How Does Veritula Work?
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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.”
I give “another argument that rationality isn’t the same as creativity: we can creatively come up with ways to suppress criticism”