Forum Rules

Veritula welcomes a wide range of discussion topics. Generally speaking, people have free speech here. Unpopular topics will not automatically get people banned. The goal of moderation is to preserve productive, truth-seeking discussion.

Behavior that is intended, or likely, to sabotage debate or prevent progress is a bannable offense. Such behavior includes, but is not limited to, harassment, brigading, rage baiting, public shaming, and persistent bad-faith argumentation or refusal to engage substantively.

Veritula takes intellectual property seriously and reserves the right to take down content that infringes on others’ intellectual property.

Veritula also reserves the right to take down obscene content such as pornography.

Serious instances of off-platform behavior that clearly would have violated these rules on-platform may result in removal.

Depending on the severity of an infraction, moderators may issue a warning, temporarily lock an account, or permanently ban the account.

Looking for loopholes in these rules, or abusing the letter to violate the spirit of these rules, is a bannable offense.

Moderation decisions are at the discretion of Veritula.

Users may appeal moderation decisions by contacting the moderators within a reasonable time after a decision. Appeals should explain why the decision was wrong. Appeals are reviewed at the moderators’ discretion. The same decision may be appealed only once.

Talks with moderators should remain respectful and constructive. Changes to these rules should be proposed by criticizing this idea before issues arise. Changes are generally not retroactive unless specified otherwise.

Site-wide terms apply as well.

#5511​·​Dennis HackethalOP revised 9 days ago

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

#3069​·​Dennis HackethalOP revised 10 months ago

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

#3069​·​Dennis HackethalOP revised 10 months ago

A simple implementation of hard-to-vary

This is my submission for Veritula's bounty for Idea #3069, which asks for an executable implementation that can compare arbitrary English explanations by how hard they are to vary.

Code: hard-to-vary/htv.py at 9da0ddd

I've implemented the approach as a small interactive program. It takes arbitrary explanations supplied by the user, collects working variations of each, and ranks the explanations by hardness to vary.

I think hard-to-vary can be implemented more simply than the approaches considered in Dennis's blog, Hard to Vary or Hardly Usable?. The basic idea I'm using is this: if an explanation is harder to vary, there should be fewer ways of changing it while still having it explain what it's supposed to explain.

The program starts by asking the user what question they're trying to answer and then asks for a list of proposed explanations. It goes through each explanation one at a time and asks the user to come up with variations of it that would still work as explanations. The user can enter as many as they can find, then move on to the next explanation.

Variations can either be entered individually or parameterized using notation like <X> and <Y>. For example, <X> kg of grass mixed with <Y> kg of wheat cures the disease can represent a whole family of variations. The user can either enter how many working values or combinations the parameters have, including an infinite number, or enumerate them and let the program count. This avoids requiring the user to manually enter every member of a family of variations.

The user can also review and revise their inputs before the final ranking by adding, editing, or deleting explanations and variations.

Finally, the program counts the working variations and ranks the explanations. Fewer working variations means harder to vary, while equal numbers mean equally hard to vary. So if explanation A has two working variations and explanation B has five, A is harder to vary than B.

Infinite variations need a little more information. If two explanations both have infinitely many working variations, the program first compares how many independently variable parameters have infinitely many possible values. Fewer infinitely-variable parameters means harder to vary. If that's also equal, it compares the remaining finite parts of the variations. This lets the program distinguish, for example, between an explanation with one unconstrained infinite parameter and another with two.

An example

I'll use Deutsch's example from Chapter 1, “The Reach of Explanations,” of The Beginning of Infinity: Why do seasons occur?

One explanation is the story of Persephone. Hades, god of the underworld, kidnaps Persephone. Her mother Demeter eventually negotiates her release under an arrangement that requires Persephone to return to Hades once a year. Whenever Persephone is away, Demeter becomes sad and makes the world cold and bleak.

Deutsch's point is that we can change many of the details of this explanation while still accounting for the same observations. For example, I might try variations like:

• Persephone escapes instead of being released under an agreement.
• Something other than a magic seed compels her to return.
• Some other arrangement causes Persephone to return annually instead of a marriage contract.

The details have changed, but the story can still be made to explain the seasonal cycle. Suppose I find three such variations.

