How Does Veritula Work?
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Rational Decision-Making
Expanding on #2112…
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 1) no reasons to reject it (ie, criticisms) have been suggested or 2) 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?
Or, simplified:
It is rational to adopt only those ideas which, as written, don’t have pending criticisms, and to reject ideas that do.
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?
This approach does not specify how long you should spend coming up with criticisms before adopting it, therefore it cannot be put into action as stated. The delay must be nonzero otherwise, the fresh idea "you should ignore criticisms" would nullify the system.
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?
How do you not make yourself vulnerable to DDoS attacks on your life and actions under this system?
Attack means bad faith, which is a type of counter-criticism.
But how do I know that’s what’s going on before I get through the content of the 1000 criticisms or whatever. There could be a valid one in there! Maybe from someone unaffiliated with the attack.
You’d know it’s a DDoS long before reviewing all the contents. That amount of criticism in a short time is suspicious, so you’d investigate for signs of coordination. Companies investigating actual DDoSes don’t need to review every single request to know they’re being DDoS’ed. And no otherwise reasonable person could blame them if a few good requests get dropped during their defense efforts.
But what if the idea that you should be suspicious of a large volume of criticism in a short time has pending criticism itself?
Then the idea ‘I could either address that pending criticism or, if I fail to do that, look into all the other pending criticisms’ would have no pending criticisms.
How about I hold this idea to be true: ‘entertaining criticisms is good.’ But I receive a letter purporting to contain a criticism of this idea, and it has a note attached to it stating that it contains such a criticism. Should I open the letter? Assume that it has no pending counter-criticisms. Have we constructed an unreadable letter?
Well, if you were to open the letter anyway, and somebody criticized you for it, you could offer the following counter-criticisms: 1) you cannot be expected to adopt an idea while being prevented from entertaining it; 2) somebody artificially constructed a situation designed to abuse the literal content of the two rules in #2140 in order to violate their intention, which is to promote critical thinking and rationality; 3) just because ideas have no pending criticisms doesn’t mean you don’t get to question those ideas – otherwise no one could ever submit a first criticism.
But I want to remain free to act on whim instead!
You retain that freedom. Veritula has no power over you. Being irrational is your prerogative (as long as you don’t violate anyone else’s consent in the process). Just don’t pretend to yourself or others that you’re being rational when you’re not.
But sometimes an idea has other content that shouldn’t be thrown out with the bathwater just because of some criticism that applies only to part of it.
Then the idea should be revised to adjust or exclude the criticized part(s).
What counts as ‘addressing’ a criticism? If I write ‘nuh-uh’ as a counter-criticism, does that neutralize the original?
Only temporarily at best, since ‘nuh-uh’ would be criticized for lacking substance right away.
Podge wrote in the FoR book club:
[A]n institution that forbids action unless unanimity is reached seems not to function coherently. There are two possibilities. If postponement is uncontroversial, then no special rule is needed, since institutions for adjudicating between competing preferences are only operative when there is disagreement. If postponement itself is contested, then it’s not clear how this rule could be applied consistently, because not acting on x is itself a choice about which we are conflicted.
Sometimes postponement is impossible due to external factors, say. But maybe you can create a new option in time.
Even if you can’t create a completely new option, you could create an option saying, ‘in this situation, I have to act, and I’m running out of time to come up with new ideas, so I’m deciding to do X because Y’. And then that option, as I just phrased it, may have no pending criticisms, in which case you can still act on it. So the rule of not acting on problematic ideas remains intact because ideas are discrete and immutable.
The way out of such conundrums as Podge described them is usually (always?) to create new options (see BoI ch. 13).
Brett Hall says this basically comes down to getting the “best explanation” but is “not quite right”.
Brett is confused about HTV. It says nothing about pending criticisms. As I replied to him, it says to prefer, “between rival theories at a given state of a discussion, those we find the most difficult to change without breaking their ability to explain what they purport to explain.”
Brett Hall says Newtonian physics has pending criticisms but we can adopt it rationally in many situations so my criterion of rationality must be false.
Brett says this can’t be a fully specified criterion of rationality because it’s not an AGI.
As I wrote to him in response, rationality and creativity are different things. They’re related, and there’s overlap, but you don’t need to code creativity to code rational preference formation. You can outsource creative input to the user, as programs usually do.
Brett claims in response “the whole Popperian view is that rationality *is* creativity: the *creation* of corrections to errors once identified, etc.” He’s concerned that Veritula “seems to suggest ‘rationality’ is identical to something like ‘logic’ or a purely deductive process.”
If we can have a purely deductive process to tell whether we’re being rational or not, that’s a very good thing. The opposite of something to be concerned about.
