Search Ideas

People often say there are safety issues involved in using your true name online.

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

I believe I came across it while exploring your blog. My ‘Popperian Wikipedia’ idea was particularly sharp in my mind in that moment, so I was very excited to see how you had set things up here. I think a tremendous amount of it is transferable.

My vision is for an online encyclopedia that contains complete articles describing the totality of a perspective, with articles for alternate explanations readily available. I see many problems with this idea but I think it is worth exploring.

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.”

Would it be possible / worth it to produce a competitor to Wikipedia based on Popperian epistemology? Larry Sanger (a founder of Wikipedia) has said that he now thinks Wikipedia should have competing articles on the same topic to allow for the fact that people disagree.

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.

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

Please see #2298 for a link to an article outlining various other reasons for getting sunlight. Vitamin D is not the only reason to get sunlight (or some artificial equivalent).

Thank you for sharing. Skimming his content, I’m not finding any criticisms of the biological explanations I currently hold that reject polyunsaturated fats. I will dig deeper later on.

I haven’t yet found good criticisms of Ray Peat’s ideas regarding unsaturated fats, so those are the ideas I am currently living by.

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.

I want to live in places that are mostly sunny, most of the time. This is for health reasons.

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 could have multiple homes around the world that I move between throughout the year. This way I can make the most of geographical and seasonal advantages of different places.

Ideally I would live at some altitude, for health reasons.

I want to live somewhere with a more libertarian culture than average. I want to live somewhere where property rights are respected more than average, and people are left alone by the government more than average.

I want access to good quality food, particularly good quality meat, dairy, and fruit. Ideally the place I live has a growing culture of eating well (for example, in Austin, many restaurants are now making it a point not to use any seed oils in their cooking.)

I want to live close to thriving cities (say, no more than 60 minutes away on an average day).

I want superior water quality for drinking, bathing, etc.

This means I need to live somewhere sufficiently advanced to be able to provide and service high quality reverse-osmosis water filters. Otherwise I would need to be somewhere that I can directly access spring water, which I think is much more difficult.

Will the criterion for “battle tested” change as the site grows? If the purpose of this feature is to enable users to quickly see the best ideas on the site, I would imagine the number of addressed criticisms needed to count as “battle tested” would need to grow with the site. @dennis-hackethal*

Guess: We can generalise economics further and let it be subsumed by epistemology.

When we choose to try to solve certain problems, we always make trade-offs from a place of scarcity. Likewise, our conjectures wouldn't evolve without the competition enabled by scarcity in our minds.

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.

Yeah nice, seems true. There's no objective explicit/inexplicit ratio for knowledge, it depends on the person's background knowledge.

May have misunderstood, but do you mean that explanatory knowledge corresponds to truth, whereas biological/evolutionary knowledge doesn't?

I think that was refuted by Lucas Smalldon and others: https://barelymorethanatweet.com/

Hmm never thought of that, interesting! I think since the disease involves continuous loss of brain volume, hardware decay seems like the best explanation.

In general I think it makes sense to speak of diseases in neurology (e.g. Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, stroke) as bad hardware and psychiatric disease as bad software. But it could very well be that some of those diagnoses are miscategorised.