What Makes One Idea Better Than Another?
Showing only #5255.
See full discussionLog in or sign up to participate in this discussion.
With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Discussions can branch out indefinitely. You may need to scroll sideways.
Consider that preference formation is an engineering problem:
Rationality as Computation
Why rational decision-making should be expressed as code, and why serious epistemologists need programming skills.
And if it is, consider also that maybe it’s worth staying away from concepts like HTV, which we have no idea how to program:
Hard to Vary or Hardly Usable?
A programmer’s critique of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity: why his ‘hard to vary’ criterion is fatally underspecified and impossible to apply.
Simple Refutation of David Deutsch’s ‘Hard to Vary’
David Deutsch says we form rational preferences by choosing explanations that are hardest to vary. But that doesn’t work. I explain why.
The task is to write an algorithm that takes two ideas (eg in the form of strings of characters) and returns the preferable one.
How would one go about writing that?
I think it’d be fine to start with obviously wrong answers to that question and then incrementally correct errors. For example, an algorithm that favors the idea with fewer words. (A bit like Occam’s razor.) That’d be fine as long as one wrote working code.
Linked to by #5256