Search Ideas

A chronic calorie deficit will trigger a suppression of the active thyroid hormone T3. Lowering T3 causes a lowering of the metabolic rate, which lowers the rate of caloric burn at rest.

#4212 doesn’t advocate a chronic deficit. Still, I’ll edit it to say that people shouldn’t be in prolonged deficits.

The value of gold is anchored, see #4155. The dollar has no such anchor.

I don’t see how it matters for his argument. The value of anything fluctuates.

Emoji reactions (#2159) are implemented as of ea482fb.

Wiener says the dollar can go up or down in value (usually down; prices usually rise).

He suggests that, due to this volatility, measuring the value of something in dollars is like measuring the width of a physical object using a rubber band. He implies that this measurement is unreliable and arbitrary because you can ‘stretch’ it just like a rubber band.

He concludes that we should measure the value of something in ounces of gold instead.

Am I understanding Wiener correctly?

Apparently, stocks have fallen since the dot-com bubble when measured in gold instead of dollars: https://x.com/elerianm/status/1976237139185574170

Some comments suggest measuring stocks in gold is arbitrary, others say this development is simply due to inflation.

Are they right or is this development a deeper sign that the economy is in trouble?

This is speculation, see #4106. If it really becomes an issue, I can retire the feature or improve it.

I plan to go piecemeal by starting with reactions to ideas as a whole, then maybe to paragraphs/block-level elements down the line.

Would this work better as a criticism of #4058? That way, the relationship between these ideas might be clearer, and there’d be the possibility of a criticism chain.

Related to #4062, making any part of the drug trade illegal just gives gangs and cartels a leg up over law-abiding citizens.

But that way, you pretty much ensure that only scumbags sell drugs. And they definitely don’t care about their customers.

Posting arbitrary emojis doesn’t achieve that purpose.

Maybe it does. Any kind of reaction is a response that turns a criticism from unacknowledged to acknowledged.

Edit: …

Pointing out changes is discouraged. Version history and diffing take care of that for you.

I think the reason the limited set works well in X spaces is that there’s no text input. So there’s no way to sidestep the restriction.

For Veritula, it would be more like an emoji restriction on tweets. That wouldn’t work because you couldn’t stop people from posting arbitrary emojis in tweets by just typing them with their keyboards.

This seems both complicated and restrictive. People could easily sidestep the restriction anyway: nothing stops someone from leaving a comment with only a single emoji in it.

Too complicated/ambitious for a first implementation. Start piecemeal. But could be a promising approach if reactions to ideas as a whole end up being ambiguous (#2166).

I can speculate ahead of time, but I might implement reactions and find that this is not an issue after all. And if it is, I can either retire the feature or improve it.

But this doesn’t address the scenario where someone wants to react to no particular paragraph but the idea as a whole.

Agreed, thanks. Fixed in #4095. “Since decision-making follows the same logic as truth-seeking, you can use these trees to make decisions, too.”

I think the same logic applies because it’s not just memes that can have static and dynamic replication strategies – ideas in one mind can have those replication strategies, too.

I call a mind dominated by either replication strategy a dynamic or static mind, respectively.

Maybe there could be some type of guide for a user’s ideas generally. It takes him through all of his controversial ideas and let’s him either counter-criticize pending criticisms or revise his ideas, one at a time. And maybe the user could also choose to ‘abandon’ a controversial idea, in which case the guide would not show the idea again (unless maybe there was some new activity on the idea?).

Implemented as of 39c2686.

Then people could occasionally check the search page for ideas they think they can rationally hold but actually can’t. And then they can work on addressing criticisms. A kind of ‘mental housekeeping’ to ensure they never accidentally accept problematic ideas as true.

Some people work in professions where sharing certain opinions puts them at risk of being fired.

Also, there are people living under repressive regimes.

Some reputational concerns are legitimate, and Veritula should accommodate them to promote free speech.

People could use Veritula to establish that intellectual presence and put their name (real or not) behind their ideas.