What Makes One Idea Better Than Another?

Showing only #5255.

See full discussion
  Log 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.
Dennis Hackethal’s avatar
Dennis Hackethal​·​#5255​·​

Consider that preference formation is an engineering problem:
https://libertythroughreason.com/rationality-as-computation/

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:
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable
https://libertythroughreason.com/simple-refutation-of-david-deutschs-hard-to-vary/

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.