neither has pending criticisms. The “if and only if” is too strict.
#5250·Benjamin DaviesOP, 2 months agoThe more HTV an explanation is, the more closely it corresponds to reality.
There’s a risk in posting follow-up thoughts as nested comments. The risk is that criticism chains won’t bubble up far enough.
If you want to add more information to an idea, I suggest revising it.
#5246·Benjamin DaviesOP, 2 months agoWhen we reject explanation B in favour of explanation A, there must be some property of the explanations that comprehensively distinguishes A as better than B.
We can rationally prefer A over B if and only if A has no pending criticisms whereas B has at least one.
The property you mention is the existence of pending criticisms.
#5253·Dennis Hackethal, 2 months agoPopper says to prefer ideas that are better corroborated, more truthlike. I wrote about this recently, pasting it here:
Corroboration was meant to help us form rational preferences between ideas. From The Logic of Scientific Discovery (pp. 281-282):
We can sometimes rationally justify the preference for a theory in the light of its corroboration, that is, of the present state of the critical discussion of the competing theories, which are critically discussed and compared from the point of view of assessing their nearness to the truth (verisimilitude). The current state of this discussion may, in principle, be reported in the form of their degrees of corroboration.
Specifically, corroboration helps you form a rational preference between two theories that have both been shown to be false while there are no known alternatives. From Conjectures and Refutations (p. 318):
… even after t2 has been refuted in its turn, we can still say that it is better than t1, for although both have been shown to be false, the fact that t2 has withstood tests which t1 did not pass may be a good indication that the falsity-content of t1 exceeds that of t2 while its truth-content does not. Thus we may still give preference to t2, even after its falsification, because we have reason to think that it agrees better with the facts than did t1.
That “t2 has withstood tests which t1 did not pass” means t2 is better corroborated than t1.
Preference formation is a computational task. (#5255) To claim we’ve understood a computational task, we must have programmed it (Deutsch). Popper never programmed it, so he didn’t understand it.
(To his credit though, he got pretty technical in defining verisimilitude, logical vs. empirical content, etc.)
Consider that preference formation is an engineering problem:
And if it is, consider also that maybe it’s worth staying away from concepts like HTV, which we have no idea how to program:
The task is to write an algorithm that takes two ideas (eg in the form of strings of characters) and returns the preferable one.
How would one go about writing that?
I think it’d be fine to start with obviously wrong answers to that question and then incrementally correct errors. For example, an algorithm that favors the idea with fewer words. (A bit like Occam’s razor.) That’d be fine as long as one wrote working code.
#5253·Dennis Hackethal, 2 months agoPopper says to prefer ideas that are better corroborated, more truthlike. I wrote about this recently, pasting it here:
Corroboration was meant to help us form rational preferences between ideas. From The Logic of Scientific Discovery (pp. 281-282):
We can sometimes rationally justify the preference for a theory in the light of its corroboration, that is, of the present state of the critical discussion of the competing theories, which are critically discussed and compared from the point of view of assessing their nearness to the truth (verisimilitude). The current state of this discussion may, in principle, be reported in the form of their degrees of corroboration.
Specifically, corroboration helps you form a rational preference between two theories that have both been shown to be false while there are no known alternatives. From Conjectures and Refutations (p. 318):
… even after t2 has been refuted in its turn, we can still say that it is better than t1, for although both have been shown to be false, the fact that t2 has withstood tests which t1 did not pass may be a good indication that the falsity-content of t1 exceeds that of t2 while its truth-content does not. Thus we may still give preference to t2, even after its falsification, because we have reason to think that it agrees better with the facts than did t1.
That “t2 has withstood tests which t1 did not pass” means t2 is better corroborated than t1.
Pavel Tichý and David Miller independently proved in 1974 that Popper’s definition of verisimilitude leads to a contradiction. Explanation:
Let us suppose that A and B are both false, and that A’s truth content exceeds B’s. Let a be a true sentence entailed by A but not by B. Let f be any falsehood entailed by A. Since A entails both a and f the conjunction, a&f is a falsehood entailed by A, and so part of A’s falsity content. If a&f were also part of B’s falsity content B would entail both a and f. But then it would entail a contrary to the assumption. Hence a&f is in A’s falsity content and not in B’s. So A’s truth content cannot exceeds B’s without A’s falsity content also exceeding B’s.
Suppose now that B’s falsity content exceeds A’s. Let g be some falsehood entailed by B but not by A, and let f, as before, be some falsehood entailed by A. The sentence f→g is a truth, and since it is entailed by g, is in B’s truth content. If it were also in A’s then both f and f→g would be consequences of A and hence so would g, contrary to the assumption. Thus A’s truth content lacks a sentence, f→g, which is in B’s. So B’s falsity content cannot exceeds A’s without B’s truth content also exceeding A’s. The relationship depicted in Diagram 4 simply cannot obtain: in this sense, that picture is an “impossible” one, like those in Escher’s famous drawings.