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Each criticism, even if they are related must be in its own.

Typo: “in its own” should be ‘on its own’.

Well done. Now let’s practice addressing multiple criticisms at once. Here’s the first one:

[W]e first start with an idea/conjecture.

It need not be a conjecture. It could be a conclusion of some other train of thought, say. I recommend changing it from “idea/conjecture” to just ‘idea’.

The gap between "it's" and "its" is big. My lack of paying attention to detail is becoming more and more obvious. In any case.

Making progress. Just a minor quibble next, but worth practicing with:

Each criticism, even if they are related must be in it's own.

There’s a typo: “it's” should be ‘its’ (no apostrophe).

See if you can revise your idea to address this criticism. Remember, there are two steps: changing the spelling and deselecting this criticism.

Ah. Now I get it!

I see that you’ve revised your idea, but you forgot to deselect the criticism (#1848) your revision addresses. As I wrote in that criticism (emphasis added):

Click ‘Revise’, change ‘avoid duplicate criticism’ to ‘avoid duplicate ideas’, deselect this criticism underneath the form, then hit submit.

But #1848 is still being rendered as a criticism of your revision, and your revision has the red label that says ‘Criticized (1)’ as a result.

When a revision addresses a criticism, you don’t want it to continue being marked as criticized by that criticism. That’s why the revision form lists criticisms, so you can uncheck the ones your revision addresses.

Try revising #1851 and remember to uncheck idea #1848 underneath the revision form. Uncheck this criticism (the one I am writing now) as well.

Once you’ve submitted the revision form, verify that #1848 is not being shown underneath the new revision.

Checking that box is useful when you want a revision to override the original.

If you check it, Veritula automatically posts a criticism of the original idea on your behalf. This way, if the original idea is a criticism, it gets ‘neutralized’, which is usually what you want when you revise a criticism.

Consider what would happen if you didn’t neutralize an old criticism: then the parent idea would show two pending criticisms.

#1833 (your idea) isn’t a criticism. Even if it were, it’s already been criticized (#1848). So checking the box isn’t strictly necessary. But feel free to check it and see what happens.

What of for "Supersedes previous version?" box? Would that be selected, since the new version would supersede the current version.

Decent start with some room for improvement. Let’s learn Veritula by doing. I’ll submit criticisms of your idea one by one and you can practice Veritula by addressing them. Here’s the first one:

Also, avoid duplicate criticism.

Yes, but we should avoid duplicate ideas in general.

Try revising #1833 to address this criticism. Click ‘Revise’, change ‘avoid duplicate criticism’ to ‘avoid duplicate ideas’, deselect this criticism underneath the form, then hit submit.

Make sure that at each step you understand why you’re performing that step. Ask first if you don’t.

Implemented as of 632c0d7.

The target idea should be scrolled into view. Otherwise, it might not always be visible, which could cause confusion. See eg #1811, which is preceded by a long idea and thus not visible on page load at the time of writing.

Implemented as of 55d02a7.

Every non-top-level idea should have a link to a separate page with the single comment thread.

Might as well go with top-level ideas, too. That way, when there are other top-level ideas, they get filtered out. Good for zeroing in.

Cycling through revisions on the parent level might hide the idea but that in itself isn’t a big deal: the user can just refresh the page anytime they quickly want to find their way back to the idea.

During testing, I realized this behavior is more confusing than I had initially thought.

Could you expand more on what you mean by the above question?

Ayn Rand claims that "[t]he virtue of Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one's only source of knowledge [...]." This is wrong, mainly because reason can only be used as a method of choosing between knowledge/ideas, not as the only source of knowledge.

Irrationality may be all people had back in the day but that doesn’t make it rational.

This counter-criticism isn’t an invitation to continue this discussion at this point. See #1821.

See #1821.

That doesn’t belong here because you didn’t actually comment on my thoughts re circularity (I’m not requesting to do so now). You either did not read ‘How Does Veritula Work?’ or you did not understand it. You need to post ideas in the appropriate place. Discussions on Veritula shouldn’t be treated like linear chats.

Don’t post another idea in this discussion (the one titled ‘Reason Not The Only Source of Knowledge’) until you understand how Veritula works. If you think you understand how it works, post a summary of your understanding as a new top-level idea using the form located at the bottom of ‘How Does Veritula Work?’. I can then criticize your summary to help improve your understanding.

You can also study Edwin’s activity for examples of how to do Veritula well. He’s fairly new to it but learned it quickly.

Don’t let this discourage you. Veritula has a learning curve. It takes some upfront investment but it’s worth it.

What Does “Battle Tested” Mean?

One of @edwin-de-wit’s ideas recently got the blue label that says “battle tested” – well done, Edwin! – so he asked me what it means.

It means that the idea has at least three criticisms, all of which have been addressed.

The label is awarded automatically. It’s a tentative indicator of quality. Battle-tested ideas generally contain more knowledge than non-battle-tested ones.

When there are two conflicting ideas, each with no outstanding criticisms, go with the (more) battle-tested one. This methodology maps onto Popper’s notion of a critical preference.

The label is not an indicator of an idea’s future success, nor should it be considered a justification of an idea.

You can see all battle-tested ideas currently on Veritula on this page. Those are all the best, most knowledge-dense ideas on this site.

Recursive Epistemology

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

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

def outstanding_criticisms idea
  criticisms(idea).filter { |c| outstanding_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 true or false.

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:

              I

Since it has no criticisms, I is considered unproblematic. It is rational to adopt it, tentatively consider it true, and act in accordance with it. Conversely, it would generally be irrational to reject it, consider it false, or act counter to it.

Next, someone submits a criticism C1:

              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):

                   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:

              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 true, 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, its tree might look like this:

              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 outstanding 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 parent’s truth status. They are neutral.

One of the main benefits of Veritula is that the truth 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 truth 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 outstanding criticisms, the rational approach is to either abandon it or to save it by revising it or addressing the outstanding 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.

good idea!

For example, I had to manually notify Edwin in #1811 of a revision I had made to address a criticism of his. Without this notification, he might miss the revision. If he disagrees that the revision addresses his criticism, that’s a potential error that might not get corrected.

@edwin-de-wit In light of the potential shortcomings of Deutsch’s definitions of knowledge, I’ve revised my criticism, resulting in #1806. See if you want to counter-criticize it.