How Does Veritula Work?
Showing only #2118 and its comments.
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Decision-Making on Veritula
Expanding on #2112…
If an idea has no pending criticisms, it’s rational to adopt it and irrational to reject it. What reason could you have to reject it? If it has no pending criticisms, then either 1) no reasons to reject it have been suggested or 2) all suggested reasons have been addressed already.
If an idea does have pending criticisms, it’s irrational to adopt it and rational to reject it – by reference to those criticisms. What reason could you have to ignore the pending criticisms and adopt it anyway?
What reason could you have to reject [an idea that has no pending criticisms]?
Maybe the idea lacks something I want.
What reason could you have to ignore the pending criticisms and adopt it anyway?
Maybe the criticisms aren’t very good.
Then you counter-criticize them for whatever you think they lack (which should be easy if they really aren’t good), thus addressing them and restoring the idea.
How did you conclude that the criticisms aren’t good? You need counter-criticisms to arrive at that conclusion in the first place.
If [an idea] has no pending criticisms, then either 1) no reasons to reject it have been suggested …
If no one has even tried to criticize the idea, its adoption seems premature. (This is a modification of Kieren’s view.)
That would itself be a criticism, but it would lead to an infinite regress: any leaf of the discussion tree would always get one criticism claiming that its advocacy is premature. But then the criticism would become the new leaf and would thus have to be criticized for the same reason, and so would every subsequent criticism, forever and ever.
Say the thought of adopting some idea with no criticisms bothers you. Then you can always try to be the first to suggest criticisms, which will then give you a rational reason not to adopt the idea. If instead you fail to come up with criticisms, why not adopt it?
What reason could you have to ignore the pending criticisms and adopt [the criticized idea] anyway?
Maybe the criticisms aren’t decisive.
Popper didn’t say to correct some errors while ignoring others for no reason. He spoke of error correction, period.
This criticism reminds me of a passage in Objective Knowledge, where Popper says some people defend ugly theories by claiming they’re tiny, like people do with ugly babies. Just because (you think) a criticism is tiny doesn’t mean it’s not ugly.
To incorporate some notion of decisiveness or severity, we need to be prepared to program that into our decision-making tool. I’m not aware that anyone knows how to programmatically determine the severity or decisiveness of a criticism, and I suspect outsourcing it to the user would result in the same unintended behavior we saw with the sliders for hard to vary.
Just how ‘tiny’ is a criticism then? By reference to what principle or measure?
To arrive at that conclusion, you’d first need some counter-criticism anyway.
If you don’t have any counter-criticisms, how could the criticisms not be decisive?