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That is simply an extension of the fact that solutions to problems don’t come reliably.
As much as I dislike LLMs, I’m thinking of using them to show summaries of discussions at the top of the page. Summaries would reflect ideas without pending criticisms.
Some people – and I don’t know if this includes you or not – are overly worried about getting embarrassed or making silly mistakes.
There are some exceptions where reputation needs to be taken very seriously, but I think the general view to take in this matter is that no one cares. Think of the deepest embarrassment you’ve ever felt – and then try to replace that feeling with how others felt about your situation.
Like, if you’re on stage playing the guitar in front of hundreds of people, and you hit the wrong note, you may feel embarrassed. But many people didn’t even notice. And those who did probably didn’t care nearly as much about the mistake as you did.
Then what does somebody do who wants to react to an idea as a whole? Do they react to the last paragraph?
For reactions to paragraphs, at least you could tell if the content someone reacted to has changed, and only then remove the reaction.
But presumably, the same is true for reactions to ideas as a whole. Reactions would have to be removed for revisions.
There’s value in others being able to react as well. Maybe an idea affects them in some way or they want to voice support.
There’s value in reacting to top-level ideas, too.
One feature I have planned is private discussions that only you and people you invite can see.
The word ‘therefore’ in this context means that lack of certainty is the reason error correction is the means by which knowledge is created. I’m not sure that’s the reason.
And it’s not actually clear whether ‘therefore’ refers to the part “This means that we can't be certain about anything” or to “all knowledge contains errors.”
You can avoid all of these issues by simply removing the word ‘therefore’. Simpler.
Fixed as of recently. Emails now quote the parent idea.
All of my criticisms notwithstanding, I actually agree with your conclusion that it may be possible in principle for life to spread into space. Like you, I see why that would be hard but not why it would be impossible.
(To anyone inclined to criticize this idea: consider criticizing #2366 instead so the criticism chain remains intact – unless there’s specifically something about my idea here as distinct from Erik’s that you want to criticize.)
Their mode of replication differs, as each new guess in genes must be neutral or positive for the vehicle. [Emphasis added.]
I share the gene’s-eye view advocated by Dawkins: changes are to be judged by how they affect the replicator’s ability to spread through the population, not by how they affect the individual organism (or “vehicle”, as you called it).
This difference matters because sometimes changes hurt an individual organism while increasing a replicator’s ability to spread. If a replicator that reduces its organism’s lifespan is better able to spread through the population at the expense of its rivals, then that’s what it will do.
Their mode of replication differs, as each new guess in genes must be neutral or positive for the vehicle.
I think the word ‘as’ is strictly speaking false here. As in: even if it were true that each genetic change must be neutral or positive, that wouldn’t be the reason genes and memes have different modes of replication.
Assuming by ‘mode’ you mean ‘mechanism’, the difference is that genes don’t need to be expressed to be replicated whereas memes do. The reason for this difference is that one person has no direct visibility into other people’s brains to copy memes ‘wholesale’ – they can only make guesses based on the behavior they see. Whereas the enzymes involved in the replication of DNA do get to direct access to the entire DNA molecule.
[E]ach new guess in genes must be neutral or positive for the vehicle.
I don’t think that’s true. I remember Deutsch saying something like this but I think he’s confused about evolution.
Not every genetic change that isn’t an improvement or neutral is automatically deleterious. A replicator could go through a series of changes that temporarily reduce its ability to spread through the population until it undergoes another change that raises that ability above the original level.
To reason, within any epistemology, means to follow and apply that epistemology.
Some epistemologies are defined too poorly to be able to tell when you’re following or straying from it.
…you only think we need it to explain progress in science.
No, I think progress in science is explained by error correction. The aim of science is correspondence. There’s a difference between aims and means.
Are you asking if there can be correspondence between two abstractions? Or between a physical object and an abstraction?
Only 5-10% of gold's value is tied to its industrial use (per chatgpt).
ChatGPT is notoriously unreliable and known for making stuff up. I recommend using a different, human-made source. Should be easy to find one using your search engine of choice.
The reason to back a currency with gold or some other commodity is that the commodity has other utility aside from being used as money. This sets a floor on the price, making it a store of value.
It looks like you were trying to quote the parent idea. Be sure to use either quotation marks or, for blockquotes, start each paragraph with a > sign. That’s the markdown way to specify a blockquote so it gets the red border on the left.
For example, if you type:
> this will appear as a blockquote
…it will turn into:
this will appear as a blockquote
Check the preview to correct errors as you draft a reply.
See here. Lucas had asked:
Can you say more about why we need correspondence to make sense of the concept of self-similarity? I don't see why. And it seems to me that self-similarity is all we need to make sense of the universality of computation.
My response below. For others reading this, Erik has also since started a dedicated discussion on the topic of correspondence: https://veritula.com/discussions/is-correspondence-true-in-cr
The FoR glossary entry on self-similarity from chapter 4 reads:
self-similarity Some parts of physical reality (such as symbols, pictures or human thoughts) resemble other parts. The resemblance may be concrete, as when the images in a planetarium resemble the night sky; more importantly, it may be abstract, as when a statement in quantum theory printed in a book correctly explains an aspect of the structure of the multiverse.
The way I read that, it means the images in the planetarium correspond to the night sky. Otherwise we wouldn’t consider them similar.
From chapter 6, on the universality of computation and how “various parts of reality can resemble one another”:
The set of all behaviours and responses of that one object exactly mirrors the set of all behaviours and responses of all other physically possible objects and processes.
That means there is one-to-one correspondence between the behaviors and responses of the first object and those of all the other objects. This is basically another way to describe the self-similarity property of the universe.
From chapter 10, in the context of mathematics (italics mine):
… the physical behaviour of the symbols corresponds to the behaviour of the abstractions they denote.
(The same is true of the physical parts of a Turing machine harnessing the self-similarity property of the universe to correspond to other physical objects.)
From chapter 14, in the context of the creation of scientific knowledge (which, AFAIK, DD views as increasing correspondence):
The creation of useful knowledge by science … must be understood as the emergence of the self-similarity that is mandated by a principle of physics, the Turing principle.
It’s been ages since I read FoR so I’m relying on word searches in the ebook but it’s full of these links between self-similarity and correspondence.
a knowledge
I don’t think it’s correct to use the word ‘knowledge’ with an indeterminate article (meaning ‘a’ or ‘an’).
You could say ‘Finding problems that some knowledge addresses…’
Presumably, Zelalem wanted to delete the idea. Veritula purposely doesn’t have that functionality. In the future, Zelalem, just leave the idea and criticize it for being outdated or superseded or whatever reason you have for rejecting it.