What Makes One Idea Better Than Another?
Showing only #5246 and its comments.
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When we reject explanation B in favour of explanation A, there must be some property of the explanations that comprehensively distinguishes A as better than B.
One fatal flaw in B is enough to reject B. A does not also need to possess some opposite property that makes it the winner.
A surviving the criticism does not show that A is progress over B. We could reject one error while moving even further from reality.
Explanation A surviving criticism does not establish that explanation A is objective progress over explanation B. But the claim that one fatal flaw in explanation B is enough to reject explanation B does not depend on explanation A being objective progress. Rejecting explanation B and establishing explanation A as objective progress are separate claims.
Progress does not require a complete ranking of every live explanation. If B has a fatal flaw while no fatal flaw is currently known in A or C, the flaw in B is enough to reject B while A and C both remain live. There does not need to be one property that all three explanations possess to different degrees.
We can rationally prefer A over B if A has no pending criticisms whereas B has at least one.
The property you mention is the existence of pending criticisms.
That property is hard-to-vary-ness.
An explanation can be harder to vary than a rival and still contain a fatal flaw of another kind. Unless every possible fatal flaw is itself a form of ETV, HTV cannot comprehensively determine which explanation should be rejected.
The more HTV an explanation is, the more closely it corresponds to reality.
The idea ‘I’m located in a hemisphere’ is ‘easy to vary’ as to which hemisphere but it’s true, meaning it corresponds to reality.
HTV and correspondence are orthogonal.
Take the same explanation in two possible realities. The explanation has the same content and the same HTV in both, but it can correspond to one reality and fail to correspond to the other. HTV alone therefore cannot determine correspondence.
There’s a risk in posting follow-up thoughts as nested comments. The risk is that criticism chains won’t bubble up far enough.
If you want to add more information to an idea, I suggest revising it.
They are separate ideas, and the latter ideas depend on their formers. If there is a flaw in former ideas, they apply to latter ideas, but if there is a flaw in latter ideas, they don’t necessarily apply to the former. So arranging them like this was intentional, to respect that hierarchy.
This approach breaks search functions, where the system only goes off the ‘Criticized’ flag. Now the system shows some ideas as rationally adoptable even though they aren’t.
Dennis HackethalYou can structure discussions any way you like as long as you make sure the structure won’t break criticism chains.
Comments are for commentary or criticism, not elaborations on the same idea. The same idea shouldn’t be spread over multiple posts. That breaks criticism chains.
Veritula threads don’t work like Twitter/X threads, where people post elaborations on the same idea in comments. They used to have to do that because Twitter enforced a character limit. Now they still do it by tradition. And I’m guessing it’s an adjustment coming to Veritula.
If you realize you need to add more info to an existing idea, put it in a revision, not a comment. Again, #5250 seems like a revision of #5249. The revision of #5249 would then be a combination of both.
But the UI won’t reflect that automatically. Now you have to remember which threads have this structure and which don’t. Will you remember that, say, six months from now?