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Limitations of Veritula
Veritula can help you discover a bit of truth.
It’s not guaranteed to do so. It doesn’t give you a formula for truth-seeking. There’s no guarantee that an idea with no outstanding criticisms won’t get a new criticism tomorrow. All ideas are tentative in nature. That’s not a limitation of Veritula per se but of epistemology generally (Karl Popper).
There are currently no safeguards against bad actors. For example, people can keep submitting arbitrary criticisms in rapid succession just to ‘save’ their pet ideas. There could be safeguards such as rate-limiting criticisms, but that encourages brigading, making sock-puppets, etc. That said, I think these problems are soluble.
Opposing viewpoints should be defined clearly and openly. Not doing so hinders truth-seeking and rationality (Ayn Rand).
Personal attacks poison rational discussions because they turn an open, objective, impartial truth-seeking process into a defensive mess. It shifts the topic of the discussion from the ideas themselves to the participants in a bad way. People are actually open to harsh criticism as long as their interlocutor shows concern for how it lands (Chris Voss). I may use ‘AI’ at some point to analyze the tone of an idea upon submission.
Veritula works best for conscientious people with an open mind – people who aren’t interested in defending their ideas but in correcting errors. That’s one of the reasons discussions shouldn’t get personal. Veritula can work to resolve conflicts between adversaries, but I think that’s much harder. Any situation where people argue to be right rather than to find truth is challenging. In those cases, it’s best if an independent third party uses Veritula on their behalf to adjudicate the conflict objectively.
Veritula only works for explicit ideas. For example, you may have an inexplicit criticism of an idea, but Veritula can’t help with that until you’re able to write the criticism down, at which point it’s explicit. (The distinction between explicit vs inexplicit ideas goes back to David Deutsch. ‘Inexplicit’ means ‘not expressed in words or symbols’.)
Superseded by #1289. Knut, when you unmark an idea as a criticism, remember to ‘neutralize’ the old version.
If we use Claude Shannon’s framework of information as reducing uncertainty, a light switch doesn’t contain information. But the problem with all kinds of information is that it depends on subjectively definitions of states and uncertainty. Information is always relative to a certain «perspective».
Alan Forrester1 says ‘no’, the brain is not a quantum computer but a classical one:
Quantum mechanics has almost no bearing on the operation of the brain, except insofar as it explains the existence of matter. You say that signals are carried by electrons, but this is very imprecise. Rather, they are carried by various kinds of chemical signals, including ions. Those signals are released into a warm environment that they interact with over a very short timescale.
Quantum mechanical processes like interference and entanglement only continue to show effects that differ from classical physics when the relevant information does not leak into the environment. This issue has been explained [in] the context of the brain by Max Tegmark in The importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes. In the brain, the leaking of information should take place over a time of the order 10−13 − 10−20 s. The timescale over which neurons fire etc. is 0.001 − 0.1s. So your thoughts are not quantum computations or anything like that. The brain is a classical computer.
Forrester is a former henchman of the very toxic Elliot Temple. Approach with extreme caution.
If we define a computer as anything that processes information, the brain is at least partly a computer, since it also processes information. But that doesn't necessarily mean that a brain is only a computer. Information processing can be done without subjective experience or qualia.
A brain's properties therefore transcend information processing. It is completely conceivable that you can construct a physical brain with identical information processing without accompanying experience (zoombie argument), unless you wan't to say that this instance of information process is dependent on also having the experience.
‘When I distribute other people’s bicycles for free, I am simply offering better terms for access to bicycles than the stores that sell them, so in a free market I should be the one that ends up distributing because I solve the same problem at a lower price.’ 🤡
No I disagree, for all the reasons I already gave in response to #1346.
This duplicate is symptomatic of a larger and common issue of just reverting back to one’s previous arguments when one hasn’t fully processed the counterarguments. Veritula helps you avoid doing that because you can just look up each idea’s ‘truth status’. If it has outstanding criticisms, you don’t invoke it again. You either save it first or work on something else.
This duplicate is symptomatic of a larger and common issue of just reverting back to one’s previous arguments when one hasn’t fully addressed the counterarguments. Veritula helps you avoid doing that because you can just look up each idea’s ‘truth status’. If it has outstanding criticisms, you don’t invoke it again. You either save it first or work on something else.
Not circular since #1346 is not a parent of this idea.
You didn’t trade value for value. You traded nothing at all and only received. A free market and justice depend on people interacting as traders, not as leeches (objectivism).
You never agreed to buy the bike either, that’s the point.
Just returning the bike doesn’t necessarily make him whole. Maybe he lost revenues during the time he couldn’t use his bike.
Maybe you could simply pay her the price of the book plus interest plus a fee for the inconvenience. Plus some ‘deterrence fee’ so that most people don’t even think of doing it to begin with.
Duplicate of #1386. Repeating an argument that has outstanding criticisms doesn’t address the criticisms. You can address the criticisms or revise the argument or abandon the argument.
Not sure that’s extortion but yes, generally speaking, people have the right to use force to prevent and address the arbitrary in social life (#1345).
Yeah. And if he takes it against your will and replaces it with a brand new bike it’s still theft.
There's this nice bit in Man, Economy & State where Rothbard explains that durable goods can be broken down into their unit services (not sure that's the term) and that all durable goods get used up as they provide service.
So I guess someone would reduce the serviceable lifespan of the bike by using it during the times that you aren't using it.
It’s about value not physical scarcity. If you only steal it while I’m asleep and return it before I wake up and want to use it it’s still theft.