How Does Veritula Work?
Showing only #2040 and its comments.
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.@dennis-hackethal you have regularly pointed out to me that it’s a mistake to assign strengths or weaknesses to arguments—for example, in #1809 and #1927. I’d love to get to the bottom of that.
On one hand, I see what you mean. A criticism is a criticism: it can either be refuted or it has outstanding criticism. If it’s a bad criticism, you just refute it or deem it irrelevant and move on.
I also see why talking about a “gradient” or comparative strength between arguments is problematic: there’s no objective criterion to measure them against. We can only say one theory is better than another when both attempt to explain the same phenomenon—then we can evaluate them using properties such as hard-to-varyness and other criteria Deutsch describes. (We can get into that if you’d like, though I don’t think that’s our main disagreement.). But this comparison doesn’t apply when we’re dealing with very different criticisms of a single idea, because there’s no common standard to measure them against. Comparing their “strength” becomes arbitrary.
However, I still think there are good and bad criticisms, just as there are good and bad explanations (following Deutsch’s distinction: for instance, bad explanations are easy to vary or point to authorities to justify themselves rather than offering a hard-to-vary account of how and why something works). While I could simply refute bad criticisms and move on, there’s also the matter of efficiency and opportunity cost: I don’t want to waste time repeatedly refuting poor criticisms, or worse, get stuck in circular debates with people who don’t recognize that some arguments aren’t good criticisms at all. I’d rather focus my attention on good criticisms.
To clarify what I mean, here’s an excerpt from my book:
The most important principle to remember while criticizing is: Criticize, don’t defend or attack. Good explanations invite criticism of their intrinsic content—whether the explanation itself works, solves the problem, and avoids worse side effects. Bad explanations, by contrast, deflect criticism onto irrelevant, extrinsic properties such as authority or track record—e.g., “this is the method that successful company X uses,” “I believe strongly in this approach,” or “it’s coming from person Y, so it’s worthless.”
That kind of “criticism” isn’t real criticism at all. It’s just attacking or defending. And when we play that game, the explanation itself stays untouched and stagnant. The idea doesn’t get scrutinized or improved—it only gets shielded or dismissed for irrelevant reasons.
Tagging @bart-vanderhaegen because he and I have discussed this at length—in fact, I got the defending/attacking framing from him.
Well, it’s as you say: if a criticism is bad/weak/whatever, people should argue their case and explain why it’s bad, in the form of a counter-criticism. If the first criticism truly is weak, that should be easy to do. If anyone could just assert that something is bad without giving any reasoning, that would be arbitrary. It would allow them to reject any criticism on whim.
In my understanding, Popper’s epistemology operates on contradiction and non-contradiction. It does not assign strengths or weaknesses. By rejecting justificationism, it rejects positive reasons for preferring one theory over another and instead emphasizes the critical attitude as the only way to make progress. So it does use negative reasons for preferring one theory over another (by rejecting one theory and not another). It looks for reasons against, not reasons for. It seeks to eliminate error.
Speaking of error elimination, Popper’s epistemology does not say to eliminate some errors and ignore others whenever we feel like it. I’m not aware that it makes any distinction between better or worse criticisms. It says to eliminate errors, period.
Great point! It's a good reminder to always avoid positive arguments. By extension, if Veritula would require a specific format or mode of criticism, we’d fall into the very error Popper warns about with the Myth of the Framework—the mistaken belief that criticism requires a shared framework or language. So, Veritula should remain as it is.
At most, you might consider adding guidelines on what constitutes good versus poor criticism, so that critics can improve their skills. But I agree: the person who created the idea should remain solely responsible for addressing the criticisms they receive, not dismissing them as “bad” and moving on.
Just a clarification because you seem to be fudging refutation and criticism:
A refutation is an explanation for why something cannot be true, ie must be false. For example, some guy claims his grandfather fought in WW2. But you checked his birth certificate and he was born in 1950. So he couldn’t have fought in WW2.
A criticism just points out some shortcoming. It could be any shortcoming, even something as small as a typo.
Any refutation is also a criticism, but not every criticism is a refutation.
Thanks for clarifying! I changed the text to phrase it as counter-criticize because that's indeed more accurate here.
While I could simply refute bad criticisms and move on, there’s also the matter of efficiency and opportunity cost: I don’t want to waste time repeatedly refuting poor criticisms, or worse, get stuck in circular debates with people who don’t recognize that some arguments aren’t good criticisms at all.
That’s a fair concern if you’re talking about duplicate criticisms, which public intellectuals do field. The solution here is to publicly write a counter-criticism once and then refer to it again later. It is then on the other party to present some new reasoning or evidence, pending which you don’t need to change your mind or focus any more attention on the matter.
For example, people’s knee-jerk reaction to libertarianism is ‘who would build the roads if there were no government?’ That’s one of the reasons Logan and I wrote the Libertarian FAQ, which answers that question. We can now just link to that whenever it comes up.
If you’re talking about new criticisms, however, I think you should address and not dismiss them.
Makes sense. I’ve noticed you often refer to your blog posts or Veritula ideas during arguments.
While I could simply refute bad criticisms and move on, there’s also the matter of efficiency and opportunity cost: I don’t want to waste time repeatedly refuting poor criticisms, or worse, get stuck in circular debates with people who don’t recognize that some arguments aren’t good criticisms at all.
I recently criticized John Horgan’s article about Rat Fest (see #2046) for having misspelled my name. It’s not a big deal; pointing out a typo is arguably one of the ‘weakest’ criticisms there is. But if he now argued with me about the merits of correcting typos, that would take far more time than just correcting it.