Now I try the explanation involving Earth's axial tilt. Here the details are much more constrained by what we're trying to explain. Changing the geometry substantially changes what the theory predicts about the seasons. Suppose I only find one working variation.

The program therefore ranks axial tilt as harder to vary: one working variation versus three. That's the entire comparison procedure.

How I understand Dennis's criticism

I don't understand Dennis as claiming that Deutsch simply gets the Persephone example wrong. The issue in the blog is how we get from examples like this, where we seem to have an intuition that one explanation is harder to vary, to a sufficiently specified procedure that could compare explanations in general.

Dennis initially explores numerical quality scores, but that immediately creates problems. Why should one explanation have a score of 500 rather than 550? Why choose that scale? How do criticisms affect the score? How do criticisms of criticisms affect it? I agree with Dennis that these choices look arbitrary.

He eventually gets rid of the quality scores entirely. Instead of trying to measure the quality of an idea, his program keeps track of pending criticisms. His proposed rule becomes: adopt ideas without pending criticisms and reject ideas that have them.

There's something important about how that system works, though. The program doesn't generate criticisms itself; people do. And that's intentional: Dennis says "I’m not looking to formalize or automate creativity as a whole". Creative input can come from users while the program handles the non-creative part of the process. I agree that you can have a rational decision-making process while outsourcing the creative part to the user.

I just don't see why we can't do the same thing with HTV. Let the user come up with variations and say which ones they think still work. The program doesn't need to understand the explanation or come up with the variations itself. It keeps track of the variations and compares the counts.

This doesn't seem fundamentally different from Dennis letting the user tell his program that something is a criticism. In fact, in the blog he explicitly avoids having the program figure out whether a comment is really a criticism: the user checks a box saying that it is. So in my program the user is supplying a working variation; in his, the user is supplying a criticism. In both cases the user is providing the part that requires understanding and judgment, and the program does something simple with that input.

It also means I don't need the quality scores Dennis runs into trouble with. I don't need to decide how many points axial tilt gets compared with Persephone. I'm just asking: how many ways have we actually found to change each explanation while still having it work?

But isn't this subjective?

One criticism Dennis quotes is:

“Also, isn’t the difficulty of changing an explanation at least partly a property not of the explanation itself but of whoever is trying to change it? If I’m having difficulty changing it, maybe that’s because I lack imagination. Or maybe I’m just new to that field and an expert could easily change it.”

I think this is true. I just don't think it's a problem specific to HTV.

Imagine I can't think of any working variations of an explanation, but an expert can immediately think of five. Then yes, our results will be different. But isn't that also what happens with criticism? I might look at an idea and fail to see anything wrong with it while someone who knows much more about the subject immediately sees a serious criticism.

The same goes for participation. An idea on Veritula might have zero pending criticisms simply because hardly anyone has tried to criticize it. That doesn't mean there are literally no criticisms of it. Someone could find one tomorrow. Dennis's answer in the blog is basically that if this bothers you, try to find a criticism yourself. If you can't find one, why not adopt the idea?

I think HTV can work the same way. Zero working variations doesn't mean that we've somehow proven there are no possible variations. It means we haven't found one. If you think the explanation is actually easy to vary, try to come up with a variation that still works.

So yes, the result depends on the knowledge and creativity of the person using the program. But I think rational decision-making is always going to depend on what criticisms, arguments, alternatives, etc. a person is actually aware of. I don't see how Veritula escapes that either.

What about human judgment?

There's another obvious question: who decides whether a variation actually works?

For this program, the user does. I don't think we can get rid of that kind of human judgment, at least until we get AGI. Two people can disagree about whether a variation still explains the thing we're trying to explain. They can also disagree about whether two variations are really different or are basically the same variation stated twice.

Again, I think Veritula has the same underlying issue. People still have to decide whether something really is a criticism, whether a countercriticism actually answers it, whether two criticisms are redundant, and so on. Dennis's program can keep track of the structure, but the structure only means something if those judgments make sense.

Take an extreme case. If a malicious moderator rejects every good criticism of an idea and accepts nonsense countercriticisms, the idea could end up showing 0 pending criticisms. I obviously shouldn't look at the 0 and conclude that the idea is rational to adopt. I'd want to read what happened and decide whether I agree with it.

