I want to go to the gym today but I didn’t sleep well last night.

When thousands of dollars are at stake, I think it’s fair to ask people to play by the rules. Still, I’m allowing flexibility by giving Jad a chance to collect the remaining funds.

I’m always happy to reward good work; I’ve paid out bounties in the past. And before I found out about Jad’s use of AI, I gave him tips increasing his odds of beating the bounty. I also submitted criticisms of some of my own ideas, further increasing his odds.

But people need to earn the reward. At some point, I noticed Jad had submitted his replies very quickly, with unusually verbose text, and in fairly rapid succession. AI is notoriously verbose, so that would have been the second-best time for him to mention he was using AI. He did not. But some people do genuinely type fast, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

When I later asked him directly whether he was using AI, he admitted to it but claimed it was merely to “help edit some of [his] writings”.

Pangram, an AI detector, paints a different picture: it says 100% (!) of the code and 22% of the prose in his first idea are AI-generated. I’ve also sampled some of his replies since, which Pangram says are also 100% AI-generated.

To play devil’s advocate once again, I wanted to make sure Pangram wasn’t giving me false positives. So I ran several tests against some of my own prose and code, and compared the results with known AI-generated prose and code. Pangram was almost always right – the few times it did make mistakes, they were almost always false negatives, so if anything, Pangram is too permissive. It does have lower confidence for shorter texts, so I also made sure to use only texts that are long enough. I showed Jad these results privately and he didn’t have a good answer, so I’m surprised he now wants to continue the discussion publicly.

In terms of content, handwriting the code matters because of Deutsch’s yardstick for having understood a computational task: if you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it. Jad says he still understands the code regardless, so it shouldn’t matter. But why not raise that before agreeing to a rule he took issue with? Why accept the risk of disqualification instead?

In terms of fairness, as Jad knows, payout for a bounty depends on addressing all known criticisms inside a review deadline. When a participant uses AI to help with that, but the funders don’t know about it, it creates an unfair advantage. That’s a violation of not just the letter but also the spirit of the rules. It’d be like secretly using a chess computer for help in a chess competition. The amount of text Jad has submitted also creates an uphill battle for the remaining funders to review his submissions before the deadline. Jad says he knows how bounties work, so he knows payouts are automatic at the deadline. Still, the remaining funders are willing to accommodate him.

Before I made the decision to withdraw my funds, I reached out to Jad privately, as I said, to make sure there wasn’t anything I had missed and that there were no hard feelings. We discussed the issue thoroughly and I couldn’t find anything. I also discussed the matter with the co-funders for a second and third opinion, again to make sure I hadn’t left any stones unturned. (To be clear, the responsibility for the decision to withdraw my funds is mine alone.)

I understand Jad was hoping for a bigger payout, so this must be a disappointing outcome. I empathize with that. I’d be bummed too. But he could have easily avoided this outcome. One can’t agree to a rule, immediately break it, get an unfair advantage, hope I won’t notice, and then complain when I do. But with any luck, he’ll get the remaining funds, provided that the arguing ends now.

How Does Veritula Work?

Veritula (Latin for ‘a bit of truth’) can help you live a life guided exclusively by reason.

To reason, within any well-defined epistemology, means to follow and apply that epistemology. Unreason, or whim, is an undue departure from it. Epistemology is the study of knowledge – basically, the study of what helps knowledge grow, what hinders its growth, and related questions.

Veritula follows, and helps you apply, Karl Popper’s epistemology, Critical Rationalism. It’s a continuation of the Athenian tradition of criticism and the only known epistemology without major flaws.¹

Critical Rationalism says that ideas are assumed true until refuted. This approach leaves us free to make bold guesses and use the full arsenal at our disposal to criticize these guesses in order to solve problems, correct errors, and seek truth. It’s a creative and critical approach. Critical Rationalism is a fallibilist philosophy: there is no general criterion of truth to determine with certainty whether any given idea is true or false (Tarski). We all make mistakes, and by an effort, we can correct them to get a little closer to the truth. Rejecting all forms of mysticism and the supernatural, Veritula recognizes that progress is both possible and desirable, and that rational means are the only way to make ongoing progress.

Veritula is a programmatic implementation of Popper’s epistemology.

