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How about I hold this idea to be true: ‘entertaining criticisms is good.’ But I receive a letter purporting to contain a criticism of this idea. Should I read it?

How about I hold this idea to be true: ‘entertaining criticisms is good.’ But I receive a letter purporting to contain a criticism of this idea. What do I do?

How about I have one known idea: ‘entertaining criticisms is good.’ But I receive a letter purporting to contain a criticism of this idea. What do I do?

You’d know it’s a DDoS long before reviewing all the contents. That amount of criticism in a short time is suspicious, so you’d investigate for signs of coordination. Companies investigating actual DDoSes don’t need to review every single request to know they’re being DDoS’ed. And no reasonable person could blame them if a few good requests get dropped during their defense efforts.

But how do I know that’s what’s going on before I get through the content of the 1000 criticisms or whatever. There could be a valid one in there! Maybe from someone unaffiliated with the attack.

How do you not make yourself vulnerable to DDoS attacks on your life and actions under this system?

Veritula should have some way to indicate agreement; some way to indicate that a particular thread of a discussion is resolved, at least for the time being.

That only happens if people submit bulk ideas, and people shouldn’t do that anyway.

Reactions can be ambiguous. It wouldn’t always be clear which part of an idea someone is reacting to.

Revisions are complicated. Too many options (superseding a previous version, ‘Is criticism?’, unchecking comments). It might help to have a more guided processes with multiple screens.

Reactions could be limited to the recipient of a comment.

People could wrongly think they have epistemological relevance. For example, they might adopt an idea that has pending criticism just because it got positive reactions.

Maybe somebody just forgot to reply or doesn’t know what to say.

If there’s no criticism, that implies agreement.

Veritula should have some way to indicate agreement.

By the time someone receives an email notification, they will probably have forgotten whatever they wrote originally that prompted someone to reply to them.

Well, Tom wouldn’t do it anyway because he’s British.

That would be self-coercive.

Decision-Making on Veritula

Expanding on #2112…

If an idea 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 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?

What reason could you have to ignore the pending criticisms and adopt [the criticized idea] anyway?

Maybe the criticisms aren’t decisive.

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 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 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.

Veritula is a programmatic implementation of Popper’s epistemology.

It 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.

Consider an idea I:

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              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 generally be irrational to reject it, consider it problematic, or act counter to it.

Next, someone submits a criticism C1:

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              I
              |
              C1

The idea I is now considered problematic so long as criticism C1 is not addressed. How do you address it? 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):

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

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

If you cannot think of a way to revise I, you can counter-criticize C1, thereby neutralizing it with a new criticism, C2:

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              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, considering it to be 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:

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              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 marks ideas accordingly, automatically.

Because decision-making is a special case of, ie follows the same logic as, truth-seeking, such trees can be used for decision-making, too. 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.

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

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

What reason could you have to ignore the pending criticisms and adopt it anyway?

Maybe the criticisms aren’t decisive.

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