Search Ideas

Welcome to Veritula, Lola.

I generally like complete silence when I think but sometimes I’ll play soft music to mix things up.

You make a fair point, so I’ve updated my blog post to reflect that the ideal noise level varies based on people’s preferences.

Basically, choose a noise level that maximizes your ability to think and hear your own thoughts.

Bug: when clicking the link to the activity in #1953, the idea is replaced with “Content missing”.

https://veritula.com/activities/1808

Since the discussions starts with an idea, there should be a reply button.

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.

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def criticized? idea
  pending_criticisms(idea).any?
end

def pending_criticisms idea
  criticisms(idea).filter { |c| pending_criticisms(c).none? }
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.

How Does Veritula Work?

Veritula (Latin for ‘a bit of truth’) provides an objective, partly automated way to tentatively determine whether a given idea is problematic.

It follows Karl Popper’s epistemology, which says that ideas are assumed true until refuted. This approach leaves us free to make bold conjectures and use the full arsenal at our disposal to criticize these conjectures in order to correct errors and seek truth. It’s a creative and critical approach.

Veritula is a programmatic implementation of Popper’s epistemology.

Consider an idea I:

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              I

Since it has no criticisms, I is considered unproblematic. It is rational to adopt it, tentatively consider it unproblematic, 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:

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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.

But 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 decision. 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.

Ideas that are neither criticisms nor top-level conjectures – eg follow-up questions or neutral comments – are considered ancillary ideas. Unlike criticisms, they 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, the rational course of action is to 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 the same discussions are had over and over again, sometimes by the same people. 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.

Limitations of Veritula

Veritula can help you discover a bit of truth.

It’s not guaranteed to do so. It doesn’t give you a formula for truth-seeking. There’s no guarantee that an idea with no pending criticisms won’t get a new criticism tomorrow. All ideas are tentative in nature. That’s not a limitation of Veritula per se but of epistemology generally (Karl Popper).

There are currently no safeguards against bad actors. For example, people can keep submitting arbitrary criticisms in rapid succession just to ‘save’ their pet ideas. There could be safeguards such as rate-limiting criticisms, but that encourages brigading, making sock-puppets, etc. That said, I think these problems are soluble.

Opposing viewpoints should be defined clearly and openly. Not doing so hinders truth-seeking and rationality (Ayn Rand).

Personal attacks poison rational discussions because they turn an open, objective, impartial truth-seeking process into a defensive mess. It shifts the topic of the discussion from the ideas themselves to the participants in a bad way. People are actually open to harsh criticism as long as their interlocutor shows concern for how it lands (Chris Voss). I may use ‘AI’ at some point to analyze the tone of an idea upon submission.

Veritula works best for conscientious people with an open mind – people who aren’t interested in defending their ideas but in correcting errors. That’s one of the reasons discussions shouldn’t get personal. Veritula can work to resolve conflicts between adversaries, but I think that’s much harder. Any situation where people argue to be right rather than to find truth is challenging. In those cases, it’s best if an independent third party uses Veritula on their behalf to adjudicate the conflict objectively.

Veritula only works for explicit ideas. If you have an inexplicit criticism of an idea, say, then Veritula can’t help with that until you’re able to write the criticism down, at which point it’s explicit. (The distinction between explicit vs inexplicit ideas goes back to David Deutsch. ‘Inexplicit’ means ‘not expressed in words or symbols’.)

… we wouldn't act in accordance with an idea that has outstanding criticism.

In #1926, I suggested changing it to “we wouldn't act in accordance with an idea that has outstanding criticisms”, plural. You changed it to singular “criticism”.

You presumably typed this passage manually instead of copy/pasting. I believe you previously stated a preference for manual typing so as to better process what you type.

I don’t think you made this change on purpose. I’m guessing it was an error.

If you’re going to type manually, you should double check to make sure it’s exactly the same, eg using cmd + f.

Or you could type it manually, then erase, then paste. Manual typing is error prone. Just copy/paste. Or maybe you did copy/paste but you didn’t include the ‘s’ in the selection. Either way, there are errors for you to correct here.

I’m not marking this a criticism because I think your change it still grammatically correct. I’m pointing out a potential source of future errors.

Add hover effects to schemed buttons so there’s consistency with the existing hover effects for links.

Edwin says to either have hover effects for all clickable items or none of them. Buttons currently don’t have hover effects but links do.

I could remove hover effects from links. macOS links in System Settings don’t have a hover effect either. (They don’t even have a pointer cursor but IMO that’s going too far.)

I went back and forth on this. Native macOS buttons don’t have a hover effect and the human-interface guys at Apple are world class. I’m inclined to defer to their expertise. They know things I don’t.

@edwin-de-wit says buttons should have a hover effect.

Done as of b423e18.

That would mean the revise button would be at the top of the idea. But presumably, people would typically want to revise an idea after they finish reading it. Meaning after they reach the bottom.

I could turn the ‘Revise…’ button into an icon button that lives next to the collapse icon button. It could just have a pencil for an icon.

That way, the button wouldn’t need to be hidden anymore.

Should I be showing the comment form by default on ideas#show?

To avoid scrolling past content, I could remove the autofocus on the textarea unless a certain query parameter is given.

The ‘Revise…’ button is hidden when the comment form is open. It makes sense to hide it because it doesn’t belong in that context. But once hidden, the user has no quick way to revise an idea. Maybe the first thing they want to do after opening ideas#show is not comment but revise.

Should I be showing the comment form by default on ideas#show?

That would probably be stretching the capabilities of Stimulus…

There could be a separate button to filter comments down.

Now I’m submitting a criticism that contains a flaw. It has a tpyo.

Try counter-critizing my criticism by pointing out the typo. Observe that the red label saying ‘Criticized’ on #1874 disappears once you submit your criticism.

In other words, your counter-criticism ‘neutralizes’ my criticism.

Revising ideas and submitting counter-criticisms are the two ways to address criticisms.

The red ‘Criticized’ label could be clickable and filter the displayed comments ‘in place’.

The red ‘Criticized’ label could be a link leading to a filtered version of ideas#show.

The red ‘Criticized’ label could be clickable and lead to a filtered version of ideas#show.

The red ‘Criticized’ label shows how many outstanding criticisms an idea has. For example ‘Criticized (5)’ means the idea has five outstanding criticisms.

But if there are lots of comments, including non-criticisms and addressed criticisms, it’s hard to identify outstanding criticisms.

There should be an easy way to filter comments of a given idea down to only outstanding criticisms.

There should be a feature similar to the ‘single comment thread’ feature Reddit has, where you start with some deeply nested child idea and render all of its deeply nested parents above it:

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    G
   /|\
 P1 P2 P3
   \|/
    I

This feature would be great for seeing an idea in its proper context without having to scroll past a bunch of potentially unrelated ideas.

For parent ideas, cycle only through revisions that lead to the target idea. Communicate accordingly in the UI. For the target idea, its children, and any of its siblings’ children, cycle through all revisions.

Every idea should have a link to a separate page with the single comment thread. This could just be ideas#show. That page should also scroll the target idea into view in case its preceded by too much context that would otherwise push it below the viewport.

This feature would also allow me to remove the buggy ‘context’ feature.