How Does Veritula Work?
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.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:
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.”