Veritula provides an objective, partly automated way to tentatively determine whether a given idea is problematic. It does not tell you what to think – it teaches you how to think.

On Veritula, ideas are discrete and immutable. Consider an idea I:

1

              I

Since it has no criticisms, we tentatively consider I unproblematic. It is rational to adopt it and act in accordance with it. Conversely, it would be irrational to reject it, consider it problematic, or act counter to it. (See this quick guide for more details on rational decision-making.)

Next, someone submits a criticism C1:

1
2
3

              I
              |
              C1

The idea I is now considered problematic so long as criticism C1 is not addressed. How do you address it? If you agree with the criticism, you can revise I so that C1 doesn’t apply anymore, which restores the previous state with just the standalone I (now called I2 to indicate the revision):

1
2
3
4

                   Revise
              I ------------> I2
              |
              C1

To track changes, Veritula offers beautiful diffing and version control for ideas.

If you disagree with C, you can counter-criticize it instead, thereby neutralizing it with a new criticism, C2:

1
2
3
4
5

              I
              |
              C1
              |
              C2

Now, I is considered unproblematic again, since C1 is problematic and thus can’t be a decisive criticism anymore.

If you can think of neither a revision of I nor counter-criticism to C1, your only option is to accept that I has been (tentatively) defeated. You should therefore abandon it, which means: stop acting in accordance with it, viewing it as unproblematic, etc.

Since there can be many criticisms (which are also just ideas) and deeply nested counter-criticisms, the result is a tree structure. For example, as a discussion progresses, one of its trees might look like this:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

              I
           /  |  \
         C11 C12 C13
         / \       \
       C21 C22     C23
                   / \
                 C31 C32

In this tree, I is considered problematic. Although C11 has been neutralized by C21 and C22, C12 still needs to be addressed. In addition, C23 would have neutralized C13, but C31 and C32 make C23 problematic, so C13 makes I problematic as well.

You don’t need to keep track of these relationships manually. Veritula automatically marks ideas accordingly.

Since decision-making follows the same logic as truth-seeking, you can use these trees to make decisions, too. Veritula implements unanimous consent as defined by Taking Children Seriously, a parenting philosophy that builds on Popper’s epistemology. When you’re planning your next move but can’t decide on a city, say, Veritula helps you criticize your ideas and make a rational decision – meaning a decision you’ll be happy with. Again, it’s rational to act in accordance with ideas that have no pending criticisms.

All ideas, including criticisms, should be formulated as concisely as possible, and separate ideas should be submitted separately, even if they’re related. Otherwise, you run the risk of receiving ‘bulk’ criticisms, where a single criticism seems to apply to more content than it actually does.

Again, criticisms are also just ideas, so the same is true for criticisms. Submitting each criticism separately has the benefit of requiring the proponent of an idea to address each criticism individually, not in bulk. If he fails to address even a single criticism, the idea remains problematic and should be rejected.

The more you discuss a given topic, the deeper and wider the tree grows. Some criticisms can apply to multiple ideas in the tree, but that needs to be made explicit by submitting them repeatedly.

Comments that aren’t criticisms – eg follow-up questions or otherwise neutral comments – are considered ancillary ideas. Unlike criticisms, ancillary ideas do not invert their respective parents’ statuses. They are neutral.

One of the main benefits of Veritula is that the status of any idea in a discussion can be seen at a glance. If you are new to a much-discussed topic, adopt the displayed status of the ideas involved: if they are marked problematic, reject them; if they are not, adopt them.

Therefore, Veritula acts as a dictionary for ideas.

One of the problems of our age is that people have same discussions over and over again. Part of the reason is widespread irrationality, expressed in the unwillingness to change one’s mind; another is that it’s simply difficult to remember or know what’s true and what isn’t. Discussion trees can get complex, so people shouldn’t blindly trust their judgment of whether some idea is true or problematic, whether nested criticisms have been neutralized or not. Going off of memory is too error prone.

Veritula solves this problem: it makes discussion trees explicit so you don’t have to remember each idea and its relation to other ideas. Veritula therefore also enables you to hold irrational people accountable: if an idea has pending criticisms, the rational approach is to either abandon it or to save it by revising it or addressing all pending criticisms.