I don't mean this as a criticism specific to Veritula. I think it's just a limit of this kind of approach. At some point people have to make judgments, and people can disagree about them. Ultimately everyone is their own moderator when it comes to their own decision-making. I have to decide which arguments I accept, which criticisms I think have been answered, and so on.

The same is true with my HTV program. If someone gives me a ranking based on ten supposed working variations, I don't have to accept the ranking blindly. I can look at the ten variations and decide that five don't really work and three others are basically duplicates. My result would then be different.

I'm fine with that. I don't think the goal of either program should be to somehow remove judgment from rational thinking. The program gives us a procedure for what to do with the judgments we've made.

What does the program actually contribute?

Dennis writes:

“We can’t just outsource everything to the user – the app has to do some things or it has no value.”

This was actually the part of the blog that made me think about Veritula itself. What is Veritula doing, and what is it outsourcing?

It outsources the interesting creative part to people. People come up with the ideas. People come up with the criticisms. The user can even tell the program whether something they've written is a criticism by checking a box. The program then keeps track of the structure and tells us how many criticisms are pending.

My program is doing something similar, except with variations. People come up with the explanations and the working variations. The program keeps track of them, counts them, and ranks the explanations.

So I don't think I'm outsourcing everything to the user any more than Veritula is. I'm outsourcing the part that requires creativity and judgment. The actual decision rule is implemented in the program.

For Veritula, that rule ultimately depends on whether there are pending criticisms. For my program, it depends on the number of working variations: fewer working variations means harder to vary.

Where I disagree with the blog

I agree with Dennis that the quality sliders in the blog don't work. I also agree with his decision to let users supply the creative input rather than expecting the program to generate it.

Where I disagree is that I think once we allow this same freedom for HTV, we can construct a similarly simple program for it. The user comes up with explanations and tries to vary them while keeping them working. The program counts the working variations and ranks the explanations.

There are still all the normal problems of human knowledge: maybe I missed a variation, maybe I accepted a bad one, maybe someone else would judge things differently. But those same problems exist when we come up with and judge criticisms.

I don't think either program solves those problems, and I don't think it needs to. That's the part people do.

#5609​·​Jad Elmourad revised 3 days ago

One can’t agree to a rule, immediately break it, get an unfair advantage, hope I won’t notice, and then complain when I do.

I don't accept the characterization that I knowingly violated the rule and hoped you wouldn't notice. That wasn't my state of mind. More on this in #5622.

#5623​·​Jad Elmourad, 2 days ago

But why not raise that before agreeing to a rule he took issue with? Why accept the risk of disqualification instead?

This is a fair point, like I conceded in #5613: "We also agreed that in the future, discussions like this about the terms ought to be brought up at the beginning rather than after the fact."

And I definitely learned a lesson: to hash things out before if I see any potential conflict.

If you're curious for some more details about what happened here, I would say I got excited about getting my idea out as fast as possible and hearing criticisms. I had noticed the potential conflict about AI use, and I had marked it in my head as something we might have to discuss eventually, but I didn't see that point as arriving until at least the submission seemed to be surviving the criticisms. So when you brought it up and asked whether I was using AI, I immediately said yes.

#5622​·​Jad Elmourad, 2 days ago

But with any luck, he’ll get the remaining funds, provided that the arguing ends now.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Are you saying that my eligibility for the remaining funders' funds depends on me not continuing this discussion?

If so, then this statement seems to block discussion and thus the growth of knowledge. Isn't the point of this platform to be able to hash out ideas and conflicts between them and thereby become more rational and knowledgeable?

I like the quote at the bottom of the website

[T]he growth of knowledge depends entirely upon disagreement.

— Karl Popper, The Myth of the Framework

I hope this is what we are doing here :)

#5621​·​Jad Elmourad, 2 days ago

I’m surprised he now wants to continue the discussion publicly

In fact, I had explicitly conveyed in the private discussion that I wanted to continue the discussion, but that I will also respect Dennis's boundaries if he wishes to stop the conversation. Dennis brought the conversation to an end by saying: "I think we've discussed all we have to discuss."

