Veritula – Meta

Done as of cc8e3e9. It now says ‘x unchanged lines collapsed’. See eg this activity.

I agree that Veritula deserves to scale to something huge.

Looking through the history of Wikipedia, I see that its core concept is that of “compiling the world's knowledge in a single location […]”. To be clear, I think the core concept of Veritula is to be a programmatic implementation of Popper’s rational discussion methodology; it then becomes a dictionary for ideas as a result. It’s also less about listing facts and more about listing ideas and their logical relationship (though criticisms do provide built-in fact-checking mechanisms). That said, with enough users, Veritula could become a place with a lot of knowledge.

The linked site traces some of the success of Wikipedia to volunteers: “The use of volunteers was integral in making and maintaining Wikipedia.” So early adopters such as yourself are crucial.

In addition, 9/11 apparently played a role in making Wikipedia famous:

The September 11 attacks spurred the appearance of breaking news stories on the homepage, as well as information boxes linking related articles. At the time, approximately 100 articles related to 9/11 had been created. After the September 11 attacks, a link to the Wikipedia article on the attacks appeared on Yahoo!'s home page, resulting in a spike in traffic.

Veritula could be a place where people break news stories and others can quickly fact-check and improve upon reports by revising them. An urgent story would draw a lot of users to the site, too.

Something like Wikipedia’s arbitration process could be interesting, too.

Something similar to Wikipedia’s page-protection feature to combat “edit warring” and “prevent vandalism” could address the issue of people posting criticisms in rapid succession to protect their pet ideas.

Your suggestion to look to Wikipedia for inspiration is spot on. Thanks.

The red ‘Criticized’ label could be a link leading to a filtered version of ideas#show.

The red ‘Criticized’ label could be clickable and filter the displayed comments ‘in place’.

There could be a separate button to filter comments down.

Could this feature be unified with #2669 somehow?

Need to address the risk of the initiator himself being a bad actor who rejects pending criticisms for arbitrary reasons just to avoid paying.

Need to address the risk of people submitting arbitrary counter-criticisms just before the deadline to exclude competing criticisms from the bounty.

The grace period for the initiator unfortunately does not address this risk since he may decide not to review problematic criticisms.

Been trying a slight modification of bounties in prod for a couple of weeks or so. Working well so far.

@dirk-meulenbelt recently offered to chip in for a bounty I want to run. That got me thinking: multiple people should be able to fund bounties.

Need ‘standing’ bounties: they don’t expire. I keep finding myself wanting a standing bounty for #3069 so I don’t have to re-run expiring bounties.

Maybe there could be some type of guide for a user’s ideas generally. It takes him through all of his controversial ideas and let’s him either counter-criticize pending criticisms or revise his ideas, one at a time. And maybe the user could also choose to ‘abandon’ a controversial idea, in which case the guide would not show the idea again (unless maybe there was some new activity on the idea?).

Idea: ‘The Second Renaissance’, ‘2nd Renaissance’, ‘2R’ for short.

Idea: ‘Return to Reason’, ‘RR’

Idea: ‘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.

Idea: ‘Conjecture Arena’, ‘CA’

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.

‘Topic’

‘Thread’

‘Subject’

‘Space’

‘Entry’

‘Note’

‘Post’

‘Piece’

‘Context’

‘Cluster’

Tyler recently wrote to me, in the context of a question he wanted to figure out, “would be good to Veritula this.” Cool seeing ‘Veritula’ used as a verb.

‘Board’

How would you preview text in nodes?

Done as of cc1ab95.

Ruby example:

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def criticized? idea
  pending_criticisms(idea).any?
end

def pending_criticisms idea
  criticisms(idea).filter { |c| pending_criticisms(c).none? }
end

def criticisms idea
  children(idea).filter(&:criticism?)
end

JS example (h/t ChatGPT):

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function criticized(idea) {
  return pendingCriticisms(idea).length > 0;
}

function pendingCriticisms(idea) {
  return criticisms(idea).filter(c => pendingCriticisms(c).length === 0);
}

function criticisms(idea) {
  return children(idea).filter(c => c.isCriticism);
}

When the code overflows horizontally, a subtle inset shadow on the side shows that you can scroll:

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const posts = [
  {id: 1, title: "Understanding JavaScript Closures in Depth", url: "https://example.com/articles/javascript-closures-deep-dive"},
  {id: 2, title: "A Complete Guide to Modern Web Development Practices", url: "https://example.com/articles/modern-web-dev-guide"},
  {id: 3, title: "Exploring the Node.js Event Loop and Async Patterns", url: "https://example.com/articles/nodejs-event-loop"}
];

function formatPost(post) {
  return `${post.id}: ${post.title} -> ${post.url}`;
}

function prettyPrint(posts) {
  return posts.map(formatPost).join(" | ");
}

console.log(prettyPrint(posts));