How Does Veritula Work?
Showing only ideas leading to #2138 and its comments.
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Rational Decision-Making
It’s rational to adopt only those ideas which, as written, don’t have pending criticisms, and to reject ideas that do.
If an idea, as written, 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 no reasons to reject it (ie, criticisms) have been suggested or all suggested reasons have been addressed already.
If an idea, as written, 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? After all, the previous paragraph applies to pending criticisms, too.
See also:
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.
An inability to improve on the criticized aspect of a system is not a refutation of that criticism.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but if somebody suggests some system they can’t put into practice, then the system is no good.
if somebody suggests some system they can’t put into practice, then the system is no good.
Agreed. My point is that you can't refute a flaw by saying the flaw doesn't have a workable system to resolve it. "Your boat has a hole in it". "Yeah, well I don't have any way of fixing it". That doesn't resolve the criticism of the boat. If it's unfixable and a real flaw, you might just need a new boat.
Unclear what the boat stands for.
Sam criticized my idea, so presumably he means for the boat to represent #4711. But the way his criticism is phrased, it sounds more like the boat represents the methodology of assigning strengths to criticisms.
Assuming Sam did mean to criticize my opposition to assigning strengths to criticisms:
The issue isn’t that we don’t have a way to fix the hole. (We often do.)
The issue is that we have no rigorous way to tell how big the hole is. So, rather than evade criticisms by saying ‘but it’s only a small hole’, I’m saying we should always either fix holes in the boat, no matter their size, or choose a different boat.
To be clear, the boat represents the idea that we should judge criticisms by their strength?
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?
They must be decisive, since pending criticisms and rational adoptability are defined in terms of each other (see #5114). If a criticism is pending, we must by definition adopt it (if we want to be rational). These two concepts are a package deal.
The argument is that we have no reason not to adopt an idea with no pending criticism. In other words, we should adopt unproblematic ideas.
A criticism can itself be such an unproblematic idea. Meaning we should adopt pending criticisms. We can’t consistently adopt an idea and its pending criticisms. So from the adoption of a pending criticism logically follows the rejection of its target idea.