I think Brett is concerned that Veritula discounts the creation of new options. David is right to point in BoI chapter 13 that traditional accounts of rational decision-making focus too much on choosing from existing options according to a fixed formula while ignoring the fact that man is creative, ie can make new options.
Veritula doesn’t discount that. As I point out to Brett, it “lets us submit new options at any time, and it offers writing tools to make that as easy and enjoyable as possible. It actively encourages the creation of new options.”
My response:
I disagree. Popper suggested measures of corroboration and verisimilitude for rational preference formation *given* a set of *already-created* theories (see quotes and explanations in my answer here: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/137784/relevance-of-poppers-theory-of-corroboration/140003#140003). This is the tradition of preference formation David follows in BoI. Again, we need to take care not to fudge rationality and creativity.
Ben points out to Brett that “the step of conjecturing ideas (or criticisms) is not itself rational or irrational. rationality comes in when it comes time to decide what to do, given your state of knowledge. it is about acting according to your best ideas, rather than coming up with ideas”
Brett’s response:
One can *call* that “rationality”. And ok. But what I’m referring to is that process which causes behaviour in humans. We create (choices) and choose them.
If one wants to extract out “coming up with ideas” from this process, ok. But that to me looks just like sentential logic.
This isn’t merely an issue of what we call things. The difference between rationality and creativity isn’t semantics.
Don’t know why the sudden reference to the rather esoteric topic of sentential logic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propositional_logic Nor does Brett explain what’s wrong with it.
Ben replies that “it is one thing conjecture a theory, it is another thing to compare theories to choose which one to proceed with (tentatively)”; that HTV is meant to help with the latter.
In response, Brett claims “that can’t be so because that’s not the purpose of ‘HTV’.” Claims it is instead “a crucial feature of good explanations.”
There’s no contradiction there. It can be both a feature of explanations and a tool to help us make decisions.
I reply: “Why care whether explanations have this feature if not to prefer them?”
I reply:
The question of how we can make rational preferences has been a key philosophical problem since antiquity. Saying HTV isn’t for that is frankly a disservice to Deutsch because it demotes HTV from a genuine philosophical contribution to a mere feature of some explanations that we don’t know what to do with.
I ask: “If HTV is just a feature of explanations but not a criterion to form rational preferences, does that mean we could rationally adopt Persephone over axis tilt?”
The implied criticism is that that is clearly not what HTV is intended for.
I reply:
BoI is full of remarks about preference formation. Doing word searches for “choose between” and “rival explanation”, we can find, for example:
“… we should choose between [policies or theories] not on the basis of their origin, but according to how good they are as explanations: how hard to vary.” (209)
“… how does the ‘dictator’ itself choose between rival explanations …?” (341)
“[The] main use [of experience] is to choose between theories that have already been guessed.” (4)
“The role of experiment and observation is to choose between existing theories…” (32)
I later found more evidence running a word search for the string ‘prefer’:
“Whenever a wide range of variant theories can account equally well for the phenomenon they are trying to explain, there is no reason to prefer one of them over the others, so advocating a particular one in preference to the others is irrational.” (21, emphasis mine)
And chapter 13 is virtually all about forming rational preferences.
Then there’s TCS common-preference finding…
I preemptively address that:
Let me state preemptively that I realize these quotes aren’t exclusively about HTV. There are other factors involved in rational decision-making, such as the outcomes of crucial tests (then again, David does link that to HTV in chapter 1). I give these quotes to show that David recognizes and contributes to the problem of how to form rational preferences throughout BoI from various angles.
Liberty says in a previous discussion that the first quote is “just a cherry picked sentence and it's ambiguous as to the claim you're making. Neither Deutsch nor anyone else who agrees with it interprets the theory in the way you're doing.”
I address the cherry-picking charge now:
… chapter 1 was in large part about HTV as a way to prefer axis tilt over Persephone. That was a central part of that chapter: to present David’s answer to how we can make rational choices, using axis tilt vs. Persephone as an example.
So, far from being cherry-picked, several pages in BoI, almost a whole chapter, are about preference formation using HTV.
As for ambiguity, I don’t see how it’s ambiguous, at least now, given the additional quotes and the fact that chapter 1 is in large part about preference formation, as I say in #5363.
I don’t care whether people agree with me about this. I care about what’s true, what the ideas imply, as written. Ironically, chapter 1 also says theories can have implications their authors did not intend or may not like (p. 27):
What if you’d rather not know? You may not like these predictions.
Your friends and colleagues may ridicule them. You may try to modify
the explanation so that it will not make them… You will fail.
