Search Ideas

You could think up a design for a self-replicating machine and then build it. Assuming you made no critical mistakes, you have made a self-replicator that hasn’t self-replicated yet.

It is considered a replicator based on what it can do, rather than on what it has done.

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.

Advocacy is not the same as telling people what to think.

Because decision-making is a special case of, ie follows the same logic as, truth-seeking, you can use such trees for decision-making, too.

This sentence is difficult to follow. Could it be made simpler or broken up?

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.

Would it be any harder than verifying someone’s name? It’s not like I check people’s ID.

There are ways. For example, they could use an established account to reach out.

What if someone uses a well-established pseudonym/online identity? That can still carry a lot of weight.

See #4071: if a trusted member vouches for them, I can infer they’re not here to screw around.

When a trusted member vouches for someone new, they’ll probably meet those expectations.

@dennis-hackethal* Please share your reasoning for your request that Veritula users use their true names.

Not prohibited by law.

The purpose of the law isn’t to minimise negatives and maximise positives. The purpose of the law is to uphold the rights of people.

Legalising drugs will bring lawful competition to cartels and gangs, breaking geographical monopolies that perpetuate other (actual) criminal activity.

Define legal, please.

If they violate rights they should be punished by the law, that applies regardless of if they take drugs or not.

No need for new tabs. This feature could be integrated with the search page by filtering ideas by user. That page already has filters for problematic vs unproblematic ideas.

As I wrote in #4051, it doesn’t matter to me whether replication is necessary for evolution to take place. I’m open to the idea that it isn’t. But what I’d like instead is some argument why it couldn’t figure in the evolution that happens in the mind.

3) From what I’ve seen, the attempt to remove replication from evolution doesn’t actually remove it.

If you take some string of information and vary it, then by definition, only parts of it become different. Other parts are preserved. Even if you vary the string several times, the parts that didn’t change were still instantiated at each stage. So they still replicated. (As I recall, this is how Richard Dawkins defines what a gene is, in his book The Selfish Gene.)

Also, just by thinking about the string of information and how to vary it, you’ve already replicated the information. It now exists in its original medium and in your mind.

2) We can explain more if we use replicators. For example, memory and the origin of creativity just ‘fall out’ of the neo-Darwinian approach. Ideas in a single mind may have static vs dynamic replication strategies. All of that is lost without the notion of replication.

My response has always been that I don’t care whether replication is a necessary component of evolution, but that, 1), in the Popperian spirit, we shouldn’t break with other evolutionary theories unnecessarily. Genes and memes both replicate.