When he subsequently posted about the issue publicly in #5606, I replied publicly to confirm the AI use and explain my position.

#5620​·​Jad Elmourad, 2 days ago

When a participant uses AI to help with that, but the funders don’t know about it, it creates an unfair advantage. That’s a violation of not just the letter but also the spirit of the rules.

I don't see what creates an "unfair advantage". Maybe the next lines clarify.

It’d be like secretly using a chess computer for help in a chess competition.

I don't think this analogy is appropriate at all. In a chess competition, people are competing between themselves to prove who is better at chess. My understanding of this platform and the bounty is that it's to incentivize the growth of knowledge, not to prove who is better at writing ideas without AI.

The amount of text Jad has submitted also creates an uphill battle for the remaining funders to review his submissions before the deadline.

This reads to me as suggesting that the text I submitted was somehow excessive or perhaps even intentionally overwhelming, when instead my intention with all my writing was to communicate my ideas as clearly as possible. In fact, on the contrary, I felt that I had to excessively elaborate on some ideas that were clear to me just so that I could better get the idea across.

#5619​·​Jad Elmourad, 2 days ago

I showed Jad these results privately and he didn’t have a good answer

My actual reply to this was to bring up the questions from #5617 about what "AI-generated" signifies. Specifically, I asked "What does Pangram consider AI edits to be?", to which Dennis replied "I don't think they disclose that."

After that, I tried to make progress towards common ground by raising the deeper issue. I said:

Hmm, maybe we mean different things, so what do you think qualifies as an appropriate use of AI / using AI to edit vs an inappropriate use?

To which, Dennis replied by re-iterating that the bounty terms are clear that no AI must be used, but that didn't address the deeper issue I was trying to raise. I was trying to distinguish between different kinds of AI use in the context of what it means to have done the intellectual work necessary to earn the reward, see #5615.

#5618​·​Jad Elmourad, 2 days ago

When I later asked him directly whether he was using AI, he admitted to it but claimed it was merely to “help edit some of [his] writings”.

Pangram, an AI detector, paints a different picture

I think this relates to #5615. I think there is a fundamental disagreement about what the term AI-generated means. If I write something and then pass it to an LLM for edits, then that gets marked as AI-generated. But is that really the deal-breaker here? Are we testing "ability to solve the bounty and write up the solution without AI"? Or are we testing that the submitter understands what they're submitting, which we already established?

#5617​·​Jad Elmourad, 2 days ago

At some point, I noticed Jad had submitted his replies very quickly, with unusually verbose text, and in fairly rapid succession.

For the record, I was working in blocks. I would read all the criticisms available at a time, then think about how to address them together. So I was sometimes writing out the response for each criticism, but holding off on submitting them so that I can properly cross-reference between them. Then I would submit them all at the same time. This is the explanation for the rapid succession and what might have appeared as unusually fast typing.

#5616​·​Jad Elmourad, 2 days ago

But people need to earn the reward.

This one sentence is really at the heart of this discussion. This is the point that bothers me the most because it confirms my interpretation that Dennis doesn't think I earned the reward because I used AI. Do I take it to mean that he thinks AI could have solved this puzzle if only anyone thought to plug it into an LLM? Do I take it to mean that he thinks that's how I used AI? I think that is dismissive of all the work and thought I put into this.

One question I would pose is: What do you think AI did that means I didn't earn the reward?

#5615​·​Jad Elmourad, 2 days ago

Just to confirm, and so you can hear it from me, yes I did use AI to help with my submission.

For posterity, here was my position during the discussion:

I think it's technically fair for Dennis to consider the submission ineligible because the bounty terms clearly say "Submissions must be handwritten. No AI-generated text or code; suspected AI use makes submissions ineligible."

On the other hand, I think this outcome is a shame because I don't think my use of AI changes any of the real work and thought that was put into it. If you zoom out, the motive of the bounty is to attract people to work on ideas and develop them, which is exactly what I did here, regardless of the tools used. As How Do Bounties Work? puts it, "Bounties let you invite criticism and reward high-quality contributions with real money."