I give “another argument that rationality isn’t the same as creativity: we can creatively come up with ways to suppress criticism”
I reply:
Sometimes it’s *hard* to come up with new options. Like in the conflict between QM and GR. So then we have to choose from existing options because we can’t trivially just ‘be creative’ to make a new one
But #5331 relies on our ability to come up with new options to remain rational in the face of mutually exclusive options.
In #5368, I mean fully new options. Like a new theory in addition to QM and GR. Such a theory is extremely hard to come by.
Tyler says “All known programs to date” outsource creative input to the user.
I reply that “Not all programs prompt users for input at runtime”
Brett claims/implies Veritula is no better than other online forums; remains “unconvinced it amounts [to] the ‘algorithm’ for rationality.”
I explain:
Veritula is more advanced. X only has nested commenting, like most other sites. But it has no way to distinguish between comments and criticisms and no way to count pending criticisms. It doesn’t tell you which posts you can rationally adopt. It has no version control, no clear version history, no diffing, no ability to revise most ideas outside a narrow window.
I’m not aware of any other site like Veritula that tells you which posts we can rationally adopt. No site on the market has that capability.
Worth noting that Ben had already linked to an explanation of Veritula in response, but Brett doesn’t seem to read any of the links we send him. I can tell because he keeps having more objections or questions the links already address/answer.
By this criterion, it is irrational to adopt or advocate either GR or QM, as they have pending criticisms.
According to every physicist I have heard speak on the matter, GR and QM conflict.
@bart-vanderhaegen has also said to me that GR falsely predicts the orbit of electrons, and QM falsely predicts the mass threshold at which black holes form.
This is addressed in section 5 of Dennis' paper: The Structure of Rational Thought.
‘How can we rationally proceed when all known ideas have pending criticisms?’
By treating ideas as immutable and discrete, even if content overlaps. For example, as a description of reality, general relativity has pending criticisms. But there are no serious contenders. Instead, take the idea: ‘Although GR has pending criticisms as a true description of reality, it’s an excellent approximation, makes precise predictions, and powers technology such as GPS. So we keep using it until we find a replacement.’ As written, this idea has no pending criticisms, so its advocacy is rational.
it’s an excellent approximation
It's an excellent approximation to what? Reality? How do we know that?
This assumes ‘approximation’ means measurable closeness to an unknown final theory. In context, it actually means that GR’s predictions closely approximate observed gravitational behaviour in its tested domains. We can compare predictions with observations without knowing the final theory.
This seems to create a rewording loophole.
Almost any criticised idea could be made adoptable this way: “X has criticisms, but keep using X”
‘X is true’ and ‘use X for purpose Y while acknowledging that X is not true’ are different proposals. A criticism of X as a true description does not necessarily criticise its bounded use.
The wrapper provides no immunity. If X’s flaw defeats the proposed use, that flaw can criticise the new policy too. ‘This bridge design collapses, but keep using it’ is criticised by the danger of collapse. Therefore, not almost any criticised idea becomes adoptable this way.
“Serious contender” smuggles comparison of explanations with known flaws back in.
How do we distinguish between serious and unserious contenders?
The criterion excludes comparing the strength of criticisms, not comparison altogether. ‘Serious’ could be binary: does the contender solve the same problems, reproduce GR’s successful predictions, and lack a pending criticism that prevents replacing GR?
“There are no serious contenders” is itself merely another conjecture inside the composite idea. It too can be criticised and revised recursively.
If an idea does have pending criticisms, it’s irrational to adopt it …
What if I want to adopt it anyway?
If an idea has no pending criticisms, it’s rational to adopt it and irrational to reject it.
What if there are multiple ideas with no pending criticisms?
Then you can go with the more battle-tested one (see #1948). Or you can pick one at random. Doesn’t matter.
Make a reasonable effort to make the criticism explicit so it can be brought into direct conflict with the parent idea and examined further. In the meantime, do consider it a pending criticism and don’t act on the parent idea.
You can also submit a placeholder criticism saying something like ‘I have an inexplicit criticism of this idea.’ (Unless such a criticism would block others from adopting the idea – do this only in, say, discussions about personal matters, private discussions, or discussions about matters of taste.)
Logically, yes. But in practice, it won’t be the same.
For example:
Idea A: ‘Newtonian gravity is true.’ → Has pending criticisms (some predictions don’t match observation).
Idea B: ‘Newtonian gravity is not true.’ → Also has pending criticisms: ‘Not helpful’; ‘Doesn’t tell us how gravity works’; etc.
Related: https://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/2014/08/simple-refutation-of-the-bayesian-philosophy-of-science/