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~All previous methods of preference formation focus too much on what the ideas say; on their content.
Nobody really knows just how simple an idea is (Occam’s razor) or how likely (Bayesianism), for example. In some cases it’s obvious how ideas compare, but in others not so much.
Adherents of those epistemologies are all fooling themselves into thinking they’re being rational when really they’re still acting on whim. Just fancier whim.
Focus instead on how the ideas relate, on the structure of the current state of the discussion, and preference formation gets much easier and simpler.
Then you can easily see which ideas you can adopt and which you can’t. You can even see exactly which criticisms you’d need to address to change someone’s mind, say.
Beautiful.
… it seems like finding a common preference is the thing to do …
It is.
… (and it seems like it works).
It usually does.
But isn't that the same as compromising?
No. A common preference is a new option everyone involved prefers to their respective original stance. A compromise is an option they do not prefer, but merely reluctantly agree to. And it’s usually not really new in content but resulted from mechanically mixing existing options. See the article linked in #5301.
… a compromise can actually be bad, because it is a new theory that no one was advocating for.
Compromise is always bad. It’s a form of irrationality.
Gemini says Brett Hall...
No it’s TCS: https://takingchildrenseriously.com/how-is-a-compromise-not-a-real-solution/
Not to be nitpicky, especially since you ended up agreeing, but #5234 now has a pending criticism (yours), yet you acted on the idea. (Or rather, on the suggestion implied by it.) Acting on an idea with pending criticisms is technically the definition of irrationality on V.
I’m purposely not marking this a criticism so the flags don’t flip.
Idea: rational discussion graph with recursive criticism evaluation, like Veritula does now. Except the ideas are programs, not natural-language text. And they execute when they have no pending criticisms.
I tried this for a few days recently. By day three or four I went to bed at around 6am and woke up at 2pm. Didn’t feel great the rest of the day. Went back to a more regular sleep schedule after that and feeling better now.
You can structure discussions any way you like as long as you make sure the structure won’t break criticism chains.
Comments are for commentary or criticism, not elaborations on the same idea. The same idea shouldn’t be spread over multiple posts. That breaks criticism chains.
Veritula threads don’t work like Twitter/X threads, where people post elaborations on the same idea in comments. They used to have to do that because Twitter enforced a character limit. Now they still do it by tradition. And I’m guessing it’s an adjustment coming to Veritula.
If you realize you need to add more info to an existing idea, put it in a revision, not a comment. Again, #5250 seems like a revision of #5249. The revision of #5249 would then be a combination of both.
Possibly yeah. It doesn’t look like you were going off that. #5246 isn’t a proposed solution. Neither is #5250. That’s an elaboration on #5249.
Dennis HackethalBut the UI won’t reflect that automatically. Now you have to remember which threads have this structure and which don’t. Will you remember that, say, six months from now?
Experimental Controls Aren’t What You Think:
This approach breaks search functions, where the system only goes off the ‘Criticized’ flag. Now the system shows some ideas as rationally adoptable even though they aren’t.
There’s no need to single out corroboration or verisimilitude as special kinds of criticism.
Preference formation using either can easily be reduced to the method of counting pending criticisms:
Idea A fails to survive two tests.
Idea B fails to survive only one of the two.
Idea C says: I have only A and B; I don’t have time to create another; although both are false, I have to act; so for now I prefer B since at least it passes a test A doesn’t.
If idea C has no pending criticisms, then we should adopt it. (And thus ‘transitively’ adopt B.)
We can rationally prefer A over B if A has no pending criticisms whereas B has at least one.
The property you mention is the existence of pending criticisms.
You can still prefer A over B if neither has pending criticisms. The “if and only if” is too strict.
There’s a risk in posting follow-up thoughts as nested comments. The risk is that criticism chains won’t bubble up far enough.
If you want to add more information to an idea, I suggest revising it.
Consider that preference formation is an engineering problem:
And if it is, consider also that maybe it’s worth staying away from concepts like HTV, which we have no idea how to program:
The task is to write an algorithm that takes two ideas (eg in the form of strings of characters) and returns the preferable one.
How would one go about writing that?
I think it’d be fine to start with obviously wrong answers to that question and then incrementally correct errors. For example, an algorithm that favors the idea with fewer words. (A bit like Occam’s razor.) That’d be fine as long as one wrote working code.
Pavel Tichý and David Miller independently proved in 1974 that Popper’s definition of verisimilitude leads to a contradiction. Explanation:
Let us suppose that A and B are both false, and that A’s truth content exceeds B’s. Let a be a true sentence entailed by A but not by B. Let f be any falsehood entailed by A. Since A entails both a and f the conjunction, a&f is a falsehood entailed by A, and so part of A’s falsity content. If a&f were also part of B’s falsity content B would entail both a and f. But then it would entail a contrary to the assumption. Hence a&f is in A’s falsity content and not in B’s. So A’s truth content cannot exceeds B’s without A’s falsity content also exceeding B’s.
Suppose now that B’s falsity content exceeds A’s. Let g be some falsehood entailed by B but not by A, and let f, as before, be some falsehood entailed by A. The sentence f→g is a truth, and since it is entailed by g, is in B’s truth content. If it were also in A’s then both f and f→g would be consequences of A and hence so would g, contrary to the assumption. Thus A’s truth content lacks a sentence, f→g, which is in B’s. So B’s falsity content cannot exceeds A’s without B’s truth content also exceeding A’s. The relationship depicted in Diagram 4 simply cannot obtain: in this sense, that picture is an “impossible” one, like those in Escher’s famous drawings.
The idea ‘I’m located in a hemisphere’ is ‘easy to vary’ as to which hemisphere but it’s true, meaning it corresponds to reality.
HTV and correspondence are orthogonal.
That said I still think you should go see a sleep doctor, Tyler.
Found this article illuminating (emphasis mine):
The gradual loss of energy during the day produces a drive to sleep in order to restore that energy. This is known as the homeostatic sleep drive. If the homeostatic process were the only one involved, a person would wake up fully energized and then gradually wind down over the course of the day, like a battery losing power. This would mean an uneven level of alertness during the day, with dangerously low alertness in the afternoon and evening. To counterbalance this, the SCN also regulates alertness by what is known as the circadian process. As the day goes on, and energy winds down, the SCN compensates for this by sending a stronger alertness signal to the brain and body. This alertness signal reaches a peak in the two hours just before bedtime. This zone of maximum alertness is known as the “forbidden zone for sleep” since the alertness signal makes sleep nearly impossible during that zone. When the usual bedtime is reached, the SCN begins to turn down its alertness signal to allow the body to sleep.
The article is on “Non-24-Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder”. I’m obviously no doctor so don’t take anything I say as advice or diagnosis. But from what you’ve said, I wonder if you have that. I think I have the same issue.
The article goes into several causes you could look into. For example, it says exposure to blue light in the morning can help reset one’s internal clock. But that requires a special type of cell on the retina. If those cells don’t work properly, then as far as your internal clock is concerned, you’re effectively blind.