And this is exactly what happened here. The idea had been posted on Veritula for about 10 months, and when I saw the bounty, I took it as a fun challenge to work on. So in that sense, the bounty incentive worked. And it seems to me that the reception of the idea has been good so far, which is why I find this outcome disappointing. On a symbolic level—and I acknowledge that this may be very different from how Dennis sees or intends the decision—his withdrawal of all his funds feels to me like this work is somehow not something he's willing to reward.

I did attempt to persuade Dennis to reinterpret the no-AI rule by discussing the underlying reasons for the rule. We agreed that handwriting can be a way to test the submitter's own understanding rather than relying on AI's understanding. While we agreed that this wasn't an issue for me, we disagreed about what should follow from that. My view was that the purpose of the rule should matter more than the literal wording, whereas Dennis seemed to think that the written terms should still govern.

Ultimately, we couldn't come to an agreement on whether my use of AI was appropriate in the context of this bounty. We also disagreed about whether I should have raised my use of AI proactively. In any case, I respect Dennis's decision since ultimately these were the terms of his bounty. We also agreed that in the future, discussions like this about the terms ought to be brought up at the beginning rather than after the fact.

#5607​·​Jad Elmourad, 3 days ago

A simple implementation of hard-to-vary

This is my submission for Veritula's bounty for Idea #3069, which asks for an executable implementation that can compare arbitrary English explanations by how hard they are to vary.

Code: hard-to-vary/htv.py at cb2979b

I've implemented the approach as a small interactive program. It takes arbitrary explanations supplied by the user, collects working variations of each, and ranks the explanations by hardness to vary.

I think hard-to-vary can be implemented more simply than the approaches considered in Dennis's blog, Hard to Vary or Hardly Usable?. The basic idea I'm using is this: if an explanation is harder to vary, there should be fewer ways of changing it while still having it explain what it's supposed to explain.

The program starts by asking the user what question they're trying to answer and then asks for a list of proposed explanations. It goes through each explanation one at a time and asks the user to come up with variations of it that would still work as explanations. The user can enter as many as they can find, then move on to the next explanation.

Variations can either be entered individually or parameterized using notation like <X> and <Y>. For example, <X> kg of grass mixed with <Y> kg of wheat cures the disease can represent a whole family of variations. The user can either enter how many working values or combinations the parameters have, including an infinite number, or enumerate them and let the program count. This avoids requiring the user to manually enter every member of a family of variations.

The user can also review and revise their inputs before the final ranking by adding, editing, or deleting explanations and variations.

Finally, the program counts the working variations and ranks the explanations. Fewer working variations means harder to vary, while equal numbers mean equally hard to vary. So if explanation A has two working variations and explanation B has five, A is harder to vary than B.

An example

I'll use Deutsch's example from Chapter 1, “The Reach of Explanations,” of The Beginning of Infinity: Why do seasons occur?

One explanation is the story of Persephone. Hades, god of the underworld, kidnaps Persephone. Her mother Demeter eventually negotiates her release under an arrangement that requires Persephone to return to Hades once a year. Whenever Persephone is away, Demeter becomes sad and makes the world cold and bleak.

Deutsch's point is that we can change many of the details of this explanation while still accounting for the same observations. For example, I might try variations like:

• Persephone escapes instead of being released under an agreement.
• Something other than a magic seed compels her to return.
• Some other arrangement causes Persephone to return annually instead of a marriage contract.

The details have changed, but the story can still be made to explain the seasonal cycle. Suppose I find three such variations.

Now I try the explanation involving Earth's axial tilt. Here the details are much more constrained by what we're trying to explain. Changing the geometry substantially changes what the theory predicts about the seasons. Suppose I only find one working variation.

The program therefore ranks axial tilt as harder to vary: one working variation versus three. That's the entire comparison procedure.

How I understand Dennis's criticism

I don't understand Dennis as claiming that Deutsch simply gets the Persephone example wrong. The issue in the blog is how we get from examples like this, where we seem to have an intuition that one explanation is harder to vary, to a sufficiently specified procedure that could compare explanations in general.

Dennis initially explores numerical quality scores, but that immediately creates problems. Why should one explanation have a score of 500 rather than 550? Why choose that scale? How do criticisms affect the score? How do criticisms of criticisms affect it? I agree with Dennis that these choices look arbitrary.

