Search Ideas

Yeah I’d consider discipline irrational because it means one part of you coerces another.

Having said that, there could be value in learning how to deal productively with situations where you cannot avoid coercion. Like the government forcing you to do your taxes, which you will only do if you translate that external coercion into internal coercion. Nobody else can really coerce you, only you can coerce yourself. It would be nice to do this productively and also in a way that doesn’t practice/internalize self-coercion. And it should be rare. I don’t think basic chores qualify.

https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/unconflicted

Found this. Will read it when I have a moment to sit down.

In later implementations, I could maybe implement a ‘soft’ delete or grace period. Or I could keep the associated records and rely on authorization rules to prevent access. But as of right now, that’s a premature consideration.

Those could be deleted when the user is removed.

‘Excellence’ is very similar to pride.

I am stuck on the subject of self-discipline.

It seems important to be able to get things done, even when we aren’t in the mood for it (basic chores, for example).

But this conflicts with CR ideas to do with self-coercion.

Thank you, found a couple good ones.

Have you seen: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/core-objectivist-values

Might have some more virtues to include.

The Open Society

The concept of an 'Open Society' is central to the political philosophy of Critical Rationalism, detailed by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies. An open society is characterized by individualism, where personal choice and responsibility are paramount, in contrast to a closed society (e.g., tribal or collectivist) which demands the subordination of the individual to the group. The theory replaces the justificationist political question, "Who should rule?", with the fallibilist question: "How can we structure our institutions so that we can remove bad rulers and bad policies without violence?” In this view, democracy is not "rule by the people" (an essentialist definition) but is valued as the only known institutional mechanism for changing policy and leadership without violence.

Fallibilism

This is the philosophical position that all human knowledge—every belief, theory, and observation—is conjectural, tentative, potentially incomplete, and potentially mistaken. It holds that there cannot be any conclusive justification or rational certainty for anything we might believe to be true (including observations).

Fallibilism is distinct from skepticism. Skepticism argues that because certainty is impossible, knowledge is impossible. Fallibilism agrees that certainty is impossible but denies that this invalidates knowledge. Fallibilism holds that people can and do possess real, objective knowledge, and that people can improve it through a process of error correction.

This functionality is pretty standard across apps. You can be removed from Discord servers, Telegram channels, etc without warning or reason at any time. People generally know and accept this. If they still put in effort, that’s on them.

That depends on a bunch of factors, including their relationship with the discussion owner, into which Veritula has no visibility.

That risk could be clearly communicated in the UI.

Maybe you remove them because you don’t even want them to be able to see anything.

There’d probably be a bunch of edge cases with this approach. For example, others would still be able to comment on those ideas, and the comments would have to be hidden from OPs. Which begs the question of how that impacts the displayed criticism count… And so on.

If you later realize that adding someone was a mistake, you should be able to correct that mistake.

There could be hard cutoff: they lose access to everything, including their own ideas in that discussion.

My critique of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity as a programmer. In short, his ‘hard to vary’ criterion at the core of his epistemology is fatally underspecified and impossible to apply.

Deutsch says that one should adopt explanations based on how hard they are to change without impacting their ability to explain what they claim to explain. The hardest-to-change explanation is the best and should be adopted. But he doesn’t say how to figure out which is hardest to change.

A decision-making method is a computational task. He says you haven’t understood a computational task if you can’t program it. He can’t program the steps for finding out how ‘hard to vary’ an explanation is, if only because those steps are underspecified. There are too many open questions.

So by his own yardstick, he hasn’t understood his epistemology.

You will find that and many more criticisms here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable

We are also never the passive recipients of our knowledge; we are the creators.

Out of scope for fallibilism.

Some of those ideas are freedom, privacy, and free markets.

Out of scope for fallibilism.

This means that we can't be certain about anything, because we don't have a criterion of truth.

First sentence already implies this.

I’ve made dozens of pizzas by now. I’ve gotten pretty good at it.

Ingredients

• Store-bought dough (312g)
• Tomato sauce (70g, low sodium)
• Mozzarella (whole milk, 100g – fresh will taste better but will also make the dough less crispy due to juices)
• 2g extra virgin olive oil (optional)
• Semolina flour

Then, for garnish:

• Oregano
• Fresh basil leaves
• A dash of salt

Steps

1. Preheat oven for 1 hour. Ends up somewhere around 450°F.
2. Preheat pizza steel for 30 min on top rack underneath broiler, reaches about 650°F.
3. In the meantime, rest dough on counter top until it reaches room temperature.
4. Grate cheese and measure tomato sauce.
5. Dust counter with semolina flour and stretch the dough. Make it thin so it gets crispy.
6. Add tomato sauce.
7. Place dough on peel.
8. Place dough on steel; still on top rack with the broiler still on.
9. Bake for 2 minutes.
10. Take out to add cheese and oregano.
11. Bake for another 1.5 minutes on top rack; again, the broiler is still on. Can turn it off halfway through if the pizza is burning on top but the center of the dough needs more time to bake.
12. Optional: take out steel and let pizza rest on steel for another minute to make the bottom crispy.
13. Optional: in the meantime, apply small amount of olive oil to the outer crust and sprinkle salt on outer crust. (Kind of overrated, not really worth the extra calories.)
14. Remove from steel and serve.

My Conjecture

Conjecture: addiction is the result of the entrenchment of a conflict between two or more preferences in a mind.

Picture a smoker who wants to give up smoking but also really enjoys smoking. Those preferences conflict.

If the conflict is entrenched, then both preferences get to live on indefinitely. The entrenchment will not let the smoker give up smoking. He will become a chain smoker.

Solutions for the conflict may need to be found creatively, case by case. It depends on the nature of the particular entrenchment and the preferences involved. A more overarching answer for how to cure addiction might involve Randian ideas around introspection and getting one’s reason and emotions in the proper order.

I don’t think animals are sentient.

I realize this view sounds outlandish to most but it’s a considered, researched conclusion.

There’s lots of evidence of insentience in the way animals behave. If they were sentient, they would not behave the way they do: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/evidence-of-animal-insentience

Additional reasoning:
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/animal-sentience-faq
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/konrad-lorenz-hacked-animals
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/animal-sentience-discussion-tree
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/the-animal-rights-community-is-based-on-fear-a

…the only known institutional mechanism for error-correction…

Not totally clear what error correction means in this context. Leadership change is only one example of error correction in politics. Maybe mention policy change as well?