How Does Veritula Work?

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Dennis Hackethal’s avatar
Dennis HackethalOP​·​#5748​·​
3rd of 3 versions leading to #5088 (8 total)

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:

Battle-tested
Sam Cymbaluk’s avatar
Sam Cymbaluk​·​#5088​·​

Is rejecting an idea equivalent to adopting it's negation?

Dennis Hackethal’s avatar
Dennis HackethalOP​·​#5095​·​

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/

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