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It sounds like the core disagreement is around Lucas’s idea that the concept of correspondence fragments the growth of knowledge: if correspondence is the aim of science but not of other fields, then that means the growth of knowledge works differently in science than in other fields.

#2325 serves as an example. I had submitted a criticism which is now outdated and remains counter-criticized. It’s actually better that way because it shows that an error has been corrected, and makes it less likely for others to submit a duplicate criticism.

In your revision, you asked me to let you know if you are doing things incorrectly.

You can revise ideas the way you did, it’s not wrong per se, but revisions are better for incremental changes. They’re not really meant for taking back criticisms or indicating agreement. If a criticism of yours is successfully counter-criticized and you would like to abandon it, I would just leave it counter-criticized and not revise it further.

If you are looking for a way to indicate agreement (with a counter-criticism, say), it’s something Dirk and I have been discussing offline, see #2169. I hope to implement something to that effect soon.

I’m happy to have you and for your contributions, but I have to ask: do you see yourself building a Veritula competitor at some point in the future?

Erik has since fixed this typo.

Would it be possible / worth it to produce a competitor to Wikipedia based on Popperian epistemology?

Yes, sure.

The idea of having a Wikipedia equivalent that presents high quality competing articles detailing different alternative explanations for things (with some sort of versioning and methods of criticism) excites me greatly.

Me, too. I think Veritula’s design allows for this pretty naturally since the topic of a discussion can be general enough for various competing ideas to be posted in the discussion.

We ‘just’ need to get more users. As I wrote in #628, posting a breaking news story could work. If users submit ideas on events as they unfold and then criticize those ideas, visitors see what’s happening at a glance. It could be easier for them to know which ideas they can adopt than on conventional news channels or even Wikipedia, IMO.

There are also ‘timeless’ debates that have been going on for decades where Veritula can offer clarity. Like on the abortion debate. People shouldn’t have to keep debating that over and over when it’s a matter where objective truth can be found and then acted on.

I have thought of producing something like this myself, which was part of what drew me to Veritula.

I’m curious btw, how did you hear about Veritula?

And now you say the meta algoritm/pruning is not needed for the evolution of ideas?

Right. Pruning helps it along but isn’t strictly required. You may be misunderstanding natural selection. It is merely “the non-random differential reproduction of genes.” (From The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.) More generally, it’s the non-random differential reproduction of replicators, including ideas.

In other words, selection in and of itself doesn’t even imply that any individual replicator dies (though in practice, they usually do). It just means there’s a difference in the rate of reproduction between different replicators. That difference arises without any pruning.

And you equated pruning with the meta algorithm.

I did not equate them. I said in #2263 that the meta algorithm does the pruning: “When I say ‘pruning’, I’m referring to a specific mechanism of a meta algorithm in the mind.”

Welcome to Veritula, Benjamin. Yes, the number may need to go up in the future.

Are you thinking of sun exposure to get enough vitamin D?

To be sure, I’m not a doctor, but because I have very fair skin, every dermatologist I’ve ever talked to has advised me to avoid the sun and instead take vitamin D supplements.

You may want to check out Instagram account jacbfoods. He used to be opposed to seed oils, but when he got his master’s degree in dietetics, he changed his mind.

I don’t think the meta algorithm is necessary for the evolution of ideas. After all, there is no meta algorithm across minds, yet ideas (memes) evolve across minds. Inside a single mind, the meta algorithm is inherited from our non-creative ancestors, where (among other things) it acted as a fail safe against erroneous behaviors.

One of my previous comments notwithstanding, don’t be shy to mark ideas as criticisms whenever you point out a shortcoming. Otherwise, you won’t know later on which ideas you can adopt. In the context of Alzheimer’s, this sounds like a criticism.

In Darwinian evolution, competition and pruning are the same phenomena.

That doesn’t sound right. Not all competition is necessarily deleterious.

Wait, do you view the pruning as separate from the mere competition of ideas…?

Yes. When I say ‘pruning’, I’m referring to a specific mechanism of a meta algorithm in the mind. For more details, see my book A Window on Intelligence, I think chapter 5. There is no such meta algorithm in biological evolution.

That’s a valid point but doesn’t belong here. I have instead edited a related idea.

The pruning mechanism is part of it, but there’s more. Again, there’s also competition between ideas and even predatory behavior that can result in the elimination of ideas. All such phenomena taken together constitute natural selection in the mind.

… Rat Festers cite Popper and Deutsch as if they are infallible.

Shouldn’t it be ‘as if they were infallible’?

Fixed as of 2025-10-08.

Hardly anyone reads those, and many of those who do forget.

I have speculated in the past that ideas compete for attention, but they also compete for any kind of memory, be it something like RAM or hard-disk memory. The RAM-like memory in the brain is presumably closely related to working memory, if not the same.

The reason most people don’t (permanently) run out memory (of either kind) isn’t that memory isn’t scarce but that there’s a pruning mechanism in the mind. And again, there’s competition. That competition can involve predatory ideas which disassemble the source code of other ideas and use it for themselves because that’s cheaper than to construct source code from scratch.

By the way, how is this a criticism? #2200 makes no mention of memory.

Everyone has scarce memory. Everyone’s brain has limited storage space.

Then you counter-criticize them for whatever you think they lack (which should be easy if they really aren’t good), thus addressing them and restoring the idea.

Then the idea should be revised to adjust or exclude the criticized part(s).