How Does Veritula Work?
Showing only ideas leading to #5360 and its comments.
See full discussion·See most recent related ideasLog in or sign up to participate in this discussion.
With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Rational Decision-Making
Expanding on #2112…
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 1) no reasons to reject it (ie, criticisms) have been suggested or 2) 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?
Or, simplified:
It is rational to adopt only those ideas which, as written, don’t have pending criticisms, and to reject ideas that do.
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.”
Ben points out to Brett that “the step of conjecturing ideas (or criticisms) is not itself rational or irrational. rationality comes in when it comes time to decide what to do, given your state of knowledge. it is about acting according to your best ideas, rather than coming up with ideas”
Brett’s response:
One can *call* that “rationality”. And ok. But what I’m referring to is that process which causes behaviour in humans. We create (choices) and choose them.
If one wants to extract out “coming up with ideas” from this process, ok. But that to me looks just like sentential logic.
Ben replies that “it is one thing conjecture a theory, it is another thing to compare theories to choose which one to proceed with (tentatively)”; that HTV is meant to help with the latter.
In response, Brett claims “that can’t be so because that’s not the purpose of ‘HTV’.” Claims it is instead “a crucial feature of good explanations.”
I reply:
BoI is full of remarks about preference formation. Doing word searches for “choose between” and “rival explanation”, we can find, for example:
“… we should choose between [policies or theories] not on the basis of their origin, but according to how good they are as explanations: how hard to vary.” (209)
“… how does the ‘dictator’ itself choose between rival explanations …?” (341)
“[The] main use [of experience] is to choose between theories that have already been guessed.” (4)
“The role of experiment and observation is to choose between existing theories…” (32)
I preemptively address that:
Let me state preemptively that I realize these quotes aren’t exclusively about HTV. There are other factors involved in rational decision-making, such as the outcomes of crucial tests (then again, David does link that to HTV in chapter 1). I give these quotes to show that David recognizes and contributes to the problem of how to form rational preferences throughout BoI from various angles.