He eventually gets rid of the quality scores entirely. Instead of trying to measure the quality of an idea, his program keeps track of pending criticisms. His proposed rule becomes: adopt ideas without pending criticisms and reject ideas that have them.

There's something important about how that system works, though. The program doesn't generate criticisms itself; people do. And that's intentional: Dennis says "I’m not looking to formalize or automate creativity as a whole". Creative input can come from users while the program handles the non-creative part of the process. I agree that you can have a rational decision-making process while outsourcing the creative part to the user.

I just don't see why we can't do the same thing with HTV. Let the user come up with variations and say which ones they think still work. The program doesn't need to understand the explanation or come up with the variations itself. It keeps track of the variations and compares the counts.

This doesn't seem fundamentally different from Dennis letting the user tell his program that something is a criticism. In fact, in the blog he explicitly avoids having the program figure out whether a comment is really a criticism: the user checks a box saying that it is. So in my program the user is supplying a working variation; in his, the user is supplying a criticism. In both cases the user is providing the part that requires understanding and judgment, and the program does something simple with that input.

It also means I don't need the quality scores Dennis runs into trouble with. I don't need to decide how many points axial tilt gets compared with Persephone. I'm just asking: how many ways have we actually found to change each explanation while still having it work?

But isn't this subjective?

One criticism Dennis quotes is:

“Also, isn’t the difficulty of changing an explanation at least partly a property not of the explanation itself but of whoever is trying to change it? If I’m having difficulty changing it, maybe that’s because I lack imagination. Or maybe I’m just new to that field and an expert could easily change it.”

I think this is true. I just don't think it's a problem specific to HTV.

Imagine I can't think of any working variations of an explanation, but an expert can immediately think of five. Then yes, our results will be different. But isn't that also what happens with criticism? I might look at an idea and fail to see anything wrong with it while someone who knows much more about the subject immediately sees a serious criticism.

The same goes for participation. An idea on Veritula might have zero pending criticisms simply because hardly anyone has tried to criticize it. That doesn't mean there are literally no criticisms of it. Someone could find one tomorrow. Dennis's answer in the blog is basically that if this bothers you, try to find a criticism yourself. If you can't find one, why not adopt the idea?

I think HTV can work the same way. Zero working variations doesn't mean that we've somehow proven there are no possible variations. It means we haven't found one. If you think the explanation is actually easy to vary, try to come up with a variation that still works.

So yes, the result depends on the knowledge and creativity of the person using the program. But I think rational decision-making is always going to depend on what criticisms, arguments, alternatives, etc. a person is actually aware of. I don't see how Veritula escapes that either.

What about human judgment?

There's another obvious question: who decides whether a variation actually works?

For this program, the user does. I don't think we can get rid of that kind of human judgment, at least until we get AGI. Two people can disagree about whether a variation still explains the thing we're trying to explain. They can also disagree about whether two variations are really different or are basically the same variation stated twice.

Again, I think Veritula has the same underlying issue. People still have to decide whether something really is a criticism, whether a countercriticism actually answers it, whether two criticisms are redundant, and so on. Dennis's program can keep track of the structure, but the structure only means something if those judgments make sense.

Take an extreme case. If a malicious moderator rejects every good criticism of an idea and accepts nonsense countercriticisms, the idea could end up showing 0 pending criticisms. I obviously shouldn't look at the 0 and conclude that the idea is rational to adopt. I'd want to read what happened and decide whether I agree with it.

I don't mean this as a criticism specific to Veritula. I think it's just a limit of this kind of approach. At some point people have to make judgments, and people can disagree about them. Ultimately everyone is their own moderator when it comes to their own decision-making. I have to decide which arguments I accept, which criticisms I think have been answered, and so on.

The same is true with my HTV program. If someone gives me a ranking based on ten supposed working variations, I don't have to accept the ranking blindly. I can look at the ten variations and decide that five don't really work and three others are basically duplicates. My result would then be different.

I'm fine with that. I don't think the goal of either program should be to somehow remove judgment from rational thinking. The program gives us a procedure for what to do with the judgments we've made.

