Search 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 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”

My response:

I disagree. Popper suggested measures of corroboration and verisimilitude for rational preference formation *given* a set of *already-created* theories (see quotes and explanations in my answer here: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/137784/relevance-of-poppers-theory-of-corroboration/140003#140003). This is the tradition of preference formation David follows in BoI. Again, we need to take care not to fudge rationality and creativity.

Brett claims/implies Veritula is no better than other online forums; remains “unconvinced it amounts [to] the ‘algorithm’ for rationality.”

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.

Brett claims/implies Veritula is no better than other online forums; remains “unconvinced it amounts [to] the “algorithm” for rationality.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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 says this can’t be a fully specified criterion of rationality because it’s not an AGI.

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).

Brett Hall says Newtonian physics has pending criticisms but we can adopt it rationally in many situations so my criterion of rationality must be false.

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 Hall says this basically comes down to getting the “best explanation” but is “not quite right”.

I think you may have misunderstood me. I asked how I can know that our discussion about HTV will be productive if we continue it now. (For context and for others: I’ve found that Liberty and I have roughly the same discussion in various venues every few months or so. I raised this issue in the linked X thread.)

I didn’t ask you to continue the object-level discussion itself.

Please address my concern before continuing the discussion.

I think we agree that the conjecturing and criticising of explanations is where the progress happens, and this choice you're saying people make at the end among conjectured theories is (relatively) mechanical. But I would also point out that trying to measure how HTV a theory is is as futile and scientistic as trying to measure moral worth. Yet it's still possible to have meaningful discussions about morality. I can't measure the moral value of murder but I can meaningfully argue it's worse than theft. So I think the claim that "if you can't program it you don't understand it" doesn't apply so universally as #3020 implies.

No because 1) there’s always a finite amount of deeply nested criticisms, and 2) the discussion graph is acyclic.

should_adopt? and pending_criticisms are implemented in terms of each other. Doesn’t that cause an infinite regress?

Recursive Epistemology

Veritula implements a recursive epistemology. For a criticism to be pending, it can’t have any pending criticisms itself, and so on, in a deeply nested fashion.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

def should_adopt? idea
  pending_criticisms(idea).none?
end

def pending_criticisms idea
  criticisms(idea).filter { |c| should_adopt?(c) }
end

def criticisms idea
  children(idea).filter(&:criticism?)
end

This approach is different from non-recursive epistemologies, which handle criticisms differently. For example, they might not consider deeply nested criticisms when determining whether an idea is currently criticized.

Assuming Sam did mean to criticize my opposition to assigning strengths to criticisms:

The issue isn’t that we don’t have a way to fix the hole. (We often do.)
The issue is that we have no rigorous way to tell how big the hole is. So, rather than evade criticisms by saying ‘but it’s only a small hole’, I’m saying we should always either fix holes in the boat, no matter their size, or choose a different boat.

Unclear what the boat stands for.

Sam criticized my idea, so presumably he means for the boat to represent #4711. But the way his criticism is phrased, it sounds more like the boat represents the methodology of assigning strengths to criticisms.

To be clear, the boat represents the idea that we should judge criticisms by their strength?