Many people don’t like to concede an argument. But with Veritula, no concessions are necessary. The site just shows you who’s right.

Using Veritula, we may discover a bit of truth.

Still have questions about rationality? Read the technical paper, learn about Veritula’s recursive epistemology and how to structure discussions, or read the quick guide to rational decision-making.

Want personalized help tailored to your own specific needs? Hire Dennis, founder of Veritula, for personal tutoring, or run a bounty.

Proposal for new rule

TL;DR: repeat irrationality (as defined below) should be a bannable offense.

Since Popper seemed so agreeable, I mentioned that one of his former students had accused him of not tolerating criticism of his own ideas. Popper's eyes blazed. “It is completely untrue! I was happy when I got criticism! Of course, not when I would answer the criticism… and the person would still go on with it. That is the thing which I found uninteresting and would not tolerate.” In that case, Popper would throw the student out of his class.

… so long as the proponents of our best theories … have to expend their intellectual energies in futile refutation and re-refutation of theories long known to be false, the state of our deepest knowledge cannot improve.

Our forum rules (#4460) include a rule against “Behavior that is intended, or likely, to sabotage debate or prevent progress…” In light of recent, mostly off-platform discussions, I’m thinking about extending it. Or maybe it already applies to the behavior I’m about to describe.

Veritula is built to help people seek truth by criticizing ideas and addressing criticism. More generally, it’s meant to help people live a life guided by reason (#2844) and make progress. That includes the rejection of ideas with pending criticisms.

One of the core insights of Veritula is that people should not rely on memory to decide whether to adopt an idea (#4471). They shouldn’t rely on memory to recall the outcome of a discussion. They shouldn’t track the outcome of a discussion manually (unless they’ve practiced that skill extensively). They should instead feed ideas into Veritula, put them in the proper relationship with each other, and then simply look up which ideas they should adopt or reject. Or, if the discussion has already happened, then they should simply look up its current state instead of duplicating it. (The list of discussions and search function should help with that.) Any idea with a red label showing a count of pending criticisms should be abandoned; any idea without that label should be adopted.

This way, people can avoid having the same discussions over and over again. But some people aren’t willing to do the required work even once and change their mind. They’d rather repeat the same discussions, and repeatedly advocate the same mistaken ideas, like those Easter Islanders who kept building hideous statues with no purpose.

I think members on Veritula should be expected to follow through and update their stances when they’re shown to be wrong. After all, Veritula offers them a way to tell objectively that they’re wrong. We have a criterion of rationality, so why not use it? And if they can’t remember what their updated stance should be, they should get in the habit of simply looking it up. If their old stance has pending criticisms, they should stop advocating it.

But people conveniently ‘forget’ discussion outcomes they view as unfavorable, let a few months pass (at which point they think nobody could reasonably blame them for forgetting), and then go right back to advocating a stance that’s already known to be false.

Mistakes happen; again, memory isn’t perfect. Or sometimes we have a nagging feeling that something about the outcome of a discussion just isn’t quite right, but we can’t put our finger on it. In such a situation, when asked about one’s stance, it’s rational to say something like: ‘Although I personally disagree, at the current state of the discussion, idea X (link to the idea on V) is (or is not) rationally adoptable.’

A good example of how to do this right in a similar situation is @dirk-meulenbelt’s recent post on X:

I wrote a proof/argument on my blog that the challenge is impossible for "two strings" alone, though Dennis has [since] clarified that it's OK to have more than just two strings, and a person may be prompted within reason.

The specific content isn’t important here. What matters is that Dirk shared an objection and then immediately explained why it wasn’t valid anymore. That’s honest. It’s unlike so many dishonest interlocutors who would only mention the objection but not that it’s been addressed already.

As I’ve written before:

The catalog of ideas can be vast – much too big for any one man to hold in his mind. Memory is error-prone. We should not rely on memory to see which ideas we should adopt or reject. We should look them up, dispassionately, in the database [on Veritula], the way a judge would look up a law in a legal text. Rationality is an impersonal thing. Advocacy and rejection of ideas is impersonal as well.