What does the program actually contribute?

Dennis writes:

“We can’t just outsource everything to the user – the app has to do some things or it has no value.”

This was actually the part of the blog that made me think about Veritula itself. What is Veritula doing, and what is it outsourcing?

It outsources the interesting creative part to people. People come up with the ideas. People come up with the criticisms. The user can even tell the program whether something they've written is a criticism by checking a box. The program then keeps track of the structure and tells us how many criticisms are pending.

My program is doing something similar, except with variations. People come up with the explanations and the working variations. The program keeps track of them, counts them, and ranks the explanations.

So I don't think I'm outsourcing everything to the user any more than Veritula is. I'm outsourcing the part that requires creativity and judgment. The actual decision rule is implemented in the program.

For Veritula, that rule ultimately depends on whether there are pending criticisms. For my program, it depends on the number of working variations: fewer working variations means harder to vary.

Where I disagree with the blog

I agree with Dennis that the quality sliders in the blog don't work. I also agree with his decision to let users supply the creative input rather than expecting the program to generate it.

Where I disagree is that I think once we allow this same freedom for HTV, we can construct a similarly simple program for it. The user comes up with explanations and tries to vary them while keeping them working. The program counts the working variations and ranks the explanations.

There are still all the normal problems of human knowledge: maybe I missed a variation, maybe I accepted a bad one, maybe someone else would judge things differently. But those same problems exist when we come up with and judge criticisms.

I don't think either program solves those problems, and I don't think it needs to. That's the part people do.

#5604​·​Jad Elmourad revised 4 days ago

I think this is the same basic point as #5577.

#5587​·​Jad Elmourad, 5 days ago

When variations are given for both competing explanations, the user is none the wiser which variation of the ‘better’ explanation he should adopt. There’s no clear preference:

Whenever a wide range of variant theories can account equally well for the phenomenon they are trying to explain, there is no reason to prefer one of them over the others, so advocating a particular one in preference to the others is irrational.

#5526 is an example. Even ignoring the obviously false outcome, which I caused for illustrative purposes, we don’t know which variation of the better explanation to prefer.

#5534​·​Dennis HackethalOP revised 6 days ago

I think the program does expose it, given inputs that reflect the user's genuine understanding of the explanations.

If I genuinely regard “axial tilt while I wear one green hat,” “axial tilt while I wear two green hats,” etc. as distinct working variations of the axial-tilt explanation, then I've told the program that the hat count is part of the explanation and can be varied freely. In that case, I think it's completely fair for HTV to judge the explanation easier to vary.

If I instead understand the hat as an irrelevant fact that has nothing to do with the axial-tilt explanation, then I shouldn't submit changes in my hat count as variations of that explanation in the first place.

The program can't accept my judgment that these are genuine variations and then independently override that judgment because it “knows” they're actually irrelevant. Doing that would require the program itself to understand what is doing explanatory work. That's precisely the part I'm outsourcing to the user.

So I don't think this example shows that the program fails to expose easy-to-varyness. It shows that the result depends on which changes the user genuinely judges to be variations of the explanation—which is the same point I made in #5553 and #5555.

#5572​·​Jad Elmourad, 5 days ago

Revision 12 says:

Isn’t the assignment of positive scores, of positive reasons to prefer one theory over another, a kind of justificationism? Deutsch criticizes justificationism throughout The Beginning of Infinity, but isn’t an endorsement of a theory as ‘good’ a kind of justification?

I should know better since I recently wrote about how justifying a preference for a theory is fine (as opposed to justifying the claim that a theory is true).

#5592​·​Dennis HackethalOP, 5 days ago

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

#3069​·​Dennis HackethalOP revised 10 months ago

One would reject some explanations for reasons unrelated to HTV. It’s not that one would override a specific HTV result – one wouldn’t even get to that result because one would first make other choices leading to different inputs.

I think this is fair. You can treat new knowledge and criticism as changing the problem situation within which HTV operates, or more narrowly as filtering which explanations still work before applying HTV. I think those are functionally equivalent; if you want to call the latter preference formation outside HTV, I'm fine with that.

#5588​·​Jad Elmourad, 5 days ago