How Does Veritula Work?

That would be a pending criticism.

Then you counter-criticize them for whatever you think they lack (which should be easy if they really aren’t good), thus addressing them and restoring the idea.

How did you conclude that the criticisms aren’t good? You need counter-criticisms to arrive at that conclusion in the first place.

That would itself be a criticism, but it would lead to an infinite regress: any leaf of the discussion tree would always get one criticism claiming that its advocacy is premature. But then the criticism would become the new leaf and would thus have to be criticized for the same reason, and so would every subsequent criticism, forever and ever.

Say the thought of adopting some idea with no criticisms bothers you. Then you can always try to be the first to suggest criticisms, which will then give you a rational reason not to adopt the idea. If instead you fail to come up with criticisms, why not adopt it?

Popper didn’t say to correct some errors while ignoring others for no reason. He spoke of error correction, period.

This criticism reminds me of a passage in Objective Knowledge, where Popper says some people defend ugly theories by claiming they’re tiny, like people do with ugly babies. Just because (you think) a criticism is tiny doesn’t mean it’s not ugly.

To incorporate some notion of decisiveness or severity, we need to be prepared to program that into our decision-making tool. I’m not aware that anyone knows how to programmatically determine the severity or decisiveness of a criticism, and I suspect outsourcing it to the user would result in the same unintended behavior we saw with the sliders for hard to vary.

Just how ‘tiny’ is a criticism then? By reference to what principle or measure?

To arrive at that conclusion, you’d first need some counter-criticism anyway.

If you don’t have any counter-criticisms, how could the criticisms not be decisive?

They must be decisive, since pending criticisms and rational adoptability are defined in terms of each other (see #5114). If a criticism is pending, we must by definition adopt it (if we want to be rational). These two concepts are a package deal.

The argument is that we have no reason not to adopt an idea with no pending criticism. In other words, we should adopt unproblematic ideas.

A criticism can itself be such an unproblematic idea. Meaning we should adopt pending criticisms. We can’t consistently adopt an idea and its pending criticisms. So from the adoption of a pending criticism logically follows the rejection of its target idea.

Attack means bad faith, which is a type of counter-criticism.

Well, if you were to open the letter anyway, and somebody criticized you for it, you could offer the following counter-criticisms: 1) you cannot be expected to adopt an idea while being prevented from entertaining it; 2) somebody artificially constructed a situation designed to abuse the literal content of the two rules in #2140 in order to violate their intention, which is to promote critical thinking and rationality; 3) just because ideas have no pending criticisms doesn’t mean you don’t get to question those ideas – otherwise no one could ever submit a first criticism.

You retain that freedom. Veritula has no power over you. Being irrational is your prerogative (as long as you don’t violate anyone else’s consent in the process). Just don’t pretend to yourself or others that you’re being rational when you’re not.

Then the idea should be revised to adjust or exclude the criticized part(s).

Only temporarily at best, since ‘nuh-uh’ would be criticized for lacking substance right away.

Sometimes postponement is impossible due to external factors, say. But maybe you can create a new option in time.

Even if you can’t create a completely new option, you could create an option saying, ‘in this situation, I have to act, and I’m running out of time to come up with new ideas, so I’m deciding to do X because Y’. And then that option, as I just phrased it, may have no pending criticisms, in which case you can still act on it. So the rule of not acting on problematic ideas remains intact because ideas are discrete and immutable.

The way out of such conundrums as Podge described them is usually (always?) to create new options (see BoI ch. 13).

Brett is confused about HTV. It says nothing about pending criticisms. As I replied to him, it says to prefer, “between rival theories at a given state of a discussion, those we find the most difficult to change without breaking their ability to explain what they purport to explain.”

Brett doesn’t know this is a common objection I’ve addressed before. For example, I wrote a variant in #1976. My paper also addresses it (last objection in section 5).

Ben explored and addressed this criticism in more detail, see #5382.

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.

I explain:

Veritula is more advanced. X only has nested commenting, like most other sites. But it has no way to distinguish between comments and criticisms and no way to count pending criticisms. It doesn’t tell you which posts you can rationally adopt. It has no version control, no clear version history, no diffing, no ability to revise most ideas outside a narrow window.

I’m not aware of any other site like Veritula that tells you which posts we can rationally adopt. No site on the market has that capability.

Worth noting that Ben had already linked to an explanation of Veritula in response, but Brett doesn’t seem to read any of the links we send him. I can tell because he keeps having more objections or questions the links already address/answer.

This is addressed in section 5 of Dennis' paper: The Structure of Rational Thought.

‘How can we rationally proceed when all known ideas have pending criticisms?’
By treating ideas as immutable and discrete, even if content overlaps. For example, as a description of reality, general relativity has pending criticisms. But there are no serious contenders. Instead, take the idea: ‘Although GR has pending criticisms as a true description of reality, it’s an excellent approximation, makes precise predictions, and powers technology such as GPS. So we keep using it until we find a replacement.’ As written, this idea has no pending criticisms, so its advocacy is rational.

That would be irrational and self-coercive.

Then you can go with the more battle-tested one (see #1948). Or you can pick one at random. Doesn’t matter.

Make a reasonable effort to make the criticism explicit so it can be brought into direct conflict with the parent idea and examined further. In the meantime, do consider it a pending criticism and don’t act on the parent idea.

You can also submit a placeholder criticism saying something like ‘I have an inexplicit criticism of this idea.’ (Unless such a criticism would block others from adopting the idea – do this only in, say, discussions about personal matters, private discussions, or discussions about matters of taste.)

Logically, yes. But in practice, it won’t be the same.

For example:

Idea A: ‘Newtonian gravity is true.’ → Has pending criticisms (some predictions don’t match observation).
Idea B: ‘Newtonian gravity is not true.’ → Also has pending criticisms: ‘Not helpful’; ‘Doesn’t tell us how gravity works’; etc.

Related: https://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/2014/08/simple-refutation-of-the-bayesian-philosophy-of-science/