A judge preparing a verdict may personally disagree with a law. For example, he may think it’s too strict or not strict enough. In his ruling, he may even personally distance himself from a specific law. But that doesn’t mean he can just ignore it and act on whim instead.

Yet that is essentially how people treat the advocacy and rejection of ideas more generally. They do it based on whim. If such people participate on Veritula long-term, they will duplicate ideas or even entire discussions. But maintaining discussion trees is no simple task; it takes care and effort. If there are no consequences for such people, one would have to refute and re-refute ideas long known to be false. And that’s time we could spend advocating and improving ideas not known to be false. In short, such people sabotage progress.

Therefore, I suggest that members who are repeatedly found to advocate ideas with pending criticisms, or to reject ideas without pending criticisms, or to have duplicate discussions due to undue reversals to previous, mistaken stances – in short, members who act irrationally in this way, on or off-platform, when they should know better – be given warnings.

If it happens once, it’s no big deal. If it happens twice, it may warrant a warning. Mods should reference both the offending statement and presumed match so the presumed offender can explain any discrepancy. If positive, they may also be asked to explain how they plan to avoid this outcome in the future (eg see #5176). They could run a bounty that will charge their card a small but non-negligible amount if they don’t address a criticism. If it happens a third time, especially if it’s about the same topic as before, their account may be temporarily locked or banned permanently. More leeway can be given if a lot of time passes between offenses or due to other extenuating circumstances, case by case.

Non-members who wish to join Veritula, but who’ve been found to act irrationally in this way off-platform, will need to make a convincing case that they want to improve. Evidence that they’ve changed their mind on some issue, eg some written public record of that change, including some evidence that they remember that change over time, would be a good start.

This rule wouldn’t be retroactive for bans, but once effective, past ‘offenders’ may be warned if their behavior is expected to continue. Past warnings will count toward the decision for future bans.

I want people who take ideas, reason, and progress seriously. Others can go goof off on other platforms, there’s plenty of those around. People who take reason seriously need a way to protect their time against people who don’t.

Dirk replies that the bounty doesn’t ask for essentialist definitions. It instead asks for clarity around how to actually use HTV:

Rejecting essentialism doesn't grant your ideas immunity from clarification. Being vague is not something to be proud of.

By your standard, I could invent any bullshit property of explanations, call it "glorpiness" and when you ask what it means, reply that definitions miss the point.

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.

I’m pro abortion but I have some pro life in me.

Banning the abortion of a zygote seems ridiculous. So does aborting a seven-month-old fetus.

Why not go with: you can abort until the nervous system develops.

Clearly, an embryo without a nervous system can’t be sentient and thus can’t be a person, right? And as long as it’s not a person, it doesn’t have any rights.

According to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK542179/, “CNS [central-nervous-system] development begins during the 3rd week of embryogenesis…”

This idea is for viable pregnancies only. Other considerations may apply for non-viable ones.

I spoke of different grammar, not categories.

I think you misunderstand both my own argument and the meaning of ambiguity.

You’re saying that, to hold a true idea in the sense of absolute truth in my head, I’d have to have perfect definitions, which require infinite amounts of information, and having all that information is impossible. Right?

While you obviously know what those words mean, you do not have absolute, 100% defined boundaries of what they refer to and what they don't.

I think it’s enough to know what the words mean for the idea to be true. We don’t have to have “100% defined boundaries”.

Truth means correspondence with the facts (Tarski). Not infinite precision.

I think a ‘trick’ cynics use (not maliciously, still I like to call it a trick) is to set an unrealistically high standard for truth. And then, when no idea ends up being able to meet that standard, they say the idea can’t be true.

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.

Reiterating/refining #3904: I think the yellow "Criticism of" bubbles can and should be replaced by a graphical indication that is much easier on the eyes. The dropdown line can be made red if the comment it leads to is a criticism, and the bubble on the criticism can be eliminated. Reading the yellow bubble to get the idea # it is referring to, then searching the ideas above for the matching # is inelegant (even if it is usually the one right above).

If rationality and peace required unlimited resources and time, you’d be at war all the time, because resources and time are always limited. But you’re not at war all the time. So rationality and peace can’t require unlimited resources and time.

They require things like openness to debate, creativity, freedom of association, etc.

What's bad in being irrational?

