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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Superseded by #2094.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.

Well, it’s as you say: if a criticism is bad/weak/whatever, people should argue their case and explain why it’s bad, in the form of a counter-criticism. If the first criticism truly is weak, that should be easy to do. If anyone could just assert that something is bad without giving any reasoning, that would be arbitrary. It would allow them to reject any criticism on whim.

In my understanding, Popper’s epistemology operates on contradiction and non-contradiction. It does not assign strengths or weaknesses. By rejecting justificationism, it rejects positive reasons for preferring one theory over another and instead emphasizes the critical attitude as the only way to make progress. So it does use negative reasons for preferring one theory over another (by rejecting one theory and not another). It looks for reasons against, not reasons for. It seeks to eliminate error.

Speaking of error elimination, Popper’s epistemology does not say to eliminate some errors and ignore others whenever we feel like it. I’m not aware that it makes any distinction between better or worse criticisms. It says to eliminate errors, period.

While I could simply refute bad criticisms and move on, there’s also the matter of efficiency and opportunity cost: I don’t want to waste time repeatedly refuting poor criticisms, or worse, get stuck in circular debates with people who don’t recognize that some arguments aren’t good criticisms at all.

I recently criticized John Horgan’s article about Rat Fest (see #2046) for having misspelled my name. It’s not a big deal; pointing out a typo is arguably one of the ‘weakest’ criticisms there is. But if he now argued with me about the merits of correcting typos, that would take far more time than just correcting it.

While I could simply refute bad criticisms and move on, there’s also the matter of efficiency and opportunity cost: I don’t want to waste time repeatedly refuting poor criticisms, or worse, get stuck in circular debates with people who don’t recognize that some arguments aren’t good criticisms at all.

That’s a fair concern if you’re talking about duplicate criticisms, which public intellectuals do field. The solution here is to publicly write a counter-criticism once and then refer to it again later. It is then on the other party to present some new reasoning or evidence, pending which you don’t need to change your mind or focus any more attention on the matter.

For example, people’s knee-jerk reaction to libertarianism is ‘who would build the roads if there were no government?’ That’s one of the reasons Logan and I wrote the Libertarian FAQ, which answers that question. We can now just link to that whenever it comes up.

If you’re talking about new criticisms, however, I think you should address and not dismiss them.

Just a clarification because you seem to be fudging refutation and criticism:

A refutation is an explanation for why something cannot be true, ie must be false. For example, some guy claims his grandfather fought in WW2. But you checked his birth certificate and he was born in 1950. So he couldn’t have fought in WW2.

A criticism just points out some shortcoming. It could be any shortcoming, even something as small as a typo.

Any refutation is also a criticism, but not every criticism is a refutation.

Can you be skeptical without falling into self-contradiction, like Popper and Kuhn?

Popper was not a skeptic. Skepticism, as an epistemology, says there can be no genuine knowledge. Popper opposed skepticisism.

Chipkin urges me to come to Rat (short for rationalism) Fest…

It’s technically true that the “Rat” part of Rat Fest is short for ‘rationalism’, but I’ve always considered it to be short for Crit Rat, ie Critical Rationalism. This matters because it’s not a rationalist conference, neither in the Less Wrong sense nor in the rationalism vs empiricism sense.

This distinction matters because later on, Horgan writes:

Why do self-proclaimed rationalists often seem so wacky?

And he means the attendees of Rat Fest. But they’re not rationalists!

Not at all, Deutsch replies. We are fallible, he reminds me, that means we make mistakes. Civilizations have taken wrong turns in the past and collapsed, that can happen again. But Deutsch thinks things will work out. American scientists can come to Europe to continue their research, and maybe not all the research should continue.

I think this passage misses a key epistemological insight Deutsch shared in response to Horgan’s worries about Trump: a society that’s free to make mistakes sometimes makes bigger mistakes than one that isn’t. What matters is that the society retains the ability to correct those mistakes (which ours does retain).

Overall, I don’t share Horgan’s impression that Rat Fest is “cult-y”. Yes, fans of Deutsch aren’t critical enough of him, but that alone doesn’t rise to the level of a cult.

For instance, many people at Rat Fest know that I am critical of Deutsch, and if it was an actual cult, they wouldn’t have welcomed me with open arms.

Also, having once been tricked into joining a cult, and then worked for years to escape its fangs, I know a cult when I see one. Rat Fest is not one. Actual cults want to control your life even after you leave, thereby violating your freedom of association – that doesn’t happen at Rat Fest.

Popper himself, when I interviewed him in 1992, was a comically dogmatic denouncer of dogmatism. He kept insisting he was right and his critics wrong.

When I told Popper a former student accused him of not tolerating criticism, he responded: “It is completely untrue! I was happy when I got criticism! Of course, not when I would answer the criticism… and the person would still go on with it.” Then Popper would eject the student from the class.

Ejecting the student seems over the top. But there’s a difference between openness to criticism and relativism. If you address a criticism but the critic just continues as if you hadn’t, I can see how that’s frustrating. If there’s no new reasoning or evidence to the contrary, I think it’s fine to “insist[]” that you are right and your critics wrong. It’s possible to determine that objectively. That’s not dogma – it’s integrity.

The claim that Deutsch “repeatedly appeals to Popper’s authority” in BoI should be accompanied by evidence. Like, Horgan should quote some passage from BoI that he thinks is an appeal to Popper’s authority.