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If you don’t have any counter-criticisms, how could the criticisms not be decisive?

This criticism reminds me of a passage in Objective Knowledge, where Popper says some people defend ugly theories by claiming they’re tiny, like people do with ugly babies. Just because (you think) a criticism is tiny doesn’t mean it’s not ugly.

Popper didn’t say to correct some errors while ignoring others for no reason. He spoke of error correction, period.

That would itself be a criticism, but it would lead to an infinite regress: any leaf of the discussion tree would always get one criticism claiming that its advocacy is premature. But then the criticism would become the new leaf and would thus have to be criticized for the same reason, and so would every subsequent criticism, forever and ever.

Conversely, it would generally be irrational to reject it, consider it problematic, or act counter to it.

“generally”? So there are exceptions?

Who submitted those ideas? Not Veritula.

I didn’t have a counter to #2104, fixed it as of v2.

Ayn Rand’s book The Romantic Manifesto has 114 matches for the string ‘esthetic’ and no matches for the string ‘aesthetic’. Rand was a serious philosopher who did extensive work on art and (a)esthetics.

There’s also her talk ‘The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age’, though it may have been the Ayn Rand Institute that chose that spelling.

Justin says the term ‘esthetician’ from the esthetician industry “ruined that”.

I agree with the premise that small does not mean insignificant.

I don’t believe it’s a premise; I think it’s a conclusion because it follows from the situation described in #2070.

In the future, be sure to make clarifications as part of a revision and then uncheck the criticism you think the revision addresses. This is to avoid breaking criticism chains.

(You don’t need to make any further revisions in this specific case, though.)

Superseded by #2094.

There’s a related issue of disregarding ‘small’/‘weak’ criticisms: some criticisms may look small at first, but as you investigate, you realize they’re actually a big deal.

I realized this the other day on the topic of macOS UI bugs during a Twitter space. Somebody said that many of the issues I had pointed out with the new Tahoe OS were just minor UI glitches (in other words: ‘weak criticisms’). But then somebody else pointed out that those are still worrisome because severe security holes, like being able to bypass authentication, have presented as minor UI glitches in the past!

Fair enough – I wanted to point out a related problem since people often use terms like ‘weak’ or ‘small’ to dismiss criticisms illegitimately. But you didn’t do that.

You don’t need to do anything else to resolve this particular criticism. I’ll change #2070 to a non-criticism.

Yeah (3) is interesting. Constructor theory is the contender I can think of for a future fifth strand. Any other suggestions?

I see where the confusion comes from, but I thought clarifying my current view in #2073 already addressed the criticism. What else would you suggest I do?

If it’s a bad criticism, you just counter-criticize it or deem it irrelevant and move on.

Well, you can’t just deem it irrelevant without reasoning. Irrelevance is a specific counter-criticism you would submit.

Deutsch says our body of knowledge keeps growing both deeper—better explanations—and wider—new fields, more facts, rules of thumb. He thinks depth is winning. It might be interesting to assess what that balance looks like in 2025.

Consequently (they say), whether or not it was ever possible for one person to understand everything that was understood at the time, it is certainly not possible now, and it is becoming less and less possible as our knowledge grows.

If something already isn’t possible, how could it become less possible?
Isn’t possibility a binary thing? As opposed to difficulty, which exists in degrees.

Deutsch says our body of knowledge keeps growing both deeper—better explanations—and wider—new fields, more facts, rules of thumb. He thinks depth is winning. It might be interesting to asses what that balance looks like in 2025.

Perhaps it’s premature, but I’d love to discuss:

1. why DD thinks the four strands already amount to a theory of everything

2. why DD presents quantum mechanisms as having already subsumed general relativity

3. what other (proto)strands we could envision and why they are indeed a meaningful addition to the 4 strands

Well, you start #2074 by referencing the “mistake to assign strengths or weaknesses to arguments”, and calling a criticism small is a common way to call it weak. They’re often used as synonyms in this context.

Makes sense. I’ve noticed you often refer to your blog posts or Veritula ideas during arguments.

Great point! It's a good reminder to always avoid positive arguments. By extension, if Veritula would require a specific format or mode of criticism, we’d fall into the very error Popper warns about with the Myth of the Framework—the mistaken belief that criticism requires a shared framework or language. So, Veritula should remain as it is.

At most, you might consider adding guidelines on what constitutes good versus poor criticism, so that critics can improve their skills. But I agree: the person who created the idea should remain solely responsible for addressing the criticisms they receive, not dismissing them as “bad” and moving on.

Thanks for clarifying! I changed the text to phrase it as counter-criticize because that's indeed more accurate here.