Irrationality leads to stasis, unhappiness, and ultimately death.

The Popper-Miller Theorem

In 1983, Karl Popper and David Miller published a paper in Nature titled "A proof of the impossibility of inductive probability" that used Bayesian math to prove something uncomfortable: the part of a theory that goes beyond the evidence never gets supported by that evidence. It actually gets negative support. In their words: "probabilistic support in the sense of the calculus of probability can never be inductive support." (Popper & Miller, 1983)

They expanded on this in a second paper: "although evidence may raise the probability of a hypothesis above the value it achieves on background knowledge alone, every such increase in probability has to be attributed entirely to the deductive connections that exist between the hypothesis and the evidence." (Popper & Miller, 1987)

Here's what that means concretely. Say your theory is "swans are white because the genes controlling feather pigmentation in the swan lineage produce only white melanin." This is an explanation: it tells you why swans are white, not just that they are. It also predicts that the next swan you see will be white.

You see a white swan. Your overall confidence in the theory goes up. But Popper and Miller split the theory into two pieces:

1. The deductive piece: "this particular swan I'm looking at is white." The evidence directly confirmed the theory's prediction for this case.
2. The inductive piece: "and the reason it's white is a genetic mechanism that applies to all swans, including the ones I haven't looked at." This is the actual explanation — the part that would represent learning something new about the world.

They proved mathematically that piece 2 — the explanation, the part that matters — always receives zero or negative support from the evidence. The only work the evidence ever does is confirm the prediction it directly touched. It never reaches the explanation behind it.

The Math

What follows is a simplified sketch of the proof. For the full formal treatment, see the original paper.

Step 1: Define "support."

The support that evidence e gives to hypothesis h is defined as the change in probability:

s(h|e) = p(h|e) − p(h)

If this number is positive, the evidence raised the probability of the theory. Bayesians call this "confirmation."

Step 2: Decompose the hypothesis.

Popper and Miller split h into two components:

• The deductive component: (h ∨ e), meaning "h or e." This is the part of h that is logically connected to the evidence. If e is true, then (h ∨ e) is automatically true, so evidence trivially supports it.

• The inductive component: (h ∨ ¬e), meaning "h or not-e." This is the part of h that goes beyond the evidence — the part that would still need to be true even if the evidence hadn't occurred.

The hypothesis h is logically equivalent to the conjunction of these two components: h ⟺ (h ∨ e) ∧ (h ∨ ¬e).

Step 3: Calculate the support for each component.

Using standard probability rules, the support for the deductive component is:

s(h ∨ e | e) = 1 − p(h ∨ e)

This is always ≥ 0, since p(h ∨ e) ≤ 1. The evidence always supports the deductive part. No surprise, the evidence is logically contained in it.

The support for the inductive component is:

s(h ∨ ¬e | e) = −(1 − p(e))(1 − p(h|e))

Both (1 − p(e)) and (1 − p(h|e)) are ≥ 0 (assuming we're not dealing with certainties), so their product is ≥ 0, and the negative sign means the whole expression is always ≤ 0.

Step 4: The result.

The total support decomposes as:

s(h|e) = s(h ∨ e | e) + s(h ∨ ¬e | e)

The first term (deductive) is always non-negative. The second term (inductive) is always non-positive. The evidence never positively supports the part of the theory that goes beyond the evidence. Whatever "boost" h gets from e is entirely accounted for by the deductive connection between them. The inductive component — the explanation, the mechanism, the part that would represent genuine learning about the unobserved — is always counter-supported.

Implication

The implication is devastating for Bayesian epistemology: the entire framework of "updating beliefs with evidence" is an illusion. The number goes up, but the going-up is entirely accounted for by deduction. There is no induction hiding inside Bayes' theorem. The Bayesians' own math proves it.

David Deutsch, who has been working with colleague Matjaž Leonardis on a more accessible presentation of the theorem (Deutsch on X/Twitter, 2020), puts it this way: "There's a deductive part of the theory whose credence goes up. But the instances never imply Ahe theory. So you want to ask: 'The part of the theory that's not implied logically by the evidence – why does our credence for that go up?' Well, unfortunately it goes down." (Joseph Walker Podcast, Ep. 139, "Against Bayesianism")

From my article:

Isn’t the assignment of positive scores, of positive reasons to prefer one theory over another, a kind of justificationism? Deutsch criticizes justificationism throughout The Beginning of Infinity, but isn’t an endorsement of a theory as ‘good’ a kind of justification?

