Pasting #2079 here as it’s since been hidden in a resolved child thread and should have applied directly to #2074 in the first place.

My current view is that the only meaningful dichotomy is good vs. bad.

You say yourself in #2071 that one should “always avoid positive arguments.” Calling a theory “good” would be a positive argument.

As I say in #2065, Popperian epistemology has no room for ‘good’ or any other justification. I’m not aware that anyone has successfully proposed a way to measure the ‘hard-to-varyiness’ of theories anyway. We can criticize theories for being arbitrary (which is another word for ‘easy to vary’). That’d be fine. But Popper wouldn’t give them points for not being arbitrary. And arbitrariness isn’t the only type of criticism a theory might receive anyway.

If we follow Popper and get rid of justification, we can’t use ‘good vs bad’ because we can’t use ‘good’. The only dichotomy left standing is ‘has some bad’ vs ‘has no bad’. Another word for ‘pointing out some bad’ is ‘criticism’. So this dichotomy can be rephrased as: ‘has pending criticisms’ vs ‘has no pending criticisms’, or ‘has reasons to be rejected’ vs ‘has no reasons to be rejected’. Note that there’s a difference: if you think some idea is bad, you submit a criticism. If you think it’s good, you can still submit a criticism because it might not yet be as good as you want it to be. So regardless of how good a theory might be, it can still have pending criticisms, and thus reasons to reject it. Think of Newtonian physics, which (I’m told) is a superb theory, but it’s false and (as I understand it) has plenty of pending criticisms.

‘Has pending criticisms’ vs ‘has no pending criticisms’ is directly comparable whereas ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aren’t directly comparable. And ‘has n pending criticisms’ vs ‘has m’ or ‘has 0 pending criticisms’ are even numerically comparable.

Veritula does not implement Deutsch’s epistemology. It implements Popper’s. I don’t think they’re compatible.

(As an aside, I’m not sure how I could implement Deutsch’s epistemology even if I wanted to. Would I give each idea a slider where people can say how ‘good’ the idea is? What values would I give the slider? Would the worst value be -1,000 and the best +1,000? How would users know to assign 500 vs 550? Would a ‘weak’ criticism get a score of 500 and a ‘strong’ one 1,000? What if tomorrow somebody finds an even ‘stronger’ one, does that mean I’d need to extend the slider beyond 1,000? And so on.)

Pasting #2079 here as it’s since been hidden in a resolved child thread and should have applied directly to #2074 in the first place.

My current view is that the only meaningful dichotomy is good vs. bad.

You say yourself in #2071 that one should “always avoid positive arguments.” Calling a theory “good” would be a positive argument.

As I say in #2065, Popperian epistemology has no room for ‘good’ or any other justification. I’m not aware that anyone has successfully proposed a way to measure the ‘hard-to-varyiness’ of theories anyway. We can criticize theories for being arbitrary (which is another word for ‘easy to vary’). That’d be fine. But Popper wouldn’t give them points for not being arbitrary. And arbitrariness isn’t the only type of criticism a theory might receive anyway.

If we follow Popper and get rid of justification, we can’t use ‘good vs bad’ because we can’t use ‘good’. The only dichotomy left standing is ‘has some bad’ vs ‘has no bad’. Another word for ‘pointing out some bad’ is ‘criticism’. So this dichotomy can be rephrased as: ‘has pending criticisms’ vs ‘has no pending criticisms’, or ‘has reasons to be rejected’ vs ‘has no reasons to be rejected’. Note that there’s a difference: if you think some idea is bad, you submit a criticism. If you think it’s good, you can still submit a criticism because it might not yet be as good as you want it to be. So regardless of how good a theory might be, it can still have pending criticisms, and thus reasons to reject it. Think of Newtonian physics, which (I’m told) is a superb theory, but it’s false and (as I understand it) has plenty of pending criticisms.

‘Has pending criticisms’ vs ‘has no pending criticisms’ is directly comparable whereas ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aren’t directly comparable. And ‘has n pending criticisms’ vs ‘has m’ or ‘has 0 pending criticisms’ are even numerically comparable.

Veritula does not implement Deutsch’s epistemology. It implements Popper’s. I don’t think they’re compatible.

(As an aside, I’m not sure how I could implement Deutsch’s epistemology even if I wanted to. Would I give each idea a slider where people can say how ‘good’ the idea is? What values would I give the slider? Would the worst value be -1,000 and the best +1,000? How would users know to assign 500 vs 550? Would a ‘weak’ criticism get a score of 500 and a ‘strong’ one 1,000? What if tomorrow somebody finds an even ‘stronger’ one, does that mean I’d need to extend the slider beyond 1,000? Do I include arbitrary decimal/real numbers? Is an idea’s score reduced by the sum of its criticisms’ scores? If an idea has score 0, what does that mean – undecided? If it has -500, does that mean I should reject it ‘more strongly’ than if it had only -100? And so on. Deutsch says you haven’t understood something if you can’t program it, and I don’t think he could program his epistemology.)