Deutsch contradicts his yardstick for understanding a computational task. He says that you haven’t understood a computational task if you can’t program it. His method of decision-making based on finding good explanations is a computational task. He can’t program it, so he hasn’t understood it.

Option 2: Go on hiatus from the day job/career, and focus on creative pursuits and research, full-time, for some number of months (duration perhaps depending on job opportunities).

It sounds like you have a different conception of knowledge and rationality from Popper’s/Deutsch’s.

There’s a unity of knowledge. Knowledge isn’t fragmented the way you suggest. Rationality means finding common preferences among ideas, ie making different types of ideas jibe. Why should that not be possible for the types of knowledge you mention?

Rather than set a fixed amount for each pending criticism (#3421), the ceiling could be divided among all pending criticisms equally.

The bounty initiator’s card will have to be authorized when starting the bounty. Card authorizations presumably have a deadline, so resetting the deadline won’t be an option.

There could be hard cutoff: they lose access to everything, including their own ideas in that discussion.

Pasting #2079 here as it’s since been hidden in a resolved child thread and should have applied directly to #2074 in the first place.

My current view is that the only meaningful dichotomy is good vs. bad.

You say yourself in #2071 that one should “always avoid positive arguments.” Calling a theory “good” would be a positive argument.

As I say in #2065, Popperian epistemology has no room for ‘good’ or any other justification. I’m not aware that anyone has successfully proposed a way to measure the ‘hard-to-varyiness’ of theories anyway. We can criticize theories for being arbitrary (which is another word for ‘easy to vary’). That’d be fine. But Popper wouldn’t give them points for not being arbitrary. And arbitrariness isn’t the only type of criticism a theory might receive anyway.

If we follow Popper and get rid of justification, we can’t use ‘good vs bad’ because we can’t use ‘good’. The only dichotomy left standing is ‘has some bad’ vs ‘has no bad’. Another word for ‘pointing out some bad’ is ‘criticism’. So this dichotomy can be rephrased as: ‘has pending criticisms’ vs ‘has no pending criticisms’, or ‘has reasons to be rejected’ vs ‘has no reasons to be rejected’. Note that there’s a difference: if you think some idea is bad, you submit a criticism. If you think it’s good, you can still submit a criticism because it might not yet be as good as you want it to be. So regardless of how good a theory might be, it can still have pending criticisms, and thus reasons to reject it. Think of Newtonian physics, which (I’m told) is a superb theory, but it’s false and (as I understand it) has plenty of pending criticisms.

‘Has pending criticisms’ vs ‘has no pending criticisms’ is directly comparable whereas ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aren’t directly comparable. And ‘has n pending criticisms’ vs ‘has m’ or ‘has 0 pending criticisms’ are even numerically comparable.

Veritula does not implement Deutsch’s epistemology of good vs bad explanations. It implements Popper’s epistemology and TCS’s notion of unanimous consent.

(As an aside, I’m not sure how I could implement Deutsch’s epistemology even if I wanted to. Would I give each idea a slider where people can say how ‘good’ the idea is? What values would I give the slider? Would the worst value be -1,000 and the best +1,000? How would users know to assign 500 vs 550? Would a ‘weak’ criticism get a score of 500 and a ‘strong’ one 1,000? What if tomorrow somebody finds an even ‘stronger’ one, does that mean I’d need to extend the slider beyond 1,000? Do I include arbitrary decimal/real numbers? Is an idea’s score reduced by the sum of its criticisms’ scores? If an idea has score 0, what does that mean – undecided? If it has -500, does that mean I should reject it ‘more strongly’ than if it had only -100? And so on. Deutsch says you haven’t understood something if you can’t program it, and I don’t think he could program his epistemology.)

What if somebody wanted to post something related that isn’t a comment or criticism? Where/how would they do that?

‘Articles’ are functionally no different than top-level ideas in a discussion thread.

I could use ActionController::Live to stream top-level ideas to the page